Blog posts by Chandrakant Hadpidkar

Visitor Group Tracking into Episerver Insight

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 14:43:56 GMT

In August Chris Sharp wrote about the newly released top-level filter for Visitor Groups in Episerver Insight (link to blog). To make use of this filter it requires additional tracking into the Profile Store (underlying datastore for Episerver Insight) with the visitor group information. This blog will show an example of how to track Visitor Groups into Profile Store with similar syntax to the standard [PageViewTracking] attribute on the controller action method, that is included in EPiServer.Tracking.PageView. This content was presented at Episerver Ascend in London.

In order to get started, we need to install the following packages (full documentation here)

EPiServer.Tracking.Core. Generic package for all tracking.
EPiServer.Tracking.Cms. Base classes for tracking of CMS data.

For a complete tracking of your website, I would also recommend installing the pageview and commerce tracking

EPiServer.Tracking.PageView. Native integration for tracking of CMS data.
EPiServer.Tracking.Commerce. Native integration for tracking of Commerce data.

To follow the [PageViewTracking] notation I have created a custom [VisitorGroupTracking] that does the following:

Make sure we're not in Edit mode
Get all visitor groups
Check which visitor groups the principal is a member of
- I will track both member and non-member
Create a tracking event
Send tracking data

Complete source code can be found here.

There was a good discussion at the event around performance, and how often a visitor group should be tracked, and as always I believe that it's worth considering the use case for the tracked visitor group and design the tracking to conform to that. Also, it's a good idea to make sure the tracking isn't affecting your websites customer experience (performance) negatively.

Feel free to provide ideas or comments below, especially if you already have strategies around Visitor Group Tracking.

Get started with Abandoned Basket e-mails

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 16:50:15 GMT

Abandoned basket e-mails is a widely used concept within commerce and builds on the concept that visitors use their basket as a "reminder". A lot of visitors put products in their basket since they're not ready for the purchase, they want to do more research, they don't have time to do the checkout, information is missing etc. As a commerce website, we can utilize this opportunity of a visitor showing a high interest for a product (by adding it to the basket) to generate more sales.

In the following post, I will show you hands-on how you set-up an abandoned basket scenario with Episerver Personalization and Episerver Campaign.

Before we start digging into the details, let's have a look at the steps we need to do (i assume that Episerver Personalization tracking is already implemented on the website):

Request a new recipient list
Create an abandoned basket campaign in the Personalization Portal
Create and abandoned basket e-mail
Set-up the abandoned basket trigger

1. Request a new recipient list

The starting point of any e-mail within Episerver Campaign is a recipient list, for your trigger scenarios I would recommend you to request a new recipient list that is designed to support the integration between Episerver Personalization and Episerver Campaign (we support a lot of other ESPs as well). You do this by simply send an e-mail to support@episerver.com.

2. Create an abandoned basket campaign in the Personalization Portal.

In the personalization portal, navigate to Mail > New Campaign (picture below). The first step allows you to configure the style of the recommendation, Episervers web help has the whole step explained here.

After giving your new Mail Campaign a new and a stylistic touch we move on to the actual configuration of the e-mail strategies we want to apply. This is described in detail in our web help here. Since Episerver utilizes the same process for designing a various amount of e-mail scenarios we must define what strategies we want to apply to our campaign. In this scenario, we're designing an abandoned basket scenario so I will select an abandoned basket as the first strategy.

The strategies are explained here and abandoned basket scenarios are described as "Shows products that were added to the basket but not purchased. Only baskets abandoned within the last 90 days and products currently available are considered." Since there might be scenarios were a visitor already has purchased the product that was abandoned I want to apply other strategies as well, strategy 2 and 3 will be injected if the abandoned basket scenario doesn't apply. If you don't want to decide what strategy to use if the abandoned basket strategy doesn't apply, you can use "top-ups" that will go back to the default algorithm and make sure that the widget doesn't get empty when opening the e-mail.

For the final step, we need to define our ESP and our E-mail field function ({Email}) that is used for that ESP. The field function is the parameter that gets passed back to the recommendations engine in order to serve recommendations, so it's important that you make sure to get this correct. Click "Generate code" and save the codes in an empty document or similar.

You can now save the Campaign.

3. Create and abandoned basket e-mail

Now it's time to create the actual e-mail that will be sent when someone abandoned a cart. To do that I will create a transactional e-mail in Episerver Campaign, and configure a recommendations block that will render the e-mail recommendations (the abandoned products).

Go to Transactional E-mail and Create a new transactional E-mail. Select your recipient list (as requested in step 1) and give your Abandoned Basket E-mail a name.

Create a recommendations block and copy/paste the links from the Generated code in step 2 for each widget you have configured in the Personalization Mail Campaign (my scenario has 2).

When you're finished with your copy/paste exercise, hit apply and your recommendations block should look something like the picture below.

You can test how this e-mail will look by clicking "Test Message" and enter your e-mail address. When you have added some more content to give the e-mail a nice look click "Close" and then "Save and close". Back at the Transactional email dashboard, select your Abandoned basket e-mail and click "Start".

Now we have created recommendations (abandoned basket scenario) and also an e-mail that will render the abandoned products. The final step is to configure the actual trigger.

