You can set up your Web Channel campaign for Automation Center (AC), once you have successfully selected your Web Channel campaign template.
Web Channel has two nodes in the Automation Center that allow you to add or remove contacts to your Web Channel campaigns:
In this article we offer examples of how to build automated programs using Web Channel.
Further reading
Prerequisites
To create a newly built automated program using Web Channel templates, you need to perform the following:
- Choose a pre-created, designed campaign. For details, see Selecting your campaign template. Optionally, you can select a blank campaign.
- Define the general settings. For details, see General Settings page description.
Ensure that you set the Recipient source to the following:
- Automation Center
- Click Save and Continue to proceed to Web Channel creation flow.
- Create your Web Channel campaign for the Automation Center program.
- Check when the campaign is saved and verified, it appears on the Campaigns list with the status Ready.
Building a Web Channel Automation Center program
To add a Web Channel node to your Automation Center program proceed as follows:
- Open your Automation Center program and insert the Web Channel - add node at the point where you want contacts to join the campaign.
- Activate your Web Channel campaign.
You can only select active campaigns in the Automation Center.
- Double-click the node to see the options dialog; all the Web Channel campaigns set to use Automation Center are listed. Select the campaign you need and save the node properties.
Automation Center cannot manage the status of your Web Channel campaign. For this reason, you need to activate the campaign before using it in an Automation Center program. You can only deactivate Web Channel campaigns that are not used in active Automation Center programs.
- Add a Web Channel - remove node where you want your contacts to stop seeing your campaign. This will typically come after a filter that checks to see if the contact has reached your campaign objective (i.e. the conversion criterion).
We don't recommend inserting a Wait node between the Web Channel - add and remove nodes if you are using exit criteria in your Automation Center program because the program checks whether contacts fulfill these conditions after each Wait node. Otherwise, it may happen that contacts who passed through the Web Channel - add node will continue to see your Web Channel campaign even after being removed from the program due to exit criteria.
Editing Web Channel campaigns in live programs
To edit the content or settings of a Web Channel campaign associated with an active program, do the following:
Alternatively, you can delete the Web Channel node from your program and add another one to it where you can select the updated campaign. In this case, you don’t need to pause or freeze the program.
- Deactivate the Web Channel campaign.
- Make the changes to your Web Channel campaign. Any setting can be changed except for recipient source (which must remain Automation Center).
- You need to reactivate your Web Channel campaign, then you can resume the Automation Center program.
Limitations
There are some aspects of functionality which might result in unexpected behavior.
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Lost contacts - Contacts can exit a program flow in a number of ways, for example:
- Reaching a Finish node.
- Being filtered out by a Quick filter, Filter switch or Exclude node.
- Leaving due to the exit criteria being met.
In these cases, it is not possible for us to detect that the contact is no longer in the program, therefore they will remain in the audience of the Web Channel message until the program terminates. It is up to you to use the Web Channel - remove node to prevent this from happening.
If you change the contact identification method from setEmail (i.e. email hash) to setCustomerID (i.e. customer ID) or the other way around in your Web Extend configuration, then your Web Channel audiences will be empty and the contacts who had previously entered your Web Channel Automation Center program will not be able to see your campaigns anymore.