An Oracle White Paper
March 2011
Delivering a Unique Online Experience for
Segments, Regions, and Brands:
Knowing When to Use Personalization,
Microsites, and Independent Sites
Delivering a Unique Online Experience for Segments, Regions, and Brands
Introduction
Managing a world-class Web presence requires balancing a demanding set of requirements.
You need to ensure that the right experience is delivered to each customer across different
segments, for many brands, in a global market. You are balancing the core imperatives of
stability, performance, and security against the business’s need to market many brands
internationally and respond quickly to a changing customer and competitive landscape. You
serve many stakeholders that have competing interests beyond the business team’s needs,
including regulatory requirements, financial pressure to deliver efficient services, and the
needs of the technology groups that must deliver the solutions on time and at a reasonable
total cost of ownership.
Oracle offers a variety of industry-leading tools to address these challenges and turn your
online presence into a powerful channel that strengthens your brand, increases your sales,
and improves customer loyalty. To make the most of Oracle’s powerful capabilities, there are
many different scenarios to consider. Site structures can range across a wide spectrum, from a
single site supporting multiple experiences to a variety of sites running on a shared storefront,
all the way to completely independent sites. Each configuration has its place, and there are
factors to consider to make the best use of a given structure, whether it be personalized
pages, multisites, or independent sites.
This white paper discusses a range of site implementation and design options, recommending best
practices and critical factors you should consider in delivering a unique and effective online
experience that meets all your customers’ and stakeholders’ needs.
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Delivering a Unique Online Experience for Segments, Regions, and Brands
Serve Diverse Audiences with Personalized Content
In the Web’s infancy, online sites provided basic information that changed infrequently. As the internet
grew, content became richer and expanded to cover more topics. Now, site visitors expect to easily and
quickly find whatever information they need. There are numerous commerce studies that emphasize
the importance of delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time; the payoffs in
doing this right—and the penalties in failing to address this need—are large.
Addressing Different Visitor Segments
One of the most common challenges a site manager faces is the need to address the specific needs of
each visitor, particularly when there are very large differences among the types of users accessing a
given site. Users with similar needs can be organized into different segments. These segments represent
distinct groups that have different content requirements across a variety of dimensions.
•
Classical market segments. You can use marketing segments defined in external systems or, in the
case of an Oracle site, dynamically assigned segments for your online site. These segments typically
take into account demographics and buying behavior, such as price-sensitive bargain shoppers or
leading-edge trendsetters interested in the newest products and services. You can also use online
behavior such as whether shoppers are surgical shoppers or browsers, leveraging this information to
personalize content and/or create “microsites” to align with marketing campaigns.
•
Product knowledge. Knowing that a visitor is a returning customer allows you to avoid overly
broad marketing messages and use targeted content. For example, an equipment site might ensure
that returning customers see information about consumable refills or service offerings, while a
consumer electronics retailer might show different product information to customers with HDTV
from what they show anonymous shoppers or return customers known to have standard TV.
•
Geography and language. There can be regional variations in preference, as well as different
market conditions or even legislation that changes depending on the region that a customer lives in.
Many sites use locale, zip code, or other location information to determine the appropriate (and even
permissible) offers and products that a visitor sees. For example, apparel sites can offer golf attire in
Florida in the winter instead of the coats, hats, and gloves they would promote in the northeast.
•
Business relationships and roles. Strategic accounts or business customers may each require a
unique customer experience with personalized catalogs, custom pricing, and unique business
processes. You may want to promote selected products and offers to a high-value division with
unique needs inside a larger customer organization, or change the content based on the visitor’s
business role at the organization.
•
Site interaction. There are meaningful distinctions in how a visitor should be treated based on what
actions they take on your site. Someone registering for the first time might receive an initial
promotion and see welcome information or other content likely to be most relevant to a newcomer.
