A functional overview of FXM

Current version: 9.1

The Federated Experience Manager (FXM) is a dedicated SPEAK application that lets you track and personalize the experience of a website visitor across multiple (federated) websites, including non-Sitecore websites.

Note

FXM supports a Sitecore server role-based configuration model. For information about the role-based configuration model, see Using role-based server configuration and Scaling and configuring Core roles.

FXM lets you:

  • Track every visit to an external website and personalize the content on the external website by deploying a single JavaScript tag.

    The information from the external website is available in the Experience Analytics dashboard.

  • Easily create the FXM JavaScript tag that you deploy on the external website.

  • Enrich and personalize every visit with Sitecore marketing attributes, such as goals, events, profiles, outcomes, and campaigns.

  • Capture all the visitor information from the external website and store it in the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB).

  • Integrate the external website with the marketing capabilities that are available in Sitecore, such as goals, events, profiles, campaigns, engagement automation, and so on.

  • Use the Sitecore Experience Editor to edit the pages and their specific elements on the external website that you want to apply Sitecore marketing attributes to.

  • Use and extend a dedicated API to meet your specific tracking and personalization requirements.

FXM features

  • A single JavaScript tag that can be deployed on the external website.

    The JavaScript tag:

    • Acts as a beacon that is registered by the Beacon handler on the Sitecore platform. The Beacon handler manages all the requests from the external website.

      You must deploy the JavaScript tag on every page event of the external website that you want to monitor.

    • Can be deployed on every page of the external website without degrading performance.

  • Tracking works with first-party domain cookies.

    Third-party cookies will be supported in a later release.

  • The dedicated FXM Web API captures external visitor information and writes the information back to the xDB.

    • The FXM Web API can scale to millions of external site pages.

    • Developers can extend the FXM Web API to meet their specific requirements.

  • The JavaScript API integrates with the standard Sitecore marketing functions.

  • In Sitecore 8.0, FXM uses the Sitecore rules engine to define the external websites that you want.

    • The external site domain is matched through a domain matcher rule, so that only visits to that specific website are tracked in the xDB.

      For example, to track an external website to the domain www.external-demo.com, you should setup a domain matcher rule in FXM that only matches visits to www.external-demo.com.

    • All subsequent FXM features are derived from the domain matcher rule.

  • FXM supports multiple languages through specific rules that you define to work with the externally tracked domain.

  • All the FXM features are available in the Content Editor.

    • The Marketing Control Panel contains a node called Federated Experience Manager.

    • You can define rules through the standard item hierarchy.

FXM supports matching against any of the following conditions:

  • Page or pages through standard regular expressions

  • External actions, such as:

    • Capture Click – when a visitor clicks any element during their visit to an external website.

    • Fragments – when a visitor interacts with a DOM fragment.

    • Submit Matcher – when a visitor submits a form on an external website, such as a sign-up form.

    • Placeholder Replacer – replacing content on an external website through a standard Sitecore placeholder.

Managing FXM

The FXM application is available on the Sitecore Launchpad. It is easy to set up the tracking of an external website.

  • The application automatically creates a domain matcher rule based on the external website domain.

  • The application provides you with the JavaScript tag that the webmaster of the external website can deploy to enable FXM to track the website.

    FXM tracks every page that contains the JavaScript tag.

  • FXM automatically integrates with Sitecore Experience Analytics.

Administrator features

FXM lets administrators:

  • View a list of all the external sites that are tracked.

    The list of external websites displays the status of each domain, including:

    • Name

    • Created by

    • Website domain

    • Status – Published or Not Published

    • Date modified

    • Overall number of visits to the external site

  • Edit external domain information.

  • Open the external domain in the Experience Editor in FXM.

  • Manage the individual sites from within the FXM application.

  • View and manage any FXM functions that are associated with the external website.

FXM Experience Editor

The FXM Experience Editor lets developers:

  • Use a dedicated web browser proxy to browse the external site.

  • Add a new page filter to track specific pages - selected by browsing the site.

  • Add capture click actions to trigger an action when the user clicks any HTML element on the external site.

  • Replace elements on the external site with Sitecore placeholders.

The FXM Experience Editor lets marketers:

  • View any external webpage elements that have been assigned FXM functions.

  • Assign any Sitecore marketing attributes to these functions.

  • Create all the FXM functions they need as items in Sitecore.

  • Use standard Sitecore marketing functionality to assign marketing attributes to the definition items for capture click actions on the external site.

  • Use standard Sitecore personalization controls to personalize placeholders.

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