In this third part of our Experience Profile customisation series, we look at how we might integrate FXM into a third party website.  For the purposes of this blog, we assume the third party website is not built with Sitecore.

You can view Part 1, Part 2 and  Part 4 via the respective links.

A great example of where you might want to do this is if you link off to a third party shopping cart or payment gateway. In this particular scenario, you can use FXM to solve a few marketing requirements.

• Pages Viewed: Track the pages the user views on an external site.
• Session Merge: Continue to build the user’s Experience Profile and timeline.
• Personalise content blocks in the checkout process.  Great for cross promotion.
• Fire off goals at each step of the checkout process.
• Fire off goals and outcomes once a purchase occurs.

Note: In the examples that follow we also show what to do in each scenario for single page application. View the footnote for more details about how you might support these with regards to FXM.

---

So let’s now examine how each requirement can be solved.

Pages Viewed

Page views are a quick win, simply injecting the beacon will record the page view.

For a single page application, each time the screen changes you could use:

SCBeacon.trackEvent('Page visited')

Session Merge

If you inject the Beacon on page load you get some session merging functionality out of the box. If you have a look at the compatibility table for different browsers it’s worth noting that Safari support is limited.

Here is a potential workaround for this notable lack of Safari support:

• Follow the instructions in Part 1 to identify a user via Google Client ID.
• When linking to the external website pass through the Google Client ID (see part 1 for more details) as a URL parameter.

• ?clientID=GA1.2.2129791670.1552388156

• Initialise google analytics with the same Client ID.  This can also be achieved by setting the Client ID on the page load event in the GTM container.

• function getUrlVars(){var n={};window.location.href.replace(/[?&]+([^=&]+)=([^&]*)/gi,function(r,e,i){n[e]=i});return n}
  ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', {
    'clientId': getUrlVars()["clientID"]
  });

• Inject the FXM beacon
• Setup a custom Page Event called “updateGoogleCid” in Sitecore.
• Hook up a custom FXM procesor that will merge the session.

The process above works for single page applications as well.

Trigger Goals

Out of the box triggering a goal is easily achieved by ‘page filter‘ or ‘capture a click action‘.

For single page applications, you can use the following API calls in your javascript.

SCBeacon.trackGoal('Checkout')

Trigger Goals and Outcomes on Purchase

Out of the box triggering an outcome is achieved via a ‘capture a click action‘.

For the purposes of checkout, you are likely to want to see the dollar value purchased for that particular user in the Experience Profile. In order to achieve this, you need to use the javascript API to pass through the dollar value.  Be sure to create an outcome in Sitecore called ‘Purchase Outcome’.

SCBeacon.trackOutcome("Purchase Outcome", 
{ 
monetaryValue: revenue, 
xTransactionId: transactionId
});

A great tip that we received from the SBOS team in Australia was to trigger goals at checkout that had engagement value staggered according to the amount spent.

So, for example, you may have some javascript logic that looks like this:

if(revenue <= 99)
{
     SCBeacon.trackGoal('lowvalue')
}else if(revenue >= 100 && revenue < 500)
{
     SCBeacon.trackGoal('midvalue')
}else if(revenue >= 500 && revenue < 1000)
{
     SCBeacon.trackGoal('highvalue')
}else{
     SCBeacon.trackGoal('veryhighvalue')
}

For single page applications, you will need to use the javascript API.

---

 

Conclusion: In order to use FXM on any external website not built on Sitecore you need access to insert the Beacon code. If the external website is not a Single Page Application (also note some other limitations) you can use the FXM Experience Editor to achieve much of the desired functionality.

For those external websites containing Single page applications, ideally, you can also get access to either the GTM container or get the external website to insert some javascript for you. Using some clever javascript coding you can still record marketing events using the FXM javascript API. 

To continue reading jump over to Part 4, where we cover off a handy way to get personalisation working on the very first-page load.

---

Footnote: Single Page Applications

It’s important to note that out of the box FXM does not support single page applications. Look a bit further under the hood however and you will realise that FXM includes a great Javascript API.  After mentioning that you might now be thinking that if its a third party website you’re unlikely to get access to the source in order to implement any API calls.  At the end of the day, your going to need some sort access to inject FXM in order to achieve any sort of integration.

At the end of the day, your going to need some sort access to inject FXM in order to achieve any sort of integration.

This will likely place you in one of the following scenarios:

1. Not a single page application, in which case you just need the external website to include the FXM beacon. (instructions)
   • This is by far the simplest scenario and happy days if your in this category.
2. A single page application, with which you have access to make changes.
   • In this case, inject the FXM beacon on page load and use the Javascript API to trigger events, goals and outcomes.
3. A single page application, with which you have no direct access to make changes, but can request changes to the GTM container.
   • In this case, a great backup is using the GTM container to inject the Beacon. You can then write custom javascript that uses javascript listeners to talk with the FXM API.
   • With some single page application frameworks (Angular, React, Vue) hooking into the existing javascript listeners will prove difficult. Your last remaining option may turn out to be inside the GTM container again. If the application is already sending back telemetry to Google Analytics, make good use of it. This could be achieved by either:
     • Writing a custom javascript snippet that looks for changes in Googles datalayer.
     • If events are configured directly in GTM, simply ask for changes to each event to include an FXM API call as well.
4. If your unlucky and you have no access to make changes at all …. well …..
   •