A high-value customer may reveal himself by searching for and browsing specific products, filling up
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Delivering a Unique Online Experience for Segments, Regions, and Brands
a cart beyond a certain value, or even through his prior purchase behavior. These and other
observable actions can identify groups that have predictable needs.
These are just a few of the many segmentation methods a modern e-commerce site should properly
handle with targeted content as a routine part of site operation. The complexity of delivering relevant
content across the most important segments you serve is unmanageable with static pages and
content—you must use more-advanced technology to address this requirement.
Dynamic Content and Personalization Simplify Targeted Content Delivery
Dynamic Web content allows you to assemble the content for Web pages on demand, permitting you
to manage a great deal of content and easily display it when appropriate. This should be a standard
capability of any leading e-commerce package, and it represents a critical component to keep in mind
when addressing the content needs of different visitors. However, this foundation is not enough to
efficiently deliver the right experience to each visitor.
Personalization extends the concept of dynamic content by tailoring the Web page to the interests of
the visitor based on their information. The information used to alter pages can vary widely. If a user
logs in or you are able to retrieve a browser cookie that identifies a visitor as a known customer, you
can use detailed purchase history, stated preferences, assignment in one or more groups via formal
segmentation analysis, and other customer data to provide very specific content likely to be highly
interesting to the customer.
Even if the visitor is anonymous, there are still many cues you can use to determine content they will
probably enjoy. For example, the browser reports language and other settings that can be useful to you.
A referring URL may provide valuable insight into content likely to appeal to the visitor. The visitor’s
physical location can be estimated from their IP address. Search terms and the visitor’s navigation path
provide insight into their intentions. When you detect language settings that do not match your default,
you can automatically switch to content stored in that language. You can also alter the kind of
information presented if the language is also an indicator likely to predict other meaningful
preferences. Thus, even an apparently “anonymous” visitor will tell you a great deal about themselves
through their actions. You can use all this information to select in real time the information you display
to ensure its relevancy to that visitor.
Both dynamic content delivery and personalization are at the center of an effective online experience
and, as such, should be an integral part of your e-commerce platform. Yet there are significant
variations in the methods, and effectiveness, of different vendor solutions. For example, even some
widely adopted solutions have difficulty personalizing content automatically. These solutions force a
company to fall back on techniques like creating additional sites (such as microsites) simply to permit
delivery of the right content for different visitor groups.
Oracle Personalization with Segments, Targeters, and Scenarios
Oracle ATG Web Commerce is designed from the ground up to deliver a personalized experience for
every type of visitor your site encounters. Individual user accounts are grouped into one or more
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Delivering a Unique Online Experience for Segments, Regions, and Brands
segments, a datatype analogous to the conceptual segment that is a key building block for the entire site.
As a collection of user accounts, the segmentation feature of Oracle ATG Web Commerce allows
easy mapping of content, promotions, and other actions to a group of individuals sharing some
meaningful attribute(s). Two mechanisms perform the actual mapping function that delivers the
personalized experience.
Content targeters are pre-established rules set up by the business, which are evaluated when a page is
requested. The page is a form that will be filled with dynamic data: targeters select content based on a
segment (or other criteria) and make that information available to fill slots on the page as it is
rendered for a given visitor. For example, a vendor may display special content and new offerings to a
customer believed to be an early adopter. Another possibility is to present a special promotion to highvalue customers.
Even more-powerful personalization is enabled by the use of scenarios, an event-driven rules feature that
can be used to create complex interactions based on user actions, segments, and other factors. A
detailed discussion of scenarios and related functionality is beyond the scope of this white paper, but
one example of the sophisticated targeting that scenarios enable is a multistage campaign where
personalized content is sent via e-mail, and landing page content and promotions change based on
what link was used or which user follows the link. Through the entire campaign, the scenario
automatically acts based on the specific identity and segment(s) involved, and the user actions that take
place as the scenario unfolds.
