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Terminology Used for Marketing Metadata

To support the segmentation process, the Oracle BI Administration Tool provides a special set of Marketing metadata. This topic describes the following Marketing metadata entities:

Target Levels

A target level is the entity that a marketer wants to count. Target levels are usually customer types such as individuals, businesses, or households. However, in special circumstances a target level might also represent other entities such as bank accounts, opportunities, or assets.

To support counting, the metadata definition for a target level specifies a column in the database table that uniquely identifies the target such as Customer-ID, Account-ID, or Household-ID. Target levels can be combined in a segment. For example, a segment might be created that counts the number of contacts who live in households that satisfy a certain criteria.

Conforming Dimensions

Conforming dimensions can be used when a star might include a dimension with the target-level ID. A conforming dimension links a fact that contains target-level IDs to a fact that does not contain target-level IDs by navigating along a dimension that is shared by both fact tables.

For example, a bank might track service requests at the bank-account level only and the Service Request star does not include the customer dimension. To be able to count the number of contacts who have filed a certain number of service requests, a conforming dimension is required. In this case, the conforming dimension is the Bank Account dimension, because it is a dimension shared by both the Service Request star and another star containing the Bank Account dimension, such as the Customer Profile star. To evaluate this count, the Marketing Server determines the bank accounts that satisfy the service request criteria, and then finds all customers who join to those bank accounts using a subquery. For more information, see Setting Up Conforming Dimension Links.

Qualified List Item (QLI)

A qualified list item (QLI) is an entity that is evaluated against segment criteria so that the information related to that entity can be exported in a list file. A QLI can be of type Primary or Secondary. A primary qualified list item is the presentation column that maps to the dimension key that is being counted for a target level such as Contact-ID for the contact target level. A secondary qualified list item is primarily created for list exports. Use a QLI to restrict the list based on the logic used in the segmentation criteria.

For example, you might have a segment containing all customers who have a vehicle lease expiring in less than two months. You plan to create a list for this segment and Vehicle ID is one of the list columns. If you do not create a secondary QLI, the list contains vehicles that the customers in the segment own and it does not matter if the lease expires in less than two months. If you create a secondary QLI on the Vehicle-ID, the list contains only vehicles with leases expiring in less than two months (qualified) from the segment.

For more information, see Setting Up Marketing Qualified List Items.