Account Engagement Automation Match Type Overview

When you create Automation Rules, Dynamic Lists, and Segmentation Rules, you’ll have to select a match type and criteria as you build your rules. Account Engagement has two match types: Match Any and Match All.

• Match Any will return results that match any of the criteria -- it will match this OR that.
• Match All will return results that match ALL of the criteria -- it will match this AND that.

Match Any with Is Operator

Let's say that you want to match any prospects assigned to Dane Hall or Regina Smith. You use the "is" operator, and your rule criteria would look like this:

Match type = Match any

This rule would return any prospects assigned to Dane Hall, and any prospects assigned to Regina Smith. This sounds simple enough until you start building more complicated rules or use negative criteria.
 

Match Any with Isn't Operator

Let's say you want to match any prospects who aren't assigned to Dane Hall or Regina Smith. You want only those prospects whose assigned user is someone other than Dane or Regina. So you use the isn't operator and set up your rule like this: 

Match type = Match any

When you run your rule, it returns all prospects assigned to Dane Hall, all prospects assigned to Regina Smith, and all prospects assigned to all other users - in other words, not what you wanted. So what went wrong? When you pair the isn't operator with Match Any anything that matches any of the criteria will match the rule.

• Prospects assigned to Regina Smith aren't assigned to Dane Hall, so they match the rule.
• Prospects assigned to Dane Hall aren't assigned to Regina Smith, so they match the rule.
• Prospects assigned to other users aren't assigned to Regina Smith or Dane Hall, so they also match.

Instead, you'll likely want to use a rule type of "Match All" with your "isn't" operator

Match All with Isn't Operator

If you want to exclude all prospects assigned to Regina Smith and Dane Hall, you'd need to set up your rule with the Match All operator. Your rule would look like this:

Match type = Match all

This rule returns only those prospects assigned to users who aren't Regina Smith or Dane Hall. So why did this work the way we originally wanted it to? The answer is simple -- our prospects had to match all of the criteria. Account Engagement ran through all of the prospects and made sure that it only returned the ones with assigned users other than Regina Smith and Dane Hall.

It might help if we use a different example: Let's pretend we have wooden shapes of different colors. We have triangles, circles, and squares that are red, green, or blue. The table below shows the results that you'd get with different rule setups.