Multisite Support
Personalization is the right technology to address user segmentation across a wide variety of
differences, and is a foundation for any site. In order to serve diverse business needs such as multiple
brands sold in different regions internationally, however, it often makes sense for a site to have its own
unique existence even though it may be displayed by the same server hardware and software
infrastructure. An e-commerce multisite implementation is any group of shared server assets used to
host two or more distinct sites.
A Definition of Site
The concept of multisites begs the question of what it means to be a site. It is easy to consider a Web
address or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) as a defining attribute. However, most sites have multiple
URLs that resolve to the same Web content. For example, www.nike.com and www.justdoit.com will
both bring up Nike’s primary U.S. Website. For this white paper, site is a term that means a collection
of Web pages with a unifying theme or message, typically addressed via a primary URL.
Based on this definition, personalized content is generally not considered a site, but online
representations for two distinct brands, or a storefront displayed with unique presentations in different
countries, are sites.
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Delivering a Unique Online Experience for Segments, Regions, and Brands
One More Site Term: Microsites
One common multisite variant that has recently grown in popularity is the microsite. The Wikipedia
definition captures some of the most widely accepted aspects of a microsite:
A microsite, also known as a minisite or Weblet, is an internet Web design term referring to an individual Web page or cluster of
pages that are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary Website. The microsite's main landing page most likely
has its own URL.
The defining characteristic here is the fact that such a site has its own message (as a standalone set of
pages, typically employing its own URL and search engine optimization) that supplements a main site.
This highlights the main value of a microsite: its ability to present focused content beyond that
normally displayed on the primary site, and to draw customer attention (directly and via search engines)
to a specific topic.
Microsites can be temporary, such as a short-term promotion (for example, a site created during a
major sporting event sponsorship) or a seasonal site, or long term, emphasizing a specific brand or
focusing on a particular segment inside a larger site. All have value in drawing attention to a specific
topic that a business wants to highlight. In a sense, a well-defined microsite is basically a targeted sales
pitch or advertisement designed to draw customers to content they want to see. It can encourage
word-of-mouth and pass-along exposure and can sometimes support a community or network within a
target niche.
Common Multisite Examples
There are a number of cases where a multisite implementation makes sense. Here are some of the most
common examples:
•
Significant short-term initiatives or events. Many vendors experience significant seasonal
variation in customer interests that should trigger specific content that goes beyond the normal site
offerings. Similarly, a major campaign is best served by dedicating a site to supporting that effort.
This is a perfect example of where a microsite is most effective: much or even all of the look and
feel, content, order management, and other site elements are inherited from the larger site. But a new
URL is created, and content is search engine optimized for the initiative the site supports.
•
Brand extension or boutique stores. Larger retailers often create sites dedicated to a specific
brand—their own or a partner’s—that serve a function similar to an end-cap in a physical store: it
concentrates customer attention and product offerings on a brand the merchant wants to highlight.
•
Affiliated stores. A main site may have several affiliated sites that appear to be standalone
organizations but are actually all part of the same merchant. An example might be a clothing retailer
that sets up another storefront devoted to their children’s clothing line. Profiles, checkout, and most
site assets are shared, but the look and feel and the site URL may differ from those of the main site.
•
Unaffiliated stores or brands. When a common parent company owns two or more properties that
maintain separate identities despite that common ownership, it is still most efficient to share
substantial parts of the e-commerce infrastructure. Large consumer products companies often fit
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Delivering a Unique Online Experience for Segments, Regions, and Brands
into this model: each brand has its own online presence and business team, and the shopping cart
and checkout process is usually separate, but much of the remaining online infrastructure is shared
across the sites.
•
International stores. In today’s global economy, an online presence is often needed that is specific
to the different countries where the merchant operates—often including specific staff that tailor the
overall messages and content for their local market. It is frequently the case that payment methods,
order management, and fulfillment are different for each country, and there are usually multiple
languages offered for each country store. Some retailers will redirect shoppers to a specific store
associated with the country they are browsing from, to ensure compliance with local and
international regulations.
