Web activities

Web activities serve to generate your targeted marketing content. Web activities are typically created by a Marketing Manager. They can be associated with a campaign that contains a collection of activities. As an example of this relationship, if an office supply store had a "Back to School" campaign, the Web activities would be responsible for lower-level actions, such as advertising a discount on pens, or suggesting lined paper to any customer who has registered and listed their occupation as a student.

Web activities are capable of displaying the following types of dynamic content:

Suggestive selling initiatives

Suggestive selling content is designed to provide rule-based product recommendations, targeted at a specific customer audience, based on a customer's segment, and other customers' behavior. Web activities displaying this type of content are intended to create cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Collaborative filtering-based recommendations

Collaborative filtering-based recommendations are also intended to create product recommendations, but they use a different recommendation algorithm, which targets items based on customers' overall behavior, rather than predefined rules.

Awareness advertisements

Awareness advertisements are designed to provide advertising content targeted at a specific customer audience, based on the same criteria as those used for suggestive selling, but they are intended to increase a customer's awareness about activities at the online store, highlight special offers, and to increase brand awareness.

Web activities can be incorporated into any page on the site. When the site is designed, special placeholders, called e-Marketing Spots, are placed on the site. When displayed to a customer, these placeholders are replaced by the specific targeted content. Target locations are assigned by scheduling Web activities to display in e-Marketing Spots in the desired locations.

Web activities contain a condition that determines when and to whom they are displayed. This condition is defined when the activity is created and can be changed during the lifetime of the activity to adjust the activity's visibility and the displayed content.

Web activities generate statistics about their use. These statistics can be viewed using the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator by users assigned to the Seller or Marketing Manager roles. The statistics illustrate an activity's clickthrough rate for each e-Marketing Spot where it is implemented. These statistics provide feedback on the effectiveness of the Web activity, as well as comparative success rates among the various locations in which it displays.

Web activities are created using the Campaign Activity wizard in the WebSphere Commerce Accelerator. If your store has enabled workspaces, Web activities may be managed using workspaces and inherit the benefits from that feature.