Strategies and treatment rules

When Unica Interact receives requests for the upcoming best offers, it uses the given information to perform a lookup and runs a series of arbitration logics. A majority of these actions are done by processing rules through strategies.

A strategy provide the following functionalities.
  • For the given segments for which the active visitor is assigned to and the interaction point offers are being requested for, it looks for the candidate offers, which are defined in the format of treatment rules.
  • For each candidate offer, it performs an eligibility test with the criteria defined with each treatment rule.
  • For each eligible treatment rule, a score is calculated, which can be dynamically based on each visitor’s real-time profile data and historic activities.
  • For each offer, they enable to optionally personalize its attributes using the active visitor’s real-time profile data.

Strategies are child objects of interactive channels, and hence all its objects are valid only within the enclosing channel. As a core component, it references other objects defined in this channel or globally. So, some of those dependencies may be created beforehand elsewhere. An interactive channel can possess multiple strategies based on the requirements of marketers.

The following sections include details on most commonly used operations.

Treatment rules

Treatment rules are the main guidelines, which are used by Unica Interact to present offers. The treatment rules are applicable where you assign offers to smart segments by zone. You can also add a marketing score to each rule to add more weightage to the offer within the learning engine.

There are several optional features that you can use to further influence or override treatment rules. For more information about Unica Interact offer serving, see the Unica Interact Administrator's Guide.

Treatment rules are organized by smart segments. You can assign any number of offers to each segment. After assigning offers to a segment, you can define a zone where the offer is applicable. You can assign the same offer to the same segment multiple times and assign them to different zones.

If you delete a smart segment or retire an offer, Unica Campaign disables any treatment rule that contains the segment or offer.

The smart segments are mapped to cells within a campaign. You can edit the cell codes that are associated with each smart segment from the interaction.

To ensure that accurate report data is generated, you must select offers which are created from an offer template with Allow offers created from this template to be used in real-time interactions option enabled.

Treatment rules are defined on the interaction strategy of a campaign. Click Copy Interaction Strategy icon located at the top of the tab to copy interaction strategies from one campaign to another.

Offer eligibility

Treatment rules are the first-level methods used by Unica Interact to determine the offers which are eligible for a visitor. Unica Interact has several optional features that you can implement to enrich your offer-to-visitor assignments.

The following list displays the optional features in Unica Interact that you can use to enrich your offer-to-visitor assignments:

  • Offer suppression
  • Global offers
  • Individual offer assignments
  • Score overrides
  • Learning

Before you create your treatment rules, you must confirm the offer eligibility features available to you with your Unica Interact administrator. For example, if you are using a score override table to override the marketing score, it may not be required to change the default marketing score for your treatment rules.

You can directly write the expressions for offer eligibility within treatment rules to control how you target offers from outside interactive flowcharts. Some rules may be easier to manage at this level rather than at the segmentation level.

For example, you may write the expression offer.dynamic.ownProductX='yes',that is, if the offer attribute ownProductX is yes, it uses this treatment rule. In this example, you may include a specific offer or you may possess a different score for the offer for people who already own product X. You can build specific treatment rules, for example, assigning specific offers that are based on offer attributes or the day of the week.

For more information about offer eligibility features, see the Unica Interact Administrator Guide.

Marketing score

Each treatment rule contains a marketing score, which is represented by the slider. The default score is 50. The higher a score, the more likely Unica Interact selects the offer to recommend. Depending on how you configure your treatment rules across multiple campaigns, you can have multiple offers assigned to the same smart segments.

Unica Interact uses the marketing score in determining the offer, if multiple offers are available for a single request. For example, to choose between Offer A with the marketing score of 30 and Offer B with the marketing score of 80, Unica Interact presents Offer B.

If there are two or more offers have the same score, Unica Interact breaks the tie among the offers by making random selection from the matching offers. This helps to ensure that a single visitor interacting in the same zone multiple times is more likely to see different offers on each interaction. If required, you can change this behavior by modifying the Unica Interact |offerServing | offerTieBreakMethod configuration property.

See the "Unica Interact Runtime Configuration Properties" Appendix of the Unica Interact Administrator's Guide for more details.

If you assign the same offer to the same segment with different scores, for example, two different campaigns may create treatment rules for the same interactive channel, Unica Interact uses the higher score.

You can also define the marketing score by using advanced options for the treatment rule. You can build an expression by using macros, offer attributes, session variables, dimension tables, and any value in a customer's profile to define the marketing score.

You can override any changes to the marketing score made in the interaction strategy by providing data in the Score Override table. Using the Score Override table, you can easily import scores that are generated in PredictiveInsight, Unica Optimize, or some other modeling software. In the Score Override table, you can define scores greater than 100.

If you enable built-in learning, the marketing score is used in the learning algorithms.

For details on working with Score Override table, see the Unica Interact Administrator's Guide.

Note: For the offers with the similar marketer's score within the same segment or zone, multiple offers can be offered in a randomized fashion. You can also write expressions to define or adjust the marketing score.

Forexample, profileTable.dimensionTable.scoreAdj* MarketerScore, which multiplies the value of the scoreAdjcolumn to the current marketing score defined by the slider for the treatment rule.

Strategy tab in Design Time environment

The Strategy tab is the place where you manage strategies for an Interactive Channel and define treatment rules for a strategy. When you create a strategy, you can link it to a campaign.