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User Guide
Unica Optimize provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
Administering Unica Optimize
There are many aspects of Unica Optimize you can configure to improve performance.
Tuning the optimization algorithm
There are some settings that you can configure to change the behavior of the optimization algorithm. You can change these settings to improve optimality or to improve performance.
Controlling queries to contact history
Using contact history improves optimality but can hinder performance.

User Guide
Unica Optimize provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
- About Unica Optimize
  Unica Optimize is a web-based extension of Unica Campaign that allows you to determine the optimal contact strategy for each customer. You can optimize over time, looking across the proposed offers and channels across multiple marketing campaigns.
- Getting started with Unica Optimize
  Unica Optimize can optimize your marketing campaign and improve response from customers, but only if you know what you want to optimize. You need a plan, the data to support the plan, and an implementation method.
- Unica Optimize sessions
  A Unica Optimize session is a combination of rules and scores that apply to a set of proposed contacts.
- Optimization rules
  Unica Optimize uses the rules and scores you define in your Unica Optimize session to mathematically determine the best combination of final contacts you use across your marketing campaigns.
- Setting up scores
  You use scores in Unica Optimize to rank possible offers for each customer using a patent-pending optimization algorithm. The higher the score you assign to a contact, the more desirable you are making that contact. Unica Optimize maximizes the sum of scores in the OCT.
- Generate a list of proposed contacts
  The optimization process involves generating a list of proposed contacts in Unica Campaign and sending these contacts to Unica Optimize to produce optimized contacts.
- Use optimized contacts in marketing campaigns
  After you optimize the proposed contacts, you must retrieve the optimized contacts from Unica Optimize to send marketing communications to these contacts.
- Viewing Reports
  For each production run or test run, Unica Optimize generates a number of reports. These reports help you understand what happened during the optimization process by providing analyses pre- and post-optimization.
- Administering Unica Optimize
  There are many aspects of Unica Optimize you can configure to improve performance.
  - The Unica Optimize Utility
    The Unica Optimize utility allows you to load, run, and monitor a Unica Optimize session by using a command-line utility.
  - Optimize listener
  - Configuring Unica Optimize for a multi-locale environment
    The multi-locale feature requires some specific settings in your databases.
  - Configure database load utility
    A large component of a Unica Optimize session is reading data from the PCT and writing data to the OCT. Configuring a database load utility improves the performance of your Unica Optimize sessions.
  - Increase virtual memory allocation for a process (UNIX only)
    If you are processing large amounts of data or are using multi-threaded optimization, you might need to allow Unica Optimize to use more virtual memory.
  - Tuning the optimization algorithm
    There are some settings that you can configure to change the behavior of the optimization algorithm. You can change these settings to improve optimality or to improve performance.
    - Multi-threaded optimization
      You can enable multi-threaded optimization to improve the performance of Unica Optimize, that is, shorten the amount of time it takes to run a Unica Optimize session.
    - Setting CustomerSampleSize
      Properly configuring CustomerSampleSize for best Unica Optimize session run time while preserving optimality takes some consideration.
    - Indexing Unica Optimize tables
      Create indexes on several of your Unica Optimize tables to improve performance.
    - Controlling queries to contact history
      Using contact history improves optimality but can hinder performance.
  - Setting UOSQLOnConnect
    There is an additional configuration property, UOSQLOnConnect, that is specific to Unica Optimize in Campaign|Partitions|partition[n]|dataSources.
- Unica Optimize configuration properties
  This section describes the Unica Optimize configuration properties that are found on the Configuration page.

Controlling queries to contact history

Using contact history improves optimality but can hinder performance.

About this task

When optimizing contacts, Unica Optimize has several rules to manage contact fatigue such as Max # Duplicate Offers, Max # Packages, and Min/Max # Offers. All of these rules include the over the time period or within the time period section.

If you always set the time period to 0 in all the rules, it indicates that this Unica Optimize session does not use time periods for any of the rules. In such a case, you can control how Unica Optimize queries the contact history tables during the Unica Optimize session run using the UseFutureContacts configuration property.

If you set UseFutureContacts to false, Unica Optimize optimizes joins with the contact history tables if your rules include time periods. If your rules do not include any time periods, Unica Optimize does not query the contact history tables at all, which can improve performance.

If you set UseFutureContacts to true, Unica Optimize always queries the contact history tables. While this impacts performance, it also ensures that placeholders for contacts that are sent in the future are considered when managing contact fatigue.

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