Note
A campaign is a marketing program that uses many communication vehicles to accomplish a specific result, such as increasing market share, introducing new products, or retaining customers. Commerce Server provides several different delivery mechanisms for your online campaigns. For example, you can create campaigns for advertisements, discounts, and direct mail, and you can use analysis features to target your campaigns to specific groups of users.
Using Campaigns in Web Site Management
Analyzing Campaign Effectiveness
Campaigns have been designed to enable you to work with your customers to maximize the effect of each campaign item. With Campaigns, you can:
Campaigns and the associated campaign items are grouped by customer. Customer information, such as billing address, is used for all campaigns created for that customer and for reporting purposes. You can view all your customers in alphabetical order in the Campaign Manager.
Campaigns are a grouping structure for campaign items. There are three types of campaign items: ads, discounts, and direct mail campaigns. Each campaign may have multiple campaign items. For example, a campaign to promote a new product may include three campaign items: an advertisement banner on the Home page, a personalized direct mail message announcing the new product, and a discount campaign item offering a 10 percent discount to users who purchase the product during the month of June.
All campaign items within one campaign have a common customer and date ranges. For example, in the travel section of a Newspaper site, an advertiser might request the delivery of 10,000 requests within a week to users from the Northwest. The advertiser might decide to run three different ads to fill those 10,000 requests and then see which one of the three ads creates the highest click rate. Each ad is a campaign item.
Campaign goaling is the process of specifying the number of ads to deliver (the goal) in a certain amount of time. You can goal by clicks on an ad or by requests for an ad. You can goal campaigns at the campaign level or at the ad level.
For example, say you perform goaling at the campaign level for a customer. The customer gives you two ads, and orders 25,000 ad requests. At the campaign level, one ad is set up to display 60 percent of the ad requests, and the other ad is to display 40 percent of the ad requests. If the customer changes the number of ad requests, for example, to 40,000, you do not have to manually change the number of times the ads are to display; they are still 60 percent and 40 percent.
You can switch between campaign level goaling and ad level goaling. For example, a customer orders two ad campaign items to run in even proportion for a quantity ordered of 1000 ad requests. You perform the following steps:
The quantity ordered for Ad 1 is 1000. The quantity ordered for Ad 2 is 500. The total quantity ordered is not visible in the Campaign Manager for ad goaled campaigns.
At this point you can edit the weights of each ad so that the weights are 3 and 1 and Commerce Server will calculate the new quantities, or figure out that the new paid weights would be 1125 and 375.
In a different situation, for example, after step two the customer wants the campaign run at a rate of 2 to1 and the third ad to also have weight of 1. If you add an ad to a campaign that has been converted from an ad level goaling to Campaign level goaling, and leave the weight of 1 without changing the paid weights of the other ads, the ad delivery will be skewed. You should reopen the Campaign Manager and assign new weights to all of the ads, and then verify the actually calculations.
You use the Reference Tables module in Business Desk to set the sizes of content that is displayed on your site, to manage the names of Page Groups, and to establish industry codes that you can use to prevent two ads from the same industry showing up on the same page at the same time. The properties in the Reference Table module ensure the consistency of advertising content across your site.
The content sizes in the reference tables are available when you select the size you want for your campaign item content. You can view, edit, and delete any of the predefined sizes, or you can create a new content size to fit your needs.
You can update your industry codes, for example, to include more than one beverage code, such as one for coffee and one for milk, so that ads for different types of beverages can appear on the same page. For example, it may be acceptable for an ad for coffee to compete with an ad for milk on the same page. You can set the level at which the industry conflict is monitored by controlling the number of entries in this table.
Commerce Server provides several popular industry codes for your use. The industry codes used in ads are validated through the Industry Codes section in the Reference Tables module. The industry codes in the reference tables are available when you select the industry code for a campaign item. You can view a list of all current industry codes, add new industry codes, edit industry codes, and delete industry codes from the Industry Code section in the Reference Tables module.
When you bill customers for displaying ads on your site, you can base the advertising rates by page group. For example, you can charge a premium for ads displayed on your home page, but less for ads displayed on other pages.
Note
Commerce Server supports two types of ads: paid ads and house ads.