•
Multitenant sites. This is a less-common model where a single vendor maintains a common
infrastructure for completely different customers. In this model, each site is a completely different
business with its own content, pages, style, and so on, but the underlying infrastructure is designed
to give each site its own existence in the shared infrastructure.
Best Practices Using Microsites
The content within a microsite must be relevant to the topic the site emphasizes, and it should be
optimized for search engine rankings. This can be accomplished by putting the keywords in the URL
and/or other Web page elements rated highly by the search engine crawlers. Look and feel can—and in
many cases should—be different from that of the main site to clearly differentiate it from the main site.
The relationship to the main site may be very clear, as in the case of a seasonal promotion, or
completely hidden from the customers, as in the case of a brand that a merchandiser wants to establish
independently of the main site or other brands. Where there are meaningful associations between the
sites, the two sites should cross-sell and cross-promote each other, linking products and user profiles
to ensure that the visitor sees the most-relevant content from either site at any given time. It is also
beneficial to maintain common interface features such as site navigation, search, and checkout process
to minimize the development time for these sites.
Multisite Implementations
Multiple sites, whether they are microsites or some other variant, are easily implemented with Oracle
technology. The most common approach is to create a new set of pages and style sheets, possibly
establishing one or more subcatalog(s) depending on the nature of the different sites, and link a
separate URL for the new home page. Customer profile information is often shared, although it may
be necessary to associate different site access with each profile, depending on business needs.
Hardware, software, and even major business processes such as order management and fulfillment
interfaces may be shared. In cases where the different sites have less or no natural relationship other
than the fact that they are owned by the same organization, there is naturally less sharing of site assets
and underlying infrastructure. For example, a consumer products manufacturer may put up a site for
each brand it manages, along with a corporate site and one or more affinity sites for various customer
segments. There may be a very different look and feel across the sites, and it may make sense to share
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Delivering a Unique Online Experience for Segments, Regions, and Brands
only a small amount of the content or none at all. Another case might be for international stores,
where the sites are related but there are substantial variations among the different geographies that
could require different profiles, payment options, order management and fulfillment interfaces, and
other elements. These sites would still share hardware and the underlying software engine.
Oracle easily handles all these cases. A single Oracle implementation leveraging common hardware and
software can share or segregate as many Web assets as desired. You have the flexibility to control the
degree of component reuse that makes sense in each case.
Figure 1 shows a sample Oracle multisite implementation running on a common set of hardware and
software. This configuration might be used by multibrand merchants who would like to share customer
profile database and login credentials across several branded sites, and yet offer a differently branded
experience to their consumers in terms of the pages, products, and content they see. Page templates
with similar layouts are shared and augmented with site-specific pages. A visitor sees content selected
dynamically based on his segment and the site he visits. Each branded site may reference a specific
product catalog, such that each “store” displays only the correct products for that brand. Different
languages may be defined for each branded site, and price lists exist for each variant supported.
Figure 1. A sample multisite implementation for a multibrand merchant uses shared customer information across
different branded sites, and yet offers a differently branded content experience to the visitor.
Independent Sites
Although most business needs are well served by a multisite implementation, some factors may lead
managers to use independent sites that do not share one or more of the resources common to a
multisite implementation. This always implies some degree of cost and potentially management
complexity, so it should be balanced against the benefits of dedicated instances. Business scenarios
where independent sites might make sense include the following:
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Delivering a Unique Online Experience for Segments, Regions, and Brands
•
Sites with volatile or unpredictable demand, where peak usage might adversely affect other
sites. If a site that would otherwise be a candidate for a multisite implementation has very high
demand, it may make sense to provision it on a dedicated set of hardware to ensure adequate
capacity. This helps to prevent unexpected peaks in demand from being felt across all sites,
potentially harming responsiveness of any site in the group. For example, an Olympics microsite
might be deployed outside the core commerce cluster until traffic patterns and their relation to
existing peaks are fully understood and total capacity is fully capable of handling combined load.
