Action tables

An action table is audience level-specific. Typically, you create one action table for each audience level in Unica Campaign.

The action table can then serve as the source data of the input cell for the Response process in a campaign flowchart. Unica Campaign reads from the action table, and if a match is found between the relevant attributes and/or response codes, Unica Campaign populates the response history tables.

Using an action table is a best practice to ensure that sufficient information about target responses is recorded.

What does an action table contain?

An action table includes data such as customer identification, response codes, and attributes of interest. Depending on how responses are tracked in your organization, the responses could be directly related to transactional data, such as purchases or contracts and subscriptions.

Each row of the action table represents a single event, which must minimally contain the audience IDs, the response type, and the response date. An action table typically includes one or more response codes (campaign, cell, offer, or treatment codes) and one or more standard or custom offer attributes for inferred response tracking (for example, the purchased product or service). Any field that is populated in an event is used to match against possible treatments that have that offer attribute. Any fields that are NULL are ignored.

The best practice is to use an action table that combines all responders and response types.

Where are action tables located?

The decision where to put action tables must be made on a case-by-case basis and is usually done as part of your initial implementation.

When action tables are located in the user data mart, you can easily populate the table from other data mart tables, make joins, and perform similar database operations. However, you must ensure that you have permission to purge the action tables after each Response process run.

If your response logic is fairly simple (for example, if the action table is already populated with ETL routines and you only need to read the data from the table), then you may choose to locate the action table with the Unica Campaign system tables.

The Unica Campaign system tables include a sample action table for the Customer audience level, called UA_ActionCustomer, which administrators can customize as needed. The sample table contains several columns which you can use in Response tracking, such as the CustomerId, Response and Tracking codes.