Linked Audience Sessions in Unica Interact

Traditionally Unica Interact presents the best real-time offers based on the audience Id who is active on a specific Inbound Channel. This means that Interact can handle one audience ID and one Interactive channel in a session at a given time. However, do you know that starting 12.1 FixPack3, Interact can handle a session inside another for either the same or different audience Id? There are use cases where the marketing logic and related marketing objects are designed in separate Interactive channels. Thus, CFS needs to create multiple sessions and gather the results from all those sessions. We have introduced the concept of ‘Embedded sessions’ to solve the limitation as mentioned earlier.

To understand this better, consider a use case where a customer logs into the website of a shoe department store, where multiple departments of that company, high heels, men sports, women sports- have their individual portions to show offers/messages. In this case, a “parent” session is started for loading customer data, and each department starts its embedded session to process its specific logic.

How to do this?

A child/embedded session can be called from an existing parent session. This can be done using two methods:

You need to invoke an executeBatch API is invoked with either of the following API call being the first command in the batch.

1. setAudience with the parameter UACIEmbeddedSession with the value of 1.
2. startSession with the parameter UACIEmbeddedSession with the value of 1 and the parameter relyOnExistingSession with the value ‘true.’

Things to consider while using Embedded sessions:

1. Embedded session only works in batch mode. The created embedded session is terminated as soon as all the commands in this batch are complete, regardless of the endSession is included in the batch.
2. Embedded sessions are not added into SessionCache, and therefore, they are never available to other Interact run time instances even when the distributed cache is enabled.
3. Treatments and Session parameters created from flowchart execution in the embedded session will be added to the parent session.
4. Contact and response events can be posted to the parent session for the treatments returned from its embedded sessions.

Treatment handling for mixed sources:

In this scenario, the buyer visits the airline website to book their flights. You can here view and control the offer they see, based on the profiles attached to their account. Let’s consider the user has both personal and corporate profiles linked to the account they are using to book the tickets. So both the offers can be delivered to the user from 2 different departments (corporate and personal) that too at the same time. The offers can be in the form of ad banners, SMS, Email and other channels. This useful capability added where Interact can retrieve offers belonging to different audience IDs which are passed in the same session. In this case, usual arbitration and optimization logic will be applied, and a final combined list of offers will be presented.

Thus, using both these new capabilities, Unica Interact can handle child sessions inside a parent session and multiple audiences in the same session. If you are already an Interact user, I hope this article helped you discover Unica Interact’s potential even further. To learn more about the embedded sessions in Unica Interact, you can reach out to us, and we will be happy to help.