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User Guide
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
About interactive flowcharts
Interactive flowcharts are similar to Unica Campaign batch flowcharts when used to create strategic segments.
Interactive flowcharts and data sources
Similar to batch flowcharts, use interactive flowcharts to define the segments that the audience members belong in, based on characteristics of the data that is associated with the segments. However, the data that you use in an interactive flowchart is different from the data that you use in batch flowcharts.
Derived fields, user variables, macros, and Interact
While you can create expressions in interactive flowcharts and advanced options for treatment rules, all of the building blocks are not available in both query builders. The table in this section describes the query building block, whether it is available in interactive flowcharts or advanced options, and any special notes.

User Guide
Unica Interact provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
- Unica Interact overview
  Unica Interact is an interactive engine that targets personalized offers to visitors of inbound marketing channels. You can configure Unica Interact to be behavioral, strictly event-based, situational, strategic, and so on. Unica Interact is a module within the Unica suite of tools.
- Marketing Campaign
  Designing the Unica Interact configuration is a multi-step process that involves many people in your organization. You work with the Unica Interact user interface, the Unica Interact API, and Unica Campaign flowcharts to configure your interactive marketing campaign.
- Interactive channels
  An interactive channel is a representation of a client-facing touchpoint that is used to coordinate all of the objects, data, and server resources that are involved in interactive marketing.
- About interactive flowcharts
  Interactive flowcharts are similar to Unica Campaign batch flowcharts when used to create strategic segments.
  - Building interactive flowcharts
    Typical interactive flowcharts start with an Interaction process, go through data manipulation processes, and end in at least one PopulateSeg process. The data manipulation processes, Decision, Select, and Sample, can be used to create detailed segments. The Decision and Sample processes can be used to create branching logic, while the Select process can be used to enrich the data that is considered in making decisions and segmentation. The Snapshot process can be used to persist profile data, session data, or real-time calculated data to a database.
  - To create interactive flowcharts
    Use the Summary tab of a session to add an interactive flowchart.
  - Interactive flowcharts and data sources
    Similar to batch flowcharts, use interactive flowcharts to define the segments that the audience members belong in, based on characteristics of the data that is associated with the segments. However, the data that you use in an interactive flowchart is different from the data that you use in batch flowcharts.
    - The test run profile table
      During design-time, you have access only to persisted profile data. Campaign is not connected to a touchpoint and therefore cannot collect real-time session data. To create interactive flowcharts that reference real-time session data and to complete test runs of interactive flowcharts, you must have sample real-time session data in a test run profile table.
    - Dimension tables
      You can map dimension tables for interactive flowcharts. However, you must map the tables in the Interactive Channel, and not within the Unica Campaign table mapping that is available in Campaign Settings.
    - Configuring interactive flowcharts
      In general, interactive flowcharts are configured the same way as batch flowcharts. While you need consider the different concepts behind interactive flowcharts compared to batch flowcharts, you add and edit processes in an interactive flowchart in the same way as you do in a batch flowchart.
    - Queries and Interact
      Several processes in Interactive flowcharts and advanced options in treatment rules can be used to create queries to select data from your data source. These are, in general, the same queries as Unica Campaign.
    - About data types and stored objects
      Like Unica Campaign, Unica Interact supports several data types for stored objects. User variables, derived fields, and macros can all use Number, String, and Date data types. Date constants are interpreted by using the date format settings of Unica Campaign.
    - Derived fields, user variables, macros, and Interact
      While you can create expressions in interactive flowcharts and advanced options for treatment rules, all of the building blocks are not available in both query builders. The table in this section describes the query building block, whether it is available in interactive flowcharts or advanced options, and any special notes.
    - Using EXTERNALCALLOUT
      EXTERNALCALLOUT is a function available to you when working with custom macros in Decision, Select, and Snapshot processes in interactive flowcharts. EXTERNALCALLOUT can be used to make a synchronous call to an external service, for example, to request the credit score for a particular audience level.
  - About the Interaction process
    All interactive flowcharts must start with the Interaction process. You can use the interaction process to start an interactive flowchart, and to define the size of the test profile sample that Unica Interact uses when performing a test run of interactive flowcharts.
  - About the Decision process
    The Decision process is the workhorse of the interactive flowchart. The Decision process divides the cells that are passed into the process into new cells that are based on configurable criteria. Each new cell creates a branch, like a decision tree.
  - About the PopulateSeg process
    The PopulateSeg process performs a similar function as the CreateSeg process in batch flowcharts; the PopulateSeg process takes the input cells and makes them smart segments. The segments that you create with the PopulateSeg process are the smart segments that you use in treatment rules. The PopulateSeg process is a terminal node of interactive flowcharts.
  - About the Sample process in interactive flowcharts
    The Sample process in interactive flowcharts fills the same purpose of Sample processes in batch flowcharts: to create one or more cells for different treatments, control groups, or a subset of data for modeling. However, the interactive flowchart Sample process contains only a subset of the features in the Sample process in batch flowcharts. The Sample Size Calculator and Maximum Cell Size are removed. Interactive flowchart Sample processes also have a new method for selecting the sample, the Deterministic Hash Function.
  - About the Select process in interactive flowcharts
    The Select process in interactive flowcharts fills the same purpose of Select processes in batch flowcharts to specify the customer data that you want to use in your interactive flowchart. The interactive flowchart Select process contains a subset of the batch flowchart Select process; it contains only the Source and General tabs.
  - About the Snapshot process in interactive flowcharts
    The Snapshot process in interactive flowcharts fills the same purpose of Snapshot processes in batch flowcharts to capture a list of IDs and associated data, and export them to a table. The interactive flowchart Snapshot process contains a subset of the batch flowchart Snapshot process. You can save to a table only. However, you also cannot order or skip duplicate entries in the table because interactive flowcharts handle only one record at a time, these features are not necessary.
  - Understanding interactive flowchart test runs
    Interactive flowchart test runs check the segmentation logic of an interactive flowchart. Interactive flowcharts are intended to run on a runtime server with one visitor at a time. However, you can test them in Unica Campaign to ensure that the interactive flowchart creates and assigns visitors to the segments you expect. For a complete test of your interactive flowcharts and how it interacts with your touchpoint, you must deploy the interactive flowchart to a test runtime server.
  - About deploying interactive flowcharts
    When you configure the interactive flowchart, you must mark the flowchart for deployment. When you mark an interactive flowchart for deployment, a notification is displayed on the interactive channel that is associated with this interactive flowchart that it can be deployed to a runtime server group for testing or the production runtime server group.
- Strategies and treatment rules
- FlexOffers
- Events and Event Patterns
- Gateways
- About the Interact List process in batch flowcharts
  When Unica Interact is installed, the Interact List process is available in batch flowcharts. Similar to the Call List and Offer List processes, the Interact List process allows you to specify which offers are served to which visitors to your interactive site. This provides you with the ability to target offers to entire audience levels, target specific individual audience members, or suppress offers from specific audience members by using table-driven features.
- Understanding deployment to runtime servers
  Deployment is how you transfer all the configuration that you define in the design environment to the runtime server groups. Deployment is grouped by interactive channel. When you deploy an interactive channel, you are sending all the data that is associated with an interactive channel to the selected runtime server group. This is why, when you are creating interactive channels, you must define the production runtime servers and the non-production (testing) runtime servers.
- About Interact reporting
  Unica Interact is integrated with Unica reporting to deliver comprehensive Cognos® reports in Unica Interact.

