SAS CMS universal Group

[Fdwa-Adwan]

I work in marketing department in telecom company, where we create campaigns to our base on SAS CMs, I tried to create a universal control group, where SAS can drop certain count of MSAISN in order to exclude them on our campaigns, I couldn't find a way to do it.

I need help! I know ho to do it per campaign, but not per SAS CMS

thank you. 

[JamesAnderson]

Hi,

Unlike the “Hold-out Control Groups” within a communication node, there isn’t a specific function within CI Studio to define a "Universal Control Group", and enforce its usage in campaigns.

However we can use other feature of the software to implement a universal control group. If you create another campaign diagram which selects customers who are members of the control group, you can configure the final Cell (which represents the control group population) as “make this cell available for linking” and configure the diagram as “Use the most current data when referenced by a link” to be No. This means you can run the selection for your universal control group once, and it wont change (until you decide to refresh it and run it again).

Then in your campaigns you can use a link node to re-use the cell from other diagram and tick “Exclude these subjects”.

All that remains is deciding how to choose customers to go into the universal control group (perhaps look at SAS’s PROC SURVEYSELECT to get a stratified sample of your customer base), and then deciding which campaigns should implement the universal control group.

Regards
James

[Fdwa-Adwan]

thank you fro your help, but t I have 2 questions:

1- is the below suggestion is the same as "drop campaign" ?

2- can you check k the below screenshot? I didn't know where to connect the link in the diagram.

[JamesAnderson]

Hi,

Im not sure what you mean by a drop campaign - however this is the same approach used for exclusion diagrams to remove unwanted customers (for example Opt outs, Bad Debt, Do Not Contact, Suspended etc).

In your diagram you need to add an AND node after the OR node and connect the Link node to the AND. The numbers on the link node look suspicious (15 million). It looks like your control group diagram is selecting customers who are not in the control group, rather than those that are.

Regards
James

[Dmitry_Alergant]

@JamesAnderson 

Respectfully disagree... I'd not use Cells / Links for Universal Control Groups functionality.

Typical marketing requirements for Universal (Global) Control Group - all that I have seen - would require, at a very least:

1) That it was persistent and stable over very long periods of time (6 month - 1 year - "forever / undefined"), an need to be robust - accidentally losing and recreating a control group from scratch is absolutely unacceptable

2) That it allowed incremental additions from a portion of new customers, so it won't miss out its share of new customer population throughout the group's lifetime.

3) That it could be used for reporting. One needs to be able to build a report comparing long-term performance of Universal Control Group (as a whole) with Universal Target Group (as a whole).

Storing "static" diagram cells as storage for Universal Control Group in my view does not satisfy any of these 3 requirements...    There are lots of ways how the contents of a cell can be cleared or lost, accidentally and not... It includes many kinds of upstream diagram modifications, accidental diagram reruns, using many kinds of MATables cleanup procedures, some scenarios to system restore after failure, etc. And once it's gone, there is essentially no way back. This is not something one can rely on to be a robust and guaranteed storage for 1 a year.   

Requirements 2 and 3 will not be satisfied unless Universal Control Group is being materialized to the actual database table. One will need to introduce a customized database table (CDM or CMDM) for the Universal Control Group, and implement a mechanism to
store it there. At this point, it becomes easier to just add this table to the infomap... And there is no more need for a statically linked cell altogether...

[JamesAnderson]

Hi Dmitry,
The points you raise are all good ones, and I agree with them all. I didn't go into much detail about how to decide on the UCG membership, other than a suggestion about PROC SURVEYSELECT. I completely agree that the best approach is to use a table carefully populated with the UCG members. In terms of excluding UCG members from a campaign, Id still argue that a linked cell back to a diagram that has selected everybody from the UCG table is the easiest and most consistent way to apply it across many campaigns, and allows you to control the execution of the query to refresh the cell (or not), in the same way we do for other types of "standard exclusions". But it would also be valid to put a Select Node in each campaign and run the query against the UCG table every time.
Cheers
James