Rules for suppressing offers in real time

Configuring real-time offer suppression in IBM® Interact involves defining some combination of how to handle the offer if the visitor has accepted it before, rejected it before, has been presented with the offer more than a specific number of times, or is related to an offer that is already being suppressed.

When Interact evaluates an offer for presentation to a visitor, offer personalization is performed as usual, and then each eligible offer is compared to the offer suppression list to see whether it matches. If the offer matches, it is not presented to the visitor, and instead another matching offer is presented instead.

The following table describes the methods by which Interact can suppress an offer:

Offer suppression rules

Rule

Description

Offer acceptance

An offer acceptance is an offer that has received any response that is recorded as an acceptance response. By default, a visitor response can trigger an "accept" action for an offer, but you can specify other response types as acceptance actions.

When you are defining an offer for real-time interaction, suppressing the offer that is based on acceptance is defined in the On Offer Acceptance section.

The complete list of response types available for rule suppression is defined in the UA_UsrResponseType table in theIBM® Campaign system tables. See the IBM® Campaign Administrator's Guide for details.

Offer rejection

An offer rejection is an offer that has received any response that is recorded as a rejection response. By default, a visitor response can trigger an "reject" action for an offer, but you can specify other response types as rejection actions.

When you are defining an offer for real-time interaction, suppressing the offer that is based on rejection is defined in the On Offer Rejection section.

Offer fatigue

When an offer has been presented to a visitor a specific number of times, the offer is suppressed to prevent offer fatigue, where an offer is seen so many times it is no longer noticed.

When you are defining an offer for real-time interaction, suppressing the offer that is based on the number of times it has been presented is defined in the On Offer Presentation section.

Related offer suppression

For any offer suppression (On Offer Acceptance, On Offer Rejection, or On Offer Presentation), you have the option of also suppressing other offers that are related to the current offer. An offer is related if the offer attribute (as defined on the offer template) has a matching value to the offer that is being suppressed.

For example, you might be suppressing an offer that has been accepted by visitors where the attribute "Average response revenue" is less than $100. By suppressing other offers that are based on this attribute having the same value, you can suppress other low-value offers to the same visitor.

If an offer is related to other offers that have been accepted, rejected, or presented too many times, the offer is no longer presented.

Be aware of the following practices concerning attribute matching:

If an offer rule defines both an attribute name and an attribute value, then offers with the same attribute whose value matches the configured value are suppressed for the configured duration.

If an offer rule has only an attribute name, then all offers with the same attribute whose value matches the value of the offer being posted against are suppressed for the configured duration.

For each of the rules described above, you can optionally apply a time limit to the offer suppression so that the offer is suppressed for a specified number of days. If you do not supply a time limit, the offer is permanently suppressed for that visitor.