Understanding Action Based Targeting

What is Action Based Targeting and when to use it?

Action-Based Targeting feature is used to re-target specific people based on the actions they took or did not take related to a specific journey or a workflow. Some of these actions include whether a recipient of an email is a part of a campaign or if an email sent bounced. An example use case for ABT is, if you create a campaign to send NPS surveys to the candidates, then you can send a reminder email to candidates who have not filled in the survey and request for referrals to those who have been promoters in the survey. 

This unlocks talent segmentation based on past engagement and personalized targeting based on the defined segment, thus boosting the candidate experience. 

You can access the action-based targeting events by going to workflow or Lists and creating a new list from scratch. 

Note: ABT feature needs to be enabled for your environment. To enable the ABT, please contact your customer support team. 

Image 1 : Add variables option

Image 2 : List of ABT options available

Adding ABT as a part of the list to ensure retargeting is important

It is critical to add the original entity fields based list before adding additional filters based on the action. 

Consider the following scenario:

You have shared a link with the owners (who are your internal employees) whose candidate’s placement started after 2nd March 2025. You want to create a list of candidates to either check who are remaining or send them a communication. 

Here, the first condition (date_last_placement_started is after…) ensures that your candidate is accurately filtered before you add the specific action based targeting event. 

Without the first condition, it will first find the owners who have clicked on the external link and select all the candidates for these owners thus, providing you with a larger set of candidates but inaccurate for your purpose as these candidates will include those whose placement started before 2nd March. 

Therefore, adding an entity based (preferably existing list) is critical before you add ABT events to sharpen the focus. 

How to use ABT for different communication mode/channels

You can target any person type (namely, candidate, customer contact or internal employee) with ABT where a communication is sent to them. 

Currently, we support the following communication mode and their events to track:

• Email: 

We support email action tracking sent through journeys and workflow. Following are the actions supported:

1. Select one or more of the email action
2. Select the timeline for the action which needs to be tracked e.g. if you add a custom date- 30 January 2025 to now, then it will factor in only those actions done after 30 January
3. Select upto 10 touchpoints in a journey or 10 nodes for workflows

• External links: 

We support external links tracking sent through journeys and workflow. The following are the actions supported:

To create an ABT based on External link, 

1. Select the target for the external link which is either the internal owner (who manages the relationship with employee or contact) and candidate (the candidate or contact).
2. Select the timeline for the action which needs to be tracked e.g. if you add a custom date- 30 January 2025 to now, then it will factor in only those actions done after 30 January
3. Select 1 workflow or journey at a time
4. Select multiple links for the workflow or journey

• Survey: 

We support surveys based action targeting for the following actions

To create an ABT based on Survey, 

1. Select who the survey is completed by. 
2. Select the timeline for the action which needs to be tracked e.g. if you add a custom date- 30 January 2025 to now, then it will factor in only those actions done after 30 January
3. Select upto 10 workflow nodes or journey touchpoints at a time

• Survey question: 

We support survey question based action targeting for the following actions:

To create an ABT based on Survey Question, 

1. Select who the survey question is answered by. 
2. Select the timeline for the action which needs to be tracked e.g. if you add a custom date- 30 January 2025 to now, then it will factor in only those actions done after 30 January
3. Select upto 1 workflow nodes or journey touchpoints at a time
4. Select one question
5. Select the response that you want to track. The options vary based on the survey question type. 

• Chatbot: 

We support Chatbot based action targeting for the following actions:

To create an ABT based on Survey Question, 

1. Select the chatbot action. 
2. Select the people type who triggered the action.
3. Select the timeline for the action which needs to be tracked e.g. if you add a custom date- 30 January 2025 to now, then it will factor in only those actions done after 30 January
4. Select the chatbots (upto 10) which are applicable. 
5. Select the source which is applicable for the chatbots (journey or workflow where the chatbot is added). Here if the source details are empty then, the chatbot which is selected is not added to a workflow or journey.  

ABT can be used across multiple communication modes together for all or some of the workflows 

We support creating lists by combining action outcomes for multiple communication modes together. This can be done across multiple workflows and journeys. 

To create an ABT across multiple workflows or journeys, you can select multiple workflows together as long as the maximum number of nodes selected is 10. Or, you can select all the workflows which you have created and here we don’t have a specified limit (as long as it is fairly used). 

You can also combine multiple communication modes together and create one list. To understand how to use each of the communication modes, refer to this section. 

Expansion of Supported ABT Event Sources

ABT list creation incorporates Workflow-based events, expanding functionality beyond traditional Journeys.

This capability permits you to generate ABT data for the following workflow-based communications:

• Workflows Email
• Workflows SMS
• Voice Flows
• Chatbots
• External Links (Workflows)
• Surveys (Workflows)
• WhatsApp (Workflows)

If communication occurs through automated workflows, such as chatbot nudges or automated SMS, you can directly target these specific audiences utilizing ABT lists.

Implementation of the “ANY” Operator for List Automation

The ANY operator allows you to consolidate multiple event sources under a single list condition.

This functionality effectively enables evergreen lists, ensuring that the list automatically refreshes when new qualifying events occur, thereby eliminating the requirement for manual updates. 

For instance, you can define a condition to capture all entities whose email bounced in any of the workflows or journeys under the candidate entity.

Multi-Entity and Cross-Channel Segmentation

The updated system introduces expanded entity support and consolidated data selection capabilities, facilitating more granular segmentation.

Multi-Entity Capability

ABT list building extends beyond candidate data and you can construct lists utilizing the following entities:

• Candidate entities (for talent targeting)
• Placement entities (for monitoring communication tied to placements)
• Internal owners (for tracking engagement at the recruiter or account-manager level)

This expansion facilitates more granular segmentation for both client and staffing workflows.

Cross-Channel and Multi-Workflow Selection

The system allows you to select multiple communication channels and workflows concurrently, enabling up to 10 touchpoints at a time. This capability consolidates engagement data across various communication channels into a single, unified list. 

For example, you can construct a query that selects entities who "opened an email OR started a chatbot OR clicked an external link from any of these 5 workflows".

Optimized User Interface (UI)

We have implemented a leaner user interface (UI) that displays only the workflows and journeys that have demonstrably triggered ABT events. This targeted view keeps the experience leaner, prevents confusion during source selection, and focuses the user on active campaigns.