4. Set-up the abandoned basket trigger

Navigate back to the Personalization portal and go to Triggers and New Campaign

The first time you configure a trigger you need to set-up an ESP connection. The configuration varies depending on your ESP, for Episerver Campaign you need to get your "recipient list authorization code" for the Recipient List that was requested in Step 1 (guide here). Give the connection a name, enter the recipient list authorization code and click "Test Connection". After the test is sucessful, save the ESP connection.

We also need to set up the ESP action. As for the action type, there are three different types for Episerver Campaign: send a message, add a user to a target group and remove a user from a target group. For abandoned basket e-mails, select send a message and paste the ID of abandoned basket e-mail you just created.

Go to Episerver Campaign > Transactional mails to get the ID of your Abandoned Basket e-mail.

To test your ESP action you must first add your e-mail to the recipient list. This is because Episerver Campaign will only send e-mails to customers that have opted in for marketing information, therefore we must add all the recipients that have opted in into Episerver Campaign. After you've added your e-mail, enter it in the empty field and click Test ESP action. You should now receive an e-mail (which indicated that the action is working). If you don't get the e-mail, something is wrong.

With both the ESP connection and ESP action setup we can now configure the trigger, as you can see you can configure a lot more scenarios than Abandoned Basket. With your scenario configured, hit save and don't forget to activate the trigger by hitting "play" in the trigger campaign overview.

Let's try it out!

I'll navigate to my demo site, register an account with the same e-mail as I added in Episerver Campaign before (remember, this would be an import/integration in a production scenario). Add two products to the basket and then close my session.

After 180 minutes (according to configuration) I get my abandoned basket e-mail!

I hope you found this hands-on blog interesting and that it helps you generate more sales on your commerce website!

Get started with Content Delivery API 2.2.0

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 11:14:28 GMT

I just installed the latest version of Episerver Content Delivery API 2.2.0 and just wanted to share some quick findings in order for you guys to get it up and running quickly.

I started by installing the following packages in visual studio, Episerver.ContentDeliveryApi.Search is optional and requires Episerver Find. Installation on to the latest Alloy went smooth and without dependency/build errors.

When I tried to run the site I got the following error regarding MS_attributerouteWebApi

I went to the documentation and under the configuration section for the content delivery api documentation (link) I found my answer. By installing both the CMS and the Search package I’m calling (HttpConfiguration)config.MapHttpAttributeRoutes() two times. In order to fix this error, I followed the instructions in the documentation and disabled settings from ContentDeliveryApiSearch by adding the following to my <appSettings>

<add key="episerver:contentdeliverysearch:maphttpattributeroutes" value="false" />

Note: You may be needed to disable settings for the cms package as well if you're already running the ServiceAPI (its explained in the link above).

With the change the site ran smoothly, and I could make sure that the contentapiread user had the proper access and start querying in the browser (e.g. http://localhost:61704/api/episerver/v2.0/site/)

Although when moving over to Postman I only got back a response in HTML which included the log-in screen. I realized it had something to do with authorization. Since I just wanted to get started quickly I looked at our music festival demo site (link) where they set the default minimum role to Empty in order to bypass the step of authorization. This suits me quite well when exploring the API in localhost so I created an Initialization module that sets the default minimum role to Empty.

    [ModuleDependency(typeof(ContentApiCmsInitialization))]
    public class ContentDeliveryApiInitialization : IConfigurableModule
    {
        public void Initialize(InitializationEngine context)
        {
            //Add initialization logic, this method is called once after CMS has been initialized
        }

        public void Uninitialize(InitializationEngine context)
        {
            //Add uninitialization logic
        }


        public void ConfigureContainer(ServiceConfigurationContext context)
        {
            // set minimumRoles to empty to allow anonymous calls (for visitors to view site in view mode)
            context.Services.Configure<ContentApiConfiguration>(config =>
            {
                config.Default().SetMinimumRoles(string.Empty);
            });
        }
    }

After a rebuild everything was set up and the querying from Postman worked as well.

Hopefully this helps you to get the API up and running and start exploring its capabilities.

Get started with Episerver Social

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 11:08:54 GMT

Recently we launched a developer portal for Episerver Social where all Episerver world members can try Episerver Social. Get your own account through the sign-up page!

How to get started

Installation of Episerver Social is easy. Download the Episerver Social Framework nuget package to your Episerver installation, add the XML-configuration in web.config to get connected and start developing! Full documentation and installation guide is available in the document section (link here).

The fundamentals

The Episerver Social platform is a collection of extensible services for defining and collecting community generated content. Work directly with our predefined services to manage comments, ratings, activity streams, groups and moderation. The services are easy to extend with prebuilt functionality for composites where you can combine e.g. a rating and a comment into a product review.

Retrieving your social data is easy as well with possibility to retrieve a custom result set of your social data using criteria’s. As an example, you can easily retrieve ratings for product X with a customer rating higher than 3. Of course, you can define how many ratings you want to retrieve (no need to retrieve more ratings than you're using right?).

Inspiration

Hopefully you are excited to try Episerver Social, here's some inspiration for your first try:

A comment block where visitors can comment and read other comments for a specific page.
Like button (facebook style) for your articles and/or news.
A composite of a comment and rating creating your very own product review. Why not show the average rating together with the product?
Use activities to create a feed of the articles and/or news that you have liked.
A moderation flow to curate your comments, ratings and reviews.
A forum using the comment service.
Combine Episerver Social with Episerver Find to index the average rating together with your content (great blog post by EMVP Jeroen describing it here).

Dont mind downloading SocialAlloy for more inspiration (link to github here).

Happy developing!
David