Working with Samples 

Use

Samples are used in the Segment Builder to help facilitate faster modeling of profiles, especially where large customer databases are concerned. Each sample is effectively a target group containing a certain number (either an absolute number or a percentage) of the total number of business partners on a database. These business partners are read from the business partner table BUT000. Each sample that you create belongs to a profile set of the segment category Sample.

Integration

The sampling transaction is integrated with:

·        The Segment Builder.
If you want to work with samples, then in the Segment Builder, you choose Extras ® Settings and then select the profile set and the relevant sample to be used. The number of "hits" displayed when modeling profiles is then an extrapolated figure based on the sample used. For more, information see Samples and Profile Selection.

·        The Business Information Warehouse (BW)
To enable high-performance extraction of BW data for target group creation, samples used in the CRM Segment Builder also need to be available in BW. Samples are therefore extracted as business partner hierarchies from CRM to BW. These hierarchies may then be used to build aggregates specifically for this sample.

Prerequisites

SAP supplies a range of sampling rules as standard. These rules can be displayed in Customizing under Customer Relationship Management ® Marketing ® Segment Builder ® Configure Rules for Building Samples and Target Group Processing. Where required, you can also add new rules here.

Features

Samples can be created or changed either immediately "online", or per background job.  For example, you could specify that for a sample that uses a percentage-based rule, the sample should be updated weekly.  The status of batch jobs for any given sample can be checked by choosing Samples ® Display Jobs for Sample.

Activities

Creating a sample

...

       1.      From Customer Relationship Management, choose Marketing ® Segmentation of Business Partners ® Marketing Segments ® Maintain Samples for Segment Builder.

       2.      Choose Create Profile Set, enter a name for the profile set that is to contain the sample(s) and choose Execute.
The profile set is listed on the left-hand side of the screen.

       3.      Select the profile set and choose Samples ® Create Sample.

       4.      Specify a name for the sample to be created.

       5.      Specify the segment type.

       6.      Specify the rule number by which the sample is to be generated (that is, by which business partners are to be selected from the database).

       7.      Specify the size of the sample.

       8.      Specify whether the sample is to be created immediately (online) or to be scheduled per background job.

To create a new sample for a profile set, right mouse-click on the relevant profile set in the list and choose Create New Sample.

Checking a sample

To ensure that a sample has been created correctly, you need to check the following database tables:

·        CRMD_MKTTG_TG_T (text table)

·        CRMD_MKTTG_TG_H (header table)

·        CRMD_MKTTG_TG_I (item table, that is, the list of business partners in the sample)

·        CRMD_MKTTG_TG_M (additional data such as the rule used to create sample, sample size, job number, and so on).