Closing the Loop with Commerce Server Systems

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This is a tutorial for closing the loop with Commerce Server Business Analytics, Targeting, and Profiling Systems.

You use the Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 Business Analytics system to collect data, analyze data, run reports, and make predictions. With the Commerce Server Targeting system, you can personalize content and target marketing campaigns to users who visit your Web site. Commerce Server Profiling system to profile and manage your customers and trading partners for site usage and personalization.

Following are key features of the Business Analytics, Targeting, and Profiling Systems.

Business Analytics System Targeting System
Profiling System
  • Manage millions of users and organizations.
  • Enable users to manage their own profile information and to research the status of their order.
  • Build profiles for any business-related entity, such as users or organizations.
  • Determine what information to collect about the users visiting your site.
  • Determine what information to display to specific users, such as virtual catalogs.
  • Analyze profile information to determine who is visiting your site.
  • Create target expressions to match content to users.
  • Create advertising, discount, and direct mail campaigns to target specific user groups.
Business Analytics System
  • Import large amounts of site usage data collected from different data sources into the Commerce Server Data Warehouse, and manage the data.
  • Analyze site effectiveness by running Commerce Server reports, or by creating your own custom reports.
  • Identify specific groups of users by running a report, and then export the results to a list. Use the list in a direct mail campaign, or to update the properties of the users so you can target merchandise or content to them.
  • Review collected data to identify hidden trends and new customer segments, and to view the properties of the segments.
  • Provide intelligent cross-sell capabilities, and dynamically recommend products to users as they navigate your site.
Targeting System
  • Personalize the buying experience with targeted merchandising.
  • Deliver the optimal content for a given user in a given context.
  • Create, analyze, and manage personalized and targeted discounts, and direct marketing and advertising campaigns.
  • Add predictive capabilities to your Web site.
  • Target ads or discounts to users of a specific profile. For example, you can target ads to female users who visit your site three times a week, and who have purchased three or more products.
  • Create and schedule campaigns for customers who compete within the same industry. The competing ads are never shown on the same page.
  • Charge your advertising customers based on the number of ad requests or clicks they want their ads to receive.
  • Charge your advertising customers based upon the page on which they want their ad to appear.

When you use the segmentation functionality of the Predictor resource to group users who exhibit similar patterns, you can more effectively target marketing campaigns to those users who are more likely to buy products.

Scenario:

You are a software retailer, and want to increase sales for your products. Instead of displaying random ads to everyone who logs on to your Web site, you want to create a smart ad campaign and target only those users who are more likely to buy the products. For example, you want to target an ad for Commerce Server 2002 to customers who have bought Web development software before and are likely to be Web developers by profession.

In this tutorial, you will do the following:

  1. Import Web log data into your Data Warehouse.
  2. Build a Segment model.
  3. Use Business Desk to analyze segments.
  4. Identify a group of Web Developers on your Web site.
  5. Export the group of users identified as Web Developers to the List Manager.
  6. Create a custom profile property, and associate the custom profile property with all the users identified as Web Developers.
  7. Create a campaign expression for Web Developers.
  8. Create a Target Group so that only Web Developers are targeted by related ads.
  9. Create an Ad campaign for Commerce Server 2002
  10. Log in as a member of the Web Developer user list to verify that your ad campaign is working.

This tutorial contains:

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