Campaign execution overview

After you launch a campaign, campaign execution consists of several steps.

Execution

When you launch a campaign, the campaign starts executing only after the Start time that you have set in the campaign properties. 

Qualification

Qualification means determining which users are eligible to be part of the campaign. 

• For one time and recurring campaigns, the users that qualify are simply the users in the segment.
• For segment triggered campaigns, the initial users that qualify are the users in the segment. Subsequently, new users start their campaign journey when they meet the segment criteria.
• For event triggered campaigns, a user enters the campaign journey when the user completes a qualifying event and that event is processed by Blueshift. 
• For API triggered campaigns, a user enters the campaign journey when the Trigger a campaign API is called. The API payload contains the user identifiers.

Decisioning

A user first enters the campaign through the Journey Start trigger which is the Root trigger. Decisioning determines the user’s journey in the campaign. 

The layout of your triggers is very important as they determine how users move through a campaign. Trigger ordering can be more complicated when triggers have delays. When a trigger has a delay included, the user is evaluated for the trigger only after the delay is completed.

If there are no eligible triggers now or in the future (after a delay), the user exits their journey.

For more information, see User journey in a campaign and Eligible trigger ordering.

Messaging

Once the user qualifies for a trigger, Blueshift renders the message that is to be sent to the user. Templates can contain personalization using Liquid, recommendations, and external fetches. 

Blueshift considers the following criteria while rendering the message for a particular user:

• The entire user profile.
• User transactions if the campaign is segment based with a segment of transactions.
• Items and recommendations if the template has a recommendation algorithm.
• The result from external fetches if the template includes them.
• Tracking parameters defined for the trigger.
• Execution context metadata like campaign uuid, trigger uuid, experiment uuid, and so on.
• For some channels, links are rewritten so that clicks can be tracked properly by Blueshift.

After a message is rendered, it is sent to the messaging service that you are using. 

Campaign Statistics

Once the campaign starts sending, you can see all the campaign stats like sends, opens, clicks, custom goal events, and so on broken down by trigger in the Campaign performance report. 

A Campaign execution summary report is available on the Reports tab for completed one time and recurring campaigns and contains execution statistics. For recurring campaigns, it shows statistics for the last completed execution.

For more information about the core campaign metrics that are captured by channel, see Campaign Metrics.