WebCenter Sites: Engage enables you to design websites that gather information about your site visitors and customers, evaluate that information, and then use that information to personalize the product placements and promotional offerings that are displayed for each visitor. Engage is installed with WebCenter Sites. Engage adds features to WebCenter Sites that extend the XML and JSP object methods available for programming your e-commerce site.
This chapter contains the following sections:
With Engage, you use assets to do the following:
Collect visitor data using the Visitor Attribute, History Attribute, and History Definition assets
Use that visitor data to define visitor segments (using Segment assets)
Recommend products and content to visitors based on the segments they belong to (using Recommendation assets)
Run promotions that apply to all or specific segments (Promotion assets)
Developers and administrators create and manage the visitor data and underlying business logic, while marketers create and manage the Segment, Recommendation, and Promotion assets. As with any of the other Sites applications, you create and work with assets on the management site. Then, when assets are approved, you publish them to your delivery site.
Marketers and developers are expected to collaborate extensively to implement effective marketing efforts.
Segments are assets that categorize groups of visitors based on the visitor data that you are gathering about them. You build segments by determining which kinds of visitor data to use as filtering criteria and then setting the values that qualify or disqualify a visitor for the segment.
You use the "Segment Filtering" forms in Engage to categorize groups of visitors based on the visitor attributes, history attributes, and history definitions created by the developers.
Segments are the key to personalization with Engage. When visitors browse your site, the information they submit is used to qualify them for segment membership. When the site displays a page with a recommendation or promotion, Engage determines which segments a visitor belongs to and displays the product recommendations or promotional messages that are designated for those segments.
For detailed information on segments, see Chapter 18, "Grouping Visitors into Segments with Engage."
You create "Recommendation" assets and then configure them by rating assets based on their importance to the segments that you have created.
Recommendations are assets that determine which products or content should be featured or "recommended" on a site page. These assets are rules that are based on the segments the visitors qualify for, and, in some cases, relationships between the product or content assets.
Recommendations have templates. A recommendation returns a list of assets to its template when the template is rendered on a site page. The items in a list of recommended assets are rated according to their importance to the current visitor based on the segments that the visitor belongs to.
For detailed information on recommendations, see Chapter 19, "Creating and Configuring Recommendations with Engage."
Promotions are assets that define an offer of value (a discount) to the visitors based on the products that the visitor is buying and the segments that the visitor qualifies for. This value can be offered in several ways:
A discount off the purchase price of the promoted products
A discount off the entire value of the shopping cart
A discount off shipping charges
A combination discount: a shipping discount with a price or cart discount
Promotions use the same templates as recommendations. You decide which recommendation the promotion overrides, and Engage uses that recommendation's template to render the promotion on the site page.
For detailed information on segments, see Chapter 20, "Creating Promotions with Engage."