Contact history and audience levels overview

Unica Campaign maintains contact history for each audience level, such as Customer and Household. Contact history provides a historical record of your direct marketing efforts, including who was contacted, what offers were made, by which channels.

Unica Campaign maintains contact history in the system database tables:

  • Base contact history (UA_ContactHistory) is recorded when all members of a cell are treated the same (when they are all given the same version of an offer).
  • Detailed contact history (UA_DtlContactHist) is recorded only when individuals in the same cell receive different offer versions (offers with different values for personalized offer attributes) or a different number of offers.

    Detailed contact history can quickly grow very large, but it provides complete data to support detailed response tracking and to analyze targets and controls.

  • For every production run, data is recorded in the Treatment tables (UA_Treatment). Control information for hold-outs is also recorded here. Hold-outs do not receive communications, but are measured against the target group for comparison. Treatment history is used together with contact history to form a complete historical record of offers that were sent.

Contact history and the corresponding response history are maintained for each audience level.

For example, suppose you have two audience levels, Customer and Household. The table implementation depends on how your database is configured:

  • Each audience level usually has its own set of contact and response history tables in the Unica Campaign system database. In other words, the Customer audience level has a set of tables (contact history, detailed contact history, response history), and the Household audience level has its own set of tables.
  • If your database is configured so that multiple audience levels write to the same underlying physical tables, then each audience level does not require its own set of tables. However, the underlying physical tables (contact history, detailed contact history, response history), must include a key for each audience level.