Personalization Playback in Unica Interact

With the release of Unica version 12.1.3, the Playback feature has been introduced in HCL Unica Interact. This new feature provides retrospective views of the activities that occurred in any date range. Users get a high-level view of summary and capability by drilling down all the way to individual sessions. 

Marketers can use Personalization Playback to review activities that result from existing campaigns. Personalization Playback shows the aggregated user activities grouped by the audience, offers, and segments. It also includes capabilities to drill down for activity details such as profile attributes, session attributes, API history, event patterns status, and delivered and disqualified offers for Interact APIs.

The Following Are the Capabilities of This New Feature:

• Flexible filtering options for the interested audience IDs based on audience levels and any profile attributes. 
• Capabilities of selecting any past date range, in addition to several pre-set ranges. 
• An interactive graph to show the activities based on distinct Interact sessions and audience IDs during the selected range. 
• List all sessions associated with any selected date/time point. 
• Detailed information on individual sessions, including API parameters, returned offers, suppressed offers, event pattern states, and more.

How Playback Works for HCL Unica Interact

When HCL Unica Interact responds to the requests initiated by the integrated channels, a lot of information related to this is captured in a couple of system tables (mentioned in the later section). This feature uses the data from those tables to display in the desired format. Users can create their own filters based on either Audience, Offers, or Segments. Using it, session and audience related data can be displayed for the required period.

Configurations

To enable this feature, certain parameters need to be set as described below:

1. Login into Unica Marketing Platform for Interact Runtime and navigate to “Affinium|interact|general|API” and enable API logging by setting ‘enabledLogging’ flag set to True as below:

2. Navigate to “Affinium|interact|profile|Audience Levels|Customer” and update the parameters which have been highlighted in the below images. These are the tables that get created during the installation or upgrade of Unica Interact.

NOTE: This configuration must be done for all the audiences which have been configured in HCL Unica interact. Else require, data for other audiences would not be captured.

3. Navigate to “Affinium|interact|profile|Audience Levels|<Audience_Level>|Attributes Logging|startSession”. At this location, the below parameters need to be set, as highlighted in the screenshot below:

logProfileAttributes: Profile attributes to be added or not

includeExcludeProfileAttributes: Profile attributes to be excluded from Playback

logSessionParameters: Interact session parameters to be captured or not.

logEventPatternStatus: Event / Pattern related parameters to be captured or not.

NOTE: This setting has to be done for all the APIs (Ex. startSession(), setAudience(), getOffers(), getOfferForMultipleInteractionPoints(), postEvent, and getProfile) for which you wanted to capture the data 

How to Use the Playback Feature:

• Login into HCL Unica Interact Design time, where Interact Channels are created.
• Access Interact Channels for which you want to see the data in the Playback tab.
• The first time you will have to do is to create a filter based on Audience, Offers, or Segments using the required criteria. 

• When you click on the audience graph, you will get the list of the sessions for the selected period like below:

• Details like Audience ID, Session start date and time, and session end date and time would be available.
• When you click on the specific audience for which you wish you see the details, you will get a screen like the one below, which gives you the option to view the Audience Profile, Audience Context, Interaction History (API Trace), Event Pattern State, Presented Offers and Suppressed Offers.

• When ‘Audience Profile’ is selected, it provides audience data that is available in the profile table.

• The ‘Audience Context’ option would provide the audience data which is available in the session for that audience. During the interaction, if any of the audience data is changed at the run-time, that changed data would be available when this option is selected.

• Interaction History (API Trace)’ is nothing but the API call which has been executed for the selected audience for that session. You will be able to see the data below:

• When you click startSession() from the API list, data is shown below. This will provide all the information which was provided when startSession() API was sent by the channel.

• Below is the sample screenshot when you see the data for getOffers() call:

• Following is the information available on the ‘Presented Offer’ tab. This will give the list of all the offers which were presented to this audience in the selected session.

With the help of the ‘Playback’ feature, you should be able to see the following:

• Audience data
• Context data
• API history
• Offer presented 
• Offer Suppressed
• Event Pattern States

To learn about how you can use the ‘Playback’ feature for your product or service, you can refer to Unica Interact V12.1.4 User Guide and Unica Interact V12.1.4 Administrator’s Guide.