The Activity Hierarchy

What is the activity hierarchy?

In Uptempo, you create activities to track the work, investments, and deliverables in your marketing plans.

The activity hierarchy defines how these activities work, and how they relate to one another. As an administrator, you set up your activity hierarchy by configuring three elements: activity types, activity type groups, and activity rules.

Activity types

Activity types are templates for different kinds of marketing activities. Activity types can represent both various marketing tactics (such as ads, emails, events, etc.) as well as an activity's position in the hierarchical structure of your plan (for example, campaigns, plans, or tactics). Each activity type is associated with a set of attributes, which specify what kinds of data are recorded on each activity.

Activity type groups

If you have a number of similar activity types, you can collect them into activity type groups for easier management. For example, you might use an activity type group called Content Marketing to group activity types like Whitepapers, Infographics, Videos, Podcasts, etc. Like activity types, you can attach attributes to an activity type group: when you do this, all activity types within the group inherit the group's attributes, reducing configuration effort.

Activity rules

Activity rules define the structure of your activity hierarchy. They specify which activity types (or type groups) can be parents or children of other activity types (or type groups). For example, you might set up a rule that specifies that activities of the type group Campaigns must always be children of activities of the type Plan.

By creating activity types, organizing them into type groups, and setting rules to define their relationships, you can build an activity hierarchy that supports the way your organization plans, executes, and measures its marketing efforts.

How do I set up the activity hierarchy?

The basic process for setting up the activity hierarchy consists of three steps:

  1. Set up activity type groups to organize your activity types. This step is optional, but strongly recommended. To learn more, see Configuring Activity Type Groups.

  2. Set up activity types to outline the structure of your activity hierarchy and the specific tactics you want to track. To learn more, see Configuring Activity Types.

  3. Set up activity rules to define the relationships between your activity types (and type groups). To learn more, see Configuring Activity Rules.