What does the number of interactions mean in the personalization visitor rules

Question

When adding personalization rules to a component I get this option: "where the specific campaign was triggered during a past or current interaction and when the number of elapsed days compares to number and when the past number of interactions compares to number".

This seems the perfect rule for personalization based on a specific goal. I added the goal and set the number of elapsed days to less than 10.

Some questions about this:

1. Does this mean that the rule will be taken into account if the visitor has triggered the goal in the last 10 days?
2. Does this imply that the rule will be applied to the next sessions too (and not only to the current visit) if these take place within 10 days of the triggered goal?
3. What are the "number of interactions" mentioned at the end of the rule and why is it a mandatory field?

Thanks a lot!

Stein

Answer 1

There's a very similar rule to this that is more suitable for your use case, which replaces "Campaign" with "Goal". This allows you to specify a specific goal in the rule. The ID for this rule definition is {C1DA0D65-C9C7-4526-91BB-E0390A7D3833}.

I will answer your questions, but you must bear in mind the note I add at the end:

1. Yes, the rule should pass if the goal was triggered within the last 10 days. The number you provide is compared to the number of elapsed days between the current DateTime and the InteractionStartDateTime of the Interaction.

2. Yes, the rule is checked against both the current visit and past interactions, as long as they are within the timeframe supplied (i.e. within the past 10 days).

3. This allows you to limit not just by date but by time too. For example, you could only want the rule to pass if the goal was triggered within the last 5 visits to the website. I'm unsure why it is mandatory, but it may just be to cut down on number of rule permutations needed to cover scenarios. To effectively ignore it, you could set NumberOfPastInteractions to Not equal to 0.

However, important note!

The above being said, that is how the rule should work. There is actually a bug that prevents this rule running in this manner. It affects all current versions of Sitecore that the rule exists in (8.1 to 9.0 Initial Release).

My answer to this question on rules against outcomes covers the details of this specific bug. So if you would like to use the rule in the way you have described, you are going to need to currently re-implement it or escalate with Sitecore for a patch.