House ads are critical to ensure the smooth delivery of your paid ads. House ads are also displayed when there are no paid ads eligible for the request. For example, a house ad would be served because all paid ads missed a required target.
House ads may also be used to sell leftover inventory at discounted prices. They may also be used if the ads on the site do not have specific delivery goals, but you want to have the ads run at specified weights.
In Commerce Server, ads are treated as having four parts:
Using Commerce Server, you can determine when an ad is displayed, where, and to whom. When you create an ad, you specify the following:
For house ads the weight is relative to all other house ads for all customers and all campaigns. For paid ads, the weight is relative to other paid ads in the same campaign. The weight of an individual campaign item is relative to the weight of all the other campaign items.
For example, assume you have four ads to sell paint, and you assign the weight as follows:
| Ad | Weight | Percentage of times served |
| Blue paint | 1 | 10 |
| Green paint | 2 | 20 |
| Red paint | 3 | 30 |
| Yellow paint | 4 | 40 |
| Total weight | 10 | 100 |
The total weight of all the ads is 10 (1+2+3+4 = 10). The Blue paint ad has a weight of 1 so it will be displayed once out of every ten ad requests.
For paid ads, the weight is the ratio of a single ad to the sum of all the campaign items for that campaign. For house ads, the weight is the sum of the weights of all other house ads in the campaign.
For ads that are goaled at the campaign item-level, weight is not used to determine the delivery of the ad. Instead, you directly specify the number of requests or clicks that should be served.
You create page groups using the Reference Tables module.
The Content Selection Framework (CSF) processes the variables that you specify for an ad: campaign goaling, exposure limit, schedule, weight, page groups, and target groups. Each time a user visits your site, it determines whether the ad is to be displayed.
The Content Selection Framework for advertising uses a formula called Need of Delivery (NOD) to initially score the advertisements based on how far behind schedule they are. This formula takes into account the total quantity of content to be delivered, and the length of time over which the quantity must be delivered. Need of Delivery is calculated for each ad request by the Content Selection Framework after it has processed the ad request. Need of Delivery is applied to paid ads only; it is not applied to house ads.
If you have several ads and want to know on what basis they are being displayed, contact your site developer. Commerce Server includes a tool named TraceScores that your site developer can use to trace the selection process. Use TraceScores to see exactly how the internal content decision process works.
If you plan to run many campaigns simultaneously on Commerce Server, using the same target group and the same priority, the Content Selection Framework selects which ad to display based on the ad type. If the ads are both house ads, an ad is selected at random using the weights as relative probabilities. If the ads are paid ads, an ad is selected for display based on the Need Of Delivery Calculation (which takes into account the start date, end date, number of events scheduled, and number of events served to date). One of the score modifications is History Penalty, which applies a decreasing penalty to ads recently seen by a user. When the History Penalty is enabled, ads are "rotated" over time.
You can apply discounts to any item in your catalog. You can apply a discount against an entire order (an order-level discount), or you can apply it against specific items in the order (an item-level discount).
If you apply a discount to an entire order, the discount is applied to each item individually. Only one discount can be applied to a quantity one of an order line item. Two discounts cannot be applied to the same quantity one of an item.
You can use Commerce Server to create and apply the following discount types:
You can apply these discounts to individual products, all the products in a category, or you can create an expression to discount products that meet specific criteria, for example, offer a 10 percent discount on all items from a certain manufacturer.
For example, you can create discounts to apply in the following situations:
You cannot apply multiple discounts to one product simultaneously. A customer can enjoy only one discount per product, or a condition can be applied toward only one discount. After a product as been used as a condition or an award for one discount, it cannot be used as a condition or award for another discount.
A discount campaign item has the following components: discount properties, discount definition, discount target, and discount display. You use the Campaign Manager to define these components when you create the discount.
You give every discount a priority that determines when it should be applied relative to other discounts that may also apply to a product. (Unlike ads, discounts do not use weights to determine when they are delivered.) For example, you create three discounts and assign each a priority as shown in the following table.
| Discount | Priority |
| 10 percent discount for telephones | 10 |
| 30 percent discount for premier users who buy telephones, radios, or computers. | 20 |
| Free shipping | 30 |
If a premier user shops your site and purchases a telephone, among other items, only the 10 percent discount would be applied to the telephone. Neither the 30 percent discount nor the free shipping discount would apply to the telephone purchase because those discounts are a lower priority.
