Badges, Enrichments, and Rules! Oh my!

In my last blog post I discussed how the context of a particular use case is essential when you’re deciding what data to collect in Tealium AudienceStream™. Now that your data points are ready, let’s put them to use and configure a campaign. However, like Dorothy perplexed by a fork in the yellow brick road, you too may be wondering which is the best path to take.  

Dorothy: “Rules?”
Scarecrow: “Pardon me, that way is a very nice way.”
Dorothy: “Attributes?”
Scarecrow: “It’s pleasant down that way too.”
Dorothy: “Badges or audiences?”
Scarecrow: “Of course, people do go both ways.”

Yes. It’s true that the flexibility of AudienceStream, while designed to deliver marketing agility, also means several starting points for crafting your campaign. The guidelines below however will empower you to get started building badges, enrichments and rules faster than you can say “isosceles triangle“.

Let’s first review the most common configuration elements:

• Attribute: characteristic of a visitor like a badge or a trait
• Enrichment: system action that sets the value of the attribute
• Rule: governs when enrichments are applied
• Audience: a particular group of visitors

For some context and because I was the scarecrow in my high school’s production, I’ll keep the “The Wizard of Oz” theme going. We’ll go through creating a badge to identify your visitor’s character, a trait to identify which gift they gave to Dorothy, and an Audience for your visitor to belong based those two attributes.

Attribute Title: “Munchkin” Character

• Type: Badge
• Enrichment: Assign badge
• Rule: When under 4 feet tall
  • Data source actorHeight is less than or equal to 4.0

Attribute Title: “Gift Given to Dorothy”

• Type: Trait
• Enrichment 1: Set to “lollipop”
• Rule 1: When a gift is given and it’s a lollipop
  • Data source isGiftGiven=”true” and giftGiven=”lollipop”
• Enrichment 2: Set to “ruby slippers”
• Rule 2: When a house falls on the Wicked Witch
  • Data source event=”fallen house” and isGiftGiven=”true”

Audience Title: “The Lollipop Guild”

• Visitor will join the audience if
  • “Munchkin” badge is assigned
  • “Gift Given to Dorothy” trait equals “lollipop”

Now that we have an example of how configurations work together, let’s talk about how the system processes these configurations. When AudienceStream receives an event, the configurations are run in the following order:

1. Rules are evaluated
2. Enrichments are applied to Attributes
3. Audiences are joined or left

This, however, does not mean that your marketing campaigns also need to be built in that order. The recommended best practice when building your AudienceStream configurations is to using the following order:

1. Choose the type of attribute
2. Build the enrichment(s) to make to the attribute
3. Apply a rule that defines when the attribute should be enriched
4. Create your audience made up of one or many attributes

The first 3 steps can be completed from the same screen in the UI, which is like following the yellow brick road to building your desired configurations.

All right, now that you’ve got “The Lollipop Guild” audience, AudienceStream can automatically trigger actions in one or more of your marketing technologies utilizing built in connectors from the marketplace. This post details how a single audience can be targeted across many channels. Give it a read, and combined with my previous posts, you should be well on your way to creating use cases, determining attributes, building audiences, and targeting your visitors with AudienceStream.

Fun fact: The only other time Snow White’s voice was used in any Disney movie was during the Tin Man’s song, “If I Only Had a Heart”, singing the line, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”