It’s very easy to search for the presence of an action, its sometimes not so easy to determine the logic when searching for the absence of a particular action or contact attribute when considering a number of different parameters at the same time.
Introducing NOT, or group negation, the NOT function will allow you to essentially invert the query to find people that do not match specific attributes, while matching others. Making it much easier to find contacts that did not match some criteria.
Finding contacts which have not done a specific activity without using NOT
Let’s take a simple example of looking for a contact that clicked a link in specific email campaign, which contained the phrase ‘Force24” and is in the marketing list “Force24 Dist Test List”
This is a very simple example, so let's break this into a group, this way we may wish to add more items to exclude
Let’s assume we take the first example and switch it around, and we want to find all contacts that clicked a link in specific email campaign, which didn’t contain the phrase ‘Force24” and is not in the marketing list “Force24 Dist Test List”
The solution is to negate both rules. This will convert the expression into a ‘has not clicked a url containing the specified url in the selected campaign’
Finding contacts which have not done a specific activity using NOT
We have made a significant improvement, making it a lot easier to find contacts who have not done something.
An entire group can now be negated by checking the ‘NOT’ checkbox close to the condition.
This will have the same effect as the double negated operators had before.
The new Group Negation is very helpful when trying to find contacts which have not done something within a specific period of time.
The example below shows where the query will return all contact from the list which have not clicked a URL containing ‘Force24’ in the past 10 days.
Having the ability to negate a group to express this intent makes the previous behavior redundant so we have removed it.
This means the query presented using a single group and "doesn't contain" will not apply the negation to the entire object but to the individual components. This translates to asking for ‘contacts who have clicked a campaign but the URL did not contain 'force24' and the campaign was not the selected campaign’. They still must have clicked a different campaign. Notice how this is different from ‘have not clicked that specific campaign’.
Of course, by removing this behavior means that your old queries will start yielding wrong results. Don’t worry, we’ve got that covered behind the scenes.
To make it even clearer, whenever you open a query using the old behavior, you’ll receive a message and the query will automatically be updated to preserve the results.
If you get stuck, feel free to contact your Force24 Account Manager and they will be able to talk you through.