Using the Formation app is easy when you understand what everything means. Many of our user guides have tooltips to help you, but here's a quick glossary of some words we get asked most frequently about:

A, B, C, D

Achieved: One of the types of messages or information you can set up to receive through connectors, an achieved message indicates a customer met a goal in the offer, possibly one that qualifies for a reward.
Activated: One of the types of messages or information you can set up to receive through connectors, an activated message indicates an offer activation event has been completed by a customer.
Attributable Transactions: Transactions that qualify for a reward based on the offer configuration.
Attributes: The data (such as behavioral or demographic data) used to identify and group your customers into audience segments are called attributes. Audience attributes help with initial offers by guiding which ones are shown to which customers; machine learning helps personalize the offer experience further once additional data is gathered at the individual level as each customer interacts with offer campaigns.
Average Net Spend per Customer: Total net spend/total number of offers.
Average Total Spend per Customer: Customer spend/offers.
Business rules: The business rules you set for your organization include campaign guardrails, as well as global minimum/maximum spend and minimum/maximum reward settings. The business rules can be configured from the Organization Settings page under Your Organization.
Completed: 1) Completed campaigns are campaigns that have successfully finished running and can be used as a template for new campaigns to improve optimization and personalization. 2) One of the types of messages or information you can set up to receive through connectors, a completed message indicates a customer has achieved all goals in the offer.
Completion Rate: The amount of customers who opted-in to/activated offers.
Connectors: Connectors are a way of defining how you want to receive information from Formation. A discrete set of events you can receive on connectors include notifications (set a generic notification time and a message to go with it), activated, achieved (completed some goal in the offer that may/may not issue a reward for a goal), completed (completed or achieved all goals in offer), reward (meets all goals in an offer), etc. Connectors allow you to opt-in to Formation messages to wherever you tell us to send it (connector) for each of those events types. All connector events come with the full status of the offer, and some events may overlap.
Consumer Spend: The total amount that customers have spent during the campaign window.
Draft: Campaigns can be saved as drafts at any point in the creation process before they are submitted for review. However, all campaigns have to be saved as drafts before you can add offers to them. Campaign drafts can be edited; campaigns submitted for review cannot be edited.

E, F, G, H

Fixed: Fixed offers provide the same offer to all customers in the campaign's target audience. They are configured manually, but they require less initial input to set up and can use default values to run. Fixed offers are usually best for the first time an offer is run or when you don't have sufficient audience data yet.
Global Reward Minimum/Maximum: The absolute min and max reward amounts that will be given away.
Global Spend Minimum/Maximum: The absolute min and max spend amounts that will be included in offers.
Guardrails: Campaign guardrails include a minimum spend limit and a maximum reward limit for each campaign. The minimum spend limit ensures that no offers are sent out that ask a customer to spend less than the value you set. The maximum reward limit ensures that no offers are sent out that reward customers more than the value you set.

I, J, K, L

Launched: When an offer is available and shared with customers, the status of that offer is launched.

M, N, O, P

Net Consumer Spend: Total customer spend minus incentive costs.
Objective: A campaign objective determines what kind of machine learning algorithms are used for optimization. Your primary goal for a campaign will help you choose which objective is best for it.
Offer Assignment Review: The campaign approval process, known as the Offer Assignment Review, involves taking the configured guardrails from each offer in a given campaign, generating the output of offer assignment for each consumer targeted by those offers, and then presenting that output to you for review and approve to launch.
Optimization: There are a few different meanings for optimization related to what is offered through the Formation app. 1) Optimization can refer to the calculation of what offers are ideally suited to a target audience. Optimization begins with alternating which offers are presented to an audience over the course of a new campaign until enough data is aggregated to determine which offers produce the best results with that audience. 2) Optimization can also refer to the improvement of personalization through aggregated data or the way machine learning improves individual offers at a 1:1 level for your customers as a campaign or offer is completed and used again over time.
Personalization: Personalization is a result of using completed, optimized campaigns and offers to continue expanding on the data set available for a target audience. Each time a campaign or offer is used again, the data set for the target audience gets more complex and complete, making it possible for machine learning to identify and present individual offers best matched to individual customers.
Personalized: Personalized offers use machine learning to generate custom offers best suited for each individual customer. Personalized offers improve each time they are run by making adjustments based on the user’s purchase or engagement data. Personalized offers are especially effective when using existing offers as part of your campaign.
Progressed: When a customer completes one or more goals in an offer, the status of that offer is progressed.

Q, R, S, T

Review: Campaigns that have been submitted for review can be launched after final configuration and approval.
Reward: One of the types of messages or information you can set up to receive through connectors, a reward message indicates a customer achieved one or all goals in an offer, qualifying them for a promised incentive.
Reward interval: The reward interval is by how much the reward amount can change. For example, if a reward's settings include a reward interval of 5 points, a minimum reward of 10 points, and a maximum reward of 25 points, that means a customer can get 10 points, 15 points, 20 points, or 25 points.
Spend interval: The spend interval is by how much the spend requirement amount can change to qualify for a different reward interval. For example, if the spend interval is $5, then your customer can spend $10 and get a reward, or they can spend $15 and get a reward, but if they spend $12, they qualify for the same reward as if they only spent $10.
Tags: Tags are a way of naming or identifying specific groups or categories of data. They are optional. Tags can help with campaign tracking or tagging specific creative output like an email template ID, workflow ID, or campaign trigger ID, which makes it possible to map a customer offer from Formation to all your other systems.
Transformations: Transformations allow you to convert or manipulate the data you receive through connectors. For example, transformations can be set up to convert data from JSON to XML; remap a parameter; and add/remove headers to data types. Transformations can only be applied to connectors with the same payload type.

U, V, W, X, Y, Z