Derived fields, user variables, macros, and Unica Interact

While you can create expressions in interactive flowcharts and advanced options for treatment rules, all of the building blocks are not available in both query builders. The table in this section describes the query building block, whether it is available in interactive flowcharts or advanced options, and any special notes.

Unless otherwise described in the following table, see the Unica Campaign User's Guide for more details about building queries.


Object	Available in interactive flowchart	Available in advanced options	Notes®
Derived fields	Yes	No	You can use derived fields, persistent derived fields, stored derived fields, and user variables in interactive flowcharts with the Decision, Select, and Snapshot processes. Derived fields can contain constants, user variables, other derived fields, and macros. If you are creating a derived field in an interactive flowchart that you want to be available as a name-value pair in the Unica Interact API, you must preface the name with the prefix defined in the `SessionVar` configuration property, for example, `SessionVar.DerivedFieldName`.
User variables	Yes	No	User variables can contain only numerics or strings. Interactive flowcharts do not support the `None` data type. `Current Value` is not supported for user variables.
Macros	Yes	Yes	A select list of macros are available for use in interactive flowcharts and advanced options for treatment rules. The design environment lists the available macros in the query builder. For details about using macros, see the Macros User's Guide. Note: NUMBER, IS, and IN behave differently in interactive flowcharts and advanced options than Unica Campaign. Note: Your performance may be impacted if you have an expression that uses `EXTERNALCALLOUT` in advanced options of your treatment rules. For example, if there are 100 eligible offers (each with an advanced option with an `EXTERNALCALLOUT`) that Interact has to prioritize down to one best offer, then Interact has to evaluate each option and fire potential 100 external callouts to fulfill that one `getOffers` request.
Custom Macros	Yes	No	Raw SQL selecting ID list or Raw SQL selecting ID list + value custom macro types are not supported in interactive flowcharts.

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