SMS: Response tracking

The Unica Campaign and Acoustic Campaign integration performs response tracking, so marketers can retarget responders and non-responders.

Prerequisites to support response tracking

  • The UBX Toolkit was installed and configured.
  • The UBX Toolkit user created the necessary response tracking tables.
  • A Unica Campaign administrator configured the tables as a user data source.

How does tracking work?

Acoustic Campaign records information about SMS transmission, delivery, and responses. It makes this information available to UBX.

To get the information from UBX to Unica Campaign, run UBX Toolkit scripts to download event data and import it into response tracking tables.

Unica Campaign flowcharts can then access those tables as a user data source.

In some organizations, the routing of response data is automated through scripts that administrators set up. If the scripts are on the Unica Campaign listener (Analytics) server, you can create a flowchart that calls a trigger to run the scripts and use the Unica Marketing Platform Scheduler to schedule the trigger. The Scheduler also allows you to run external scripts, so you can use that method as well.

If response routing has not been automated, you must run the scripts manually, periodically.

Attributing responses to a particular mailing and Unica Campaign is handled by the integration: Unica Campaign assigns a unique name to each SMS mailing. That unique name is included in Acoustic Campaign events, for correlation back to Unica Campaign. The unique name is generated based on the SMS name that is assigned in the process box on the flowchart.

What events are tracked?

Information about the following SMS events can be imported into the response tracking tables, so it is available to Unica Campaign:

  • Message sent from a SMS program (sentSMS): Information that describes what happens when a message is sent from an SMS program.
  • Interacted with a SMS program (interactedSMS): Information that describes the interaction between a mobile user and an SMS program.

As a marketing user, how do I populate and use these tables?

You must periodically download events from UBX and import them into your local response tracking tables. You can run the scripts manually or as a scheduled job:
  1. To download events, run the eventsDownload script that is provided with the UBX Toolkit.
    Note: The eventsDownload script downloads tracking data related to email, SMS messages, and mobile push notifications. You may or may not be using all of those features.
  2. To import the downloaded events into the response tracking tables, run the eventsImport script that is provided with the UBX Toolkit.
  3. Be sure to follow all of the instructions that are provided in the UBX Toolkit documentation. Specifically, see Chapter 3. Event destination endpoints.
  4. Once the tables are populated, you can access the tables in Unica Campaign flowcharts to retarget responders and non-responders.

    Typically, you design a response flowchart and configure the process boxes to read data from the response tracking tables. For example, you can configure Select or Extract process boxes to target SMS interactions, as you implement the next wave of the Unica Campaign.

  5. For additional information, see Response tracking tables for the integration.