10 Understanding WebCenter Sites: Visitor Services

Visitors to your website have their profile and activity information spread across different systems you own. For example, a visitor may have recently viewed an Eloqua email, downloaded a CRM white paper, or logged in via Facebook or Google. Each online activity collects a different set of visitor attributes. As marketers, you can use this profile and activity information for targeting, testing and analyzing your visitors.

A unique visitor ID and aggregation templates link visitor attributes from different sources to enrich them with the data available in other repositories. You and developers can collaborate to create as many aggregate templates as you need, choosing the attributes you want from different visitor profiles. The enriched data that your aggregate templates collect helps you to create uniquely relevant content for your visitors on WebCenter Sites delivered pages.

Visitor Services Tasks for Marketers and Developers

For more information about Visitor Services from a developer perspective, see Developing WebCenter Sites: Visitor Services in Developing with Oracle WebCenter Sites.

• Developers implement and configure the identity provider for the single sign-on system (SSO) to authenticate site visitors to Visitor Services.

  Visitor Services ships with an Oracle Access Manager identity provider for integration with Oracle Access Manager.

• Developers create and configure access providers to determine which applications can access information from visitor profiles.

  An access provider authenticates REST calls made between Visitor Services and WebCenter Sites. Oracle recommends using an access provider to maintain a secure connection between Visitor Services and WebCenter Sites. Visitor Services ships with a basic LDAP access provider for authentication against an LDAP directory.

• Marketers provide input into the profile providers used to compile and enrich visitor profiles.

  A profile provider allows a visitor identity to be associated with a visitor profile. Developers implement and configure profile providers for specified repositories in Visitor Services, and write enrichment rules to collect visitor information from all profile providers. Visitor Services ships with an Eloqua profile provider for integration with the Eloqua Cloud Marketing Service, and an Oracle Access Manager profile provider for integration with Oracle Access Manager.

• Marketers provide input into the aggregate templates that determine which data, based on visitor profiles, is returned to the site visitors.

  An aggregation template links visitor profiles and lets you combine information from different visitor profiles. Developers write aggregation rules and templates that combine profile information from visitor profiles.

• Marketers provide input into how visitor profiles from Visitor Services are requested and used.

  To make use of visitor profiles, WebCenter Sites components must request them via Visitor Services APIs (REST, JAVA, or JavaScript) during runtime. Visitor Services comes integrated with:

  • Engage: Use visitor profiles to determine Engage segments and provide recommendations. For example, a marketer might use visitor profile attributes such as age and income to create segments and deliver recommendations. For anonymous visitors, create segments for them based on attributes such as device used to access the site, time zone, locale, browser, referrer (Facebook, Twitter, Bing), or IP address. See Working with Engage Assets.

  • A/B Testing: Use visitor profiles for determining segments, then use the segments to target those visitors for A/B tests. See Working with A/B Testing.