Campaigns

Campaigns are a means of organizing and implementing sets of personalization behavior, within Web sites or as part of e-mail promotions. A useful analogy is an advertising campaign — targeting specific audiences with high priority information for a specified period of time. Campaigns achieve this by allowing you to preferentially display campaign-related content in the content spots of a Web site, or by sending directed e-mail with campaign-specific information to a group of e-mail recipients, or both. To accomplish such a goal, a campaign contains a set of rule-to-content spot mappings, start and stop dates, and optionally, e-mail promotions.

Users can create and manage campaigns through the Personalization Authoring Portlet. Just as with rules and resources, publish a completed campaign to the run-time environment for it to become active.

When a campaign is active in the run-time environment, its rule mappings take precedence over those in the Normal View. For example, a seasonal campaign might contain certain rule mappings that result in the display of special offers to a Web site visitor. A campaign can contain rule mappings for some or all of the content spots on a site.

An e-mail promotion is an e-mail message automatically sent to a defined list of recipients by an executing rule while its campaign is active. E-mail promotions can be sent once or repeatedly on regular intervals. The body of the e-mail message is derived from a file on the server, such as a text file, an HTML file, or even a JSP containing content spots for rules. This file can be actually be chosen from the authoring repository. The list of recipients can be predefined or can be derived dynamically from a rule.

It is possible to have multiple campaigns active simultaneously. When this happens, the priority settings of the active campaigns dictate which campaign's rule mapping will be used. The campaign with the highest priority 'wins' and its rule mappings are used. In the event that multiple active campaigns have the same priority setting, the rule mapping used for a given content spot is determined randomly according to the relative split ratios. E-mail promotions of overlapping active campaigns are not affected by the overlap in the way that content spots are; the e-mail promotions from all active campaigns are always sent.


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