Campaign assets

Campaigns serve to organize your marketing efforts. Campaigns are typically created by a Marketing Manager. They are often associated with a certain set of objectives. For instance, a "Back to School" campaign may have an objective of increasing sales of children's clothes during the campaign.

The following diagram illustrates the campaign assets in the WebSphere Commerce Server:

D

Campaigns, and their associated assets are scoped to stores.

Within WebSphere Commerce, campaigns contain any number of Web activities, which define a condition. The Web activities generate targeted content for the customers, when the defined condition is evaluated to be true. The result is that a campaign is the high-level marketing element that organizes the activities. The following diagram depicts the Web activity information model.

D

Campaign activities are associated with a campaign that contains a collection of activities. As an example of this relationship, if an office supply store had a "Back to School" campaign, the activities would be responsible for lower-level actions, such as advertising a discount on pens, or suggesting lined paper to any customer who has registered and listed her occupation as a student.

Campaign activities are capable of displaying four types of dynamic content:

Suggestive selling content provides rule-based category and product recommendations, targeted at a specific customer audience, based on a customer's segment, and other customers' behaviors. The customer behaviors that a campaign can target include the total value of the shopping cart, the contents of the shopping cart, and the contents of the customer's purchase history.

Collaborative filtering-based recommendations also create product recommendations, but they use a different recommendation algorithm, which targets items based on customers' overall behavior, rather than predefined rules.

Awareness advertisements provide content targeted at a specific customer audience, based on the same criteria as those used for suggestive selling, but they are intended to be used to increase a customer's awareness about activities at the online store, highlight special offers, and to increase brand awareness. Awareness advertisements follow the content information model shown here:

D

Merchandising associations create up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, based on the static associations defined in the catalog. In order to create an activity of this type, a method of selecting the source product in the association must be defined, so that the proper source is used when the e-Marketing Spot is invoked, to return the target products. The method can select the source based on either the content of the current page, the contents of the shopping cart, or the contents of the shopper's purchase history, as sources of the association.

Activities can be incorporated into any page on the site. When the site is designed, special placeholders, called e-Marketing Spots, are placed on the site. When displayed to a customer, these placeholders are replaced by the specific targeted content. Target locations are assigned by scheduling activities to display in e-Marketing Spots in the desired locations.

Web activities contain a condition that determines when and to whom they are displayed. This condition is defined when the activity is created and can be changed during the lifetime of the activity to adjust the activity's visibility and the displayed content.

Web activities generate statistics about their use. These statistics can be viewed using the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator by Sellers, and Marketing Managers. The statistics illustrate an activity's clickthrough rate for each e-Marketing Spot where it is implemented. These statistics provide feedback on the effectiveness of the activity, as well as comparative success rates among the various locations in which it displays. Related reference