Updating response history

Use the Response process to update response history. The Response process compares campaign response information with contact history and writes information to the response history tables for the appropriate audience level.

A Response process is tightly aligned with its corresponding contact process, in which the responders now being tracked were possibly members of cells targeted with particular offers. Therefore, before you can configure a Response process, you must:

Know the audience level of your contact list.

Ensure that contact history and response history system tables are mapped for each audience level that you are contacting and tracking. This is usually done by the Campaign administrator.

Set up a separate Response process for each audience level in which you are tracking responders.

Know the codes representing the response types that you want to track.

Know what Campaign-generated codes (campaign, cell, offer, or treatment codes) were sent to your contact list, so you can map them for tracking.

Enable the ability to create temp tables in the Campaign system tables database (set the AllowTempTables configuration property to true).

Follow the steps below to configure a Response process.

Navigate to the list of campaigns where you created your contact flowcharts (the flowcharts that assigned the offers that you plan to analyze).

Typically, you create a separate flowchart to handle the response process. You could also have one response flowchart per channel or one global response tracking flowchart for all campaigns.

Click the Edit icon

in the flowchart window.

Drag the Response process

from the palette to your flowchart.

Connect a Select or Extract process as input to the Response process.

The Select or Extract process typically reads from an action table. An action table is an optional database table or file containing response data that is collected after offers are presented to customers. Often, data originates from several tables such as transactions or sales information.

Administrators must ensure that the action table is locked during response processing. Administrators must also clear rows after each Response process run to ensure that responses are not credited multiple times. For example, use Campaign to run SQL after the Response process to purge the action table. For important information, see the Campaign Administrator's Guide.

Double-click the Response process in the flowchart to open the process configuration dialog.

Use the Source tab as follows.

If you followed the steps in this procedure, the Input list already displays the correct input. The input should originate from the mapped action table that holds your customer response information.

If you are using a delimited flat file as input to the Response process, you must ensure that all of the data types in the input files are mapped appropriately, as this is not enforced by the Response process. Using a mismatched data type (for example, having a treatment code mapped as "numeric" when the UA_Treatment.TreatmentCode field is a "string" type) causes a database error on some databases (for example, system tables on DB2®).

For Response Date, select a date from your action table to associate with the records that will be output by the Response process. By default, a value of "Today" is selected.

For Response Type Code, choose a field from your action table. The response type codes are globally defined and available for all campaigns. Response types are the specific actions that you are tracking, such as click-through, inquiry, purchase, activation, and use. Each response type is represented by a unique response code.

Use the Mapping to Treatments tab to select the fields to be tracked and match them to a list of offer and treatment attributes.

In the Candidate Action Fields list, expand the action table that you are using, so you can see the list of fields.

Use the Add button to match Candidate Action Fields to the corresponding attributes in the Matched Offer/Treatment Fields list. The Offer/Treatment Attribute column lists all offer or treatment attributes in the system.

It is best to match at least one Attribute of Interest and one Response Code.

Unmapped fields and fields for which values are not available (or are NULL) are not used for response attribution. For a treatment instance to receive response credit, all populated fields must match, except for controls. For controls, all codes are ignored.

Click the Log tab to specify additional fields to log to response history.

Use the controls to match fields from the Candidate Fields list with fields in the Fields to Log list.

You can automatically match fields by clicking Match. Fields with exact matches for the Table Field names are automatically added to the Fields to Log list. If there are multiple matching fields, the first match is taken.

10.

Click the General tab to assign a name and descriptive note to the process.

11.

Click OK.

The process is now configured. You can test run the process to verify that it returns the results that you expect.

When you save and run the flowchart, information is written to the response history system tables. Campaign administrators must be sure to clear rows after each Response process run to ensure that responses are not credited multiple times.