The Sitecore Experience Platform offers Federated Experience Manager as a feature that allows you to add content to your non-Sitecore site and track visitors along the way. In this article, we will provide an overview of the feature and its configuration.
What is Federated Experience Manager?
One of the tools provided by the Sitecore Experience Platform allows you to embed Web beacons on non-Sitecore sites and track interactions. For more information, please see the following pages
The operation is that the tool creates and tracks Web beacons, which are served through a CD server. This allows Sitecore to track traffic embedded on external sites via JavaScript. In this case, the following points should be noted
- However, if the domain is different, it will work as a 3rd party cookie, so it will not be available for some browsers.
- While 3rd party cookies were an effective means of providing this functionality when it was first offered, they are now becoming the default in terms of privacy and cannot be used on the browser side.
- For this reason, although the documentation states that 3rd party cookie functionality will be provided in the future, it will not be.
- If https is different from http, it is not available. Since https is the standard nowadays, this should not be a problem.
- The following features are not available
- Path Analyzer
- A/B Test
- Form
More details can be found on the following page. The name of the tool is hereafter referred to as FXM.
Creating a Web Beacon
When the tool is opened for the first time, the following screen appears
First, click the Add External Web Site button in the upper left corner. The following data should be set in the input fields.
Column | Value |
|---|---|
Name | Site name |
Domain | FQDN ( No need for https:// etc. ) |
In this case, the following settings were made
Click the Save button in the upper right corner to add the settings and switch to the following screen.
First, the beacon must be activated, so run publish. Now you have created your Web beacon.
Embed JavaScript in the target site
Next, embed the JavaScript into the target site. In this case, we will use Google Tag Manager to add a line of JavaScript.
Reflecting the above settings, access the Web site again. We can now confirm that the code contains the JavaScript we mentioned earlier.
Launching the Experience Editor
After the JavaScript has been embedded, return to the FXM administration screen again. Select the target domain and launch the Experience Editor, which will launch the Experience Editor while displaying the web page for the specified domain.
Clicking Add Placeholder will bring up an area where you can add a placeholder using the structure of the website's HTML. For example, if you select the area for the text that will be the title, you will see the following
After specifying Add, a dialog box appears to create a placeholder.
If the addition is successful, the placeholder will appear as follows
Click on the placeholder and click on the Add Here button. You will then be prompted to select a sub-layout.
This time, select the standard sample rendering provided. Also, check the Open Properties Dialog Box after selection box in the lower left corner, and click the Select button.
A dialog opens, where you select /sitecore/content/Home as the data source.
After clicking OK, the data for the Home item was displayed as shown below.
Review the resulting page and click the Save button in the upper left corner. After the settings have been saved, click the Publish button to apply the changes. After publishing is complete, you will see the content embedded in the page when you access the site.
Summary
This functionality is available to customers who are already using the Sitecore Experience Platform. On the other hand, if you want to implement this functionality on the Web, we offer it as a separate SaaS feature in the form of Sitecore CDP + Personalize. If you have not yet implemented Sitecore Experience Platform, but would like to do something similar, please consider CDP + Personalize.