Ingesting custom campaigns/events¶

Entities¶

CDP supports this type of data by using 4 main entities : campaign, dispatch, message, event. Those have a hierarchical relationship between them : a campaign can contain multiple dispatches (ie. campaign has a 1:n relationship with dispatch), a dispatch can contain multiple messages (ie. dispatch has a 1:n relationship with message), and messages can have multiple events tied to them or none, and events can be tied to no messages as well (ie. message has a 0:n relationship with event).

The concepts behind each of those entities are inspired by the structure of Email marketing campaigns, but are quite elastic and can be used for a lot more types of campaigns/events. More details :

1. Campaign: This is the actual concept of a marketing campaign, e.g. “VIP customer reactivation”. It can have multiple executions with different dates (aka “Dispatch” explained below), and it can be executed on different channels (which is why “Dispatch” is the entity on which “Type and “Subtype” attributes are provided).
2. Dispatch: A dispatch is the concept of a specific campaign executed on a specific date on a specific channel. For that reason, it has attributes like “Type”, “Subtype” and other details like “AttributionStartDate” (for Direct Mail campaigns) that are tied to a specific execution of the campaign.
3. Message: A message is the concept of a “version” (as in “A/B testing variant” or “segment of customer”) of a dispatch. In a sense, it contains the details at the most granular level for a specific execution of a specific campaign, sent to a specific group of customers. It contains the most granular information about a marketing campaign (e.g. “Cost” for Direct Mail campaigns).
4. Event : An event is a very generic concept. It can be anything that happens between the customer and the brand, regardless of who initiated the contact, e.g. : CDP uses Events to track visitor activity on the brand’s website, but it is also used to record email clicks and opens form the customer’s side. Events can be used by themselves to satisfy simple tracking use cases (details below), but they can also close the loop on marketing campaigns by recording every interaction a customer had with the campaign and what results it had (email clicks, products viewed on the web, products added to the cart, transactions…).

As is usually the case for all CDP entities, each level of the hierarchy also supports custom attributes. However, you need to be careful and think about how each attribute ties to each level : does it provide details about the overall campaign (and it should be added to the Campaign entity then), or does it provide information for one specific execution of that campaign and a specific group of recipients of the campaign (then it should be added to the Message entity instead) ? For any ingestion of marketing campaign and/or custom event data, it is imperative that you review your proposal with an CDP Product Manager, in order to make sure that your use cases are properly implemented and you get the value you were looking for.