The Audience process
Audience levels define the target entity that you want to work with, such as account, customer, household, product, or business division. Use the Audience process in a flowchart to switch between audience levels or to filter out IDs by audience level.
Audience levels are defined by an administrator during the table mapping process. When you use the Audience process in a flowchart, you can specify which audience levels you want to target in your campaign. For example, you can configure the Audience process to:
- Select one customer per household based on some business rule (for example, oldest male or the person with the highest account balance);
- Select all accounts belonging to a particular set of customers;
- Select all accounts with a negative balance belonging to a particular set of customers;
- Select all households with individuals holding checking accounts;
- Select customers with three or more purchases within a specified time-frame.
The Audience process can select from any defined table(s), so you can use it as a top-level process in your flowchart to initially select data.
To use the Audience process, you must work with tables for which multiple audience levels are defined. These levels, defined within a single table, provide a relationship to "translate" from one level to another.
- One key is defined as the "primary" or "default" key for the table. (This key represents the audience used most frequently for this data source.) The default level associated with a table is specified during the table mapping process. For more information about mapping tables, see the Unica Campaign Administrator's Guide.
- The other keys are "alternate" keys that are available for switching audience levels.
After you switch audience levels, Unica Campaign displays only those tables whose default key is defined at the same audience level. If you work at different audience levels on a regular basis, you might need to map the same table more than once within Unica Campaign, each time with a different primary/default key.
Restricting audience size
When you configure an Audience process, the default size for the number of records per audience is Unlimited. You may want to restrict the size of the audience if, for example, you are performing test runs of a campaign flowchart or process.
You can limit the audience size to any positive integer. When you limit the audience size, the qualifying records are chosen randomly.
The same random set of records will be used for each subsequent run of the Audience process (unless the input to the process changes). This is important if you intend to use the results for modeling purposes, because different modeling algorithms must be compared across the same set of records to determine each model's effectiveness. If you do not intend to use the results for modeling, you can make the Audience process select a different random set of records each time it runs. To do this, use a Random Seed of zero (0). A value of 0 ensures that a different random set of records will be selected each time the process runs.