•
Organizational requirements. Large companies have different organizational needs. In some
cases, a central multisite deployment across all brands may be feasible. For example, a large financial
software company runs three highly distinct product lines (supporting marketing, sales, support, and
customer portal access) from a single clustered Oracle environment, even though each business unit
is its own organization. But another multinational consumer product manufacturer finds it more
convenient to permit each brand general manager to operate sites that its organizations run
independently.
•
Sites with highly differentiated requirements. If a site has major differences with an existing
multisite deployment, the benefit of sharing assets may be outweighed by the extra work required to
accommodate all the requirements on a single code base. For example, an international sports
clothing manufacturer implemented a major U.S. multisite on shared assets but chose to create a
second multisite operation in Europe because the order management, fulfillment, and
internationalization requirements were so different from the U.S. sites that it did not make sense to
combine the new sites with the existing U.S. operation.
In all these cases, the unique site needs may be best met with independent site implementations.
Despite this, there are still things you can do to maximize the efficiency and stability of your collection
of online sites. Some recommendations to get the best results include
•
Assess the requirements of each site carefully to determine if it can fit into existing deployments
before breaking out into independent sites.
•
Ensure that organizational and control questions are resolved up front, and that the responsibilities
between central IT and the different business groups are clearly defined and articulated.
•
Wherever possible, use a common set of software components and ensure that each runs the same
revision level. This is particularly important for the commerce software, Java development
environment, and middleware. Even a small difference across these components may cause
compatibility issues and cost you time and effort to resolve.
•
Build enterprisewide customizations that make sense across the majority of independent sites, and
manage this as a central site “template” that each independent site leverages as a starting point for its
modifications.
•
Share what you can. Even if each site has its own customer profile, you can extract all the customer
information and perform offline analytics across your sites to gain the best understanding of your
customers—and obtain actionable information to share with each site owner. Or perhaps a common
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Delivering a Unique Online Experience for Segments, Regions, and Brands
cluster of servers can be used to run the different sites. The requirement that drove a need for
independent sites may still permit significant sharing in other ways.
•
Consider multisites within the independent sites. Even though one or more sites may have
incompatibilities with existing sites, you may be able to group some of these together in their own
multisite deployment.
Summary of Technology Recommendations
The table below lists common business needs, and the technology choices and key considerations to
address each need.
SUMMARY OF TECHNOLOGICAL RECOMMENDATIONS
BUSINESS NEED
TECHNOLOGY RECOMMENDATIONS
Different segments on a single site
• Use built-in personalization technology to avoid cost and complexity.
Sub-brands or temporary
• Use multisite functionality.
promotions of significant scope
• Consider using microsites.
• Share or isolate assets across the site implementations depending on how related
the customer experience is across the sites.
Sites with very different
• Use independent sites.
requirements or organizational
• Ensure a common base deployment and share assets where possible.
differences that preclude easy
sharing of resources
Conclusion
IT managers face considerable business requirements and pressure to get the most functionality from
each dollar. The e-commerce world is no exception. There is a spectrum of options to consider, from
the power of personalization on a single site, through multisite options, to independent sites.
With your e-commerce site on Oracle, you gain the benefit of powerful tools designed to meet these
challenges. Personalized content is part of a basic site implementation, letting you show the right
content to each user segment regardless of what dimension differentiates one customer from the next.
Multisite implementations permit you to put two or more different sites on one set of servers, and
share as much or as little of the Web assets as makes sense. Even when you need to run completely
independent sites, Oracle gives you the flexibility to provide a base layer of customizations that will
make it easier and faster to deploy each of the standalone sites. This enables you to balance the
competing demands while still serving all unique needs effectively—across the spectrum of different
implementations. Oracle gives you the right tools for making your online presence a powerful channel
that improves your brand, increases your sales and customer loyalty, and drives your business success.
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Delivering a Unique Online Experience
Copyright © 2008, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and
for Segments, Regions, and Brands
the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other
March 2011
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