If two discounts have the same priority, the type of database you are using may influence which discount is applied. The results will be undetermined for those with the same priority.
You can apply discounts based on the quantity that users purchase, or on the value of the purchase. For example, you can create a discount that applies when a user buys three cases of juice (quantity), or a discount that applies when a user buys $20.00 worth of juice (value).
You can apply one discount per quantity or value. For example, the beverage department of your online store has a special offer for summer: buy one case of juice; get the second case for half price. However, your online store has another special offering 10 percent discount on each product in the beverage category. Assume you prioritize these discounts as shown in the following table.
| Discount | Priority |
| Buy one case of juice, get the second case at a 50 percent discount. | 10 |
| 10 percent discount on each product in the beverage category. | 20 |
If a user buys four cases of juice, the discounts are applied as follows:
You can limit the number of discounts that can be applied to a basket. If the discount limit has a value of zero (0), discounts are unlimited: the discount can apply multiple times, assuming the condition for the discount is met multiple times in the basket. The discount limit is a basket limit and does not apply across baskets. For example, if a user checks out and comes in and buys the same discounted items then the user will enjoy the same discount again.
Discount campaigns are processed by the discounts Content Selection pipeline and the OrderDiscount pipeline component. You use the discounts CSF pipeline to advertise the most appropriate discount to a user. The OrderDiscount component in the Basket pipeline is used to apply discounts to the shopping basket.
You create a direct mail campaign item to distribute e-mail message ads to a targeted group of users. The objective is to achieve a high response rate from the mailings. You can send personalized e-mail messages from a Web page, or non-personalized messages from a flat text file. You can create direct mail messages that include attachments, such as pictures, discounts, or URLs. The Direct Mail service is designed to send bulk personalized e-mail messages to millions of users.
To set up a direct mail campaign you use the Campaign Manager module in Business Desk. Direct mail campaign items are processed by the Direct Mailer service, a powerful engine that can send a large number of e-mails very quickly.
To create a direct mail campaign item, you perform the following steps:
You cannot use target groups to send direct mail directly to user e-mail addresses.
For more information about adding direct mail campaign items, see Adding a Direct Mail Campaign Item.
Direct Mailer supports an opt-out feature. For direct mail jobs running as part of a campaign item, individual recipients can request to opt out of a direct mail campaign item. You can filter a mailing list against an opt-out list using an opt-out ASP page that is shipped as part of the Solution sites.
The developer that authors the ASP page for the Direct Mailer jobs from the Web server can provide links to an opt-out.asp page, which the recipient can use to either opt out from the site or the direct mail campaign item by clicking the appropriate link. When a Direct Mailer job running as part of a campaign item is executed, Direct Mailer checks for the presence of the site level opt-out list and the campaign item level opt-out list. If either list exists, they are subtracted from the original mailing list and the resulting list acts as the new mailing list.
Direct Mailer performs the following tasks:
The Direct Mailer pipeline is used to process lists of recipients. You can add new components to the pipeline, integrate the components with line-of-business systems, or replace them with components supplied by third parties.
The following table lists the reports included with Commerce Server that you use to analyze the effectiveness of a campaign item.
| Report | Description |
| Campaign Item Summary | Review a summary of campaign activity on your site. This report displays information such as the number of clicks, the percent of click, the number of ad requests remaining. |
| Ad Reach and Frequency per Day | Analyze the behavior of daily unique users who interact with your campaign. Use this report to understand the interaction of daily unique users with your campaigns. |
| Ad Reach and Frequency per Campaign Item | Analyze the interaction of unique users with your campaign items. This report displays the behavior of unique users who interact with your campaign items for all time. |
| Ad Reach and Frequency per Campaign | Analyze the interaction of unique users with your campaigns. This report displays the behavior of unique users who interact with your campaign for all time. |
| Campaign Event Summary | Analyze the effectiveness of campaigns on your site. This report displays a summary of campaign activity on your site. |
| Ad Placement | Analyze where in your site ads are most effective. This report displays a summary of the activity of campaigns by location on your site. |
For a list of all Commerce Server reports, see Commerce Server Reports. For information about running reports, see Running Reports.
Adding a Direct Mail Campaign Item