Integrating SAS Real-Time Decision Manager

Overview

You can combine the functionality provided by SAS Data Surveyor for Clickstream Data and SAS Real-Time Decision Manager. This combination enables you to dynamically update Web page content targeted to the customer in real time. Then, it lets you record and track any response as a result of activity on the modified page. This approach provides a way to dynamically present targeted content to a customer. It also facilitates establishing the effectiveness of the campaign.

The SAS page tag functionality passes session information through an asynchronous request to the SAS Real-Time Decision Manager Web service, which responds with a targeted response. The response contains information about a treatment that should be displayed on the current Web page. For example, the treatment can identify an image contained in the content management system that should be displayed on the Web page. The SAS page tag functionality then updates the Web page source to display the appropriate content. If the customer then clicks on this treatment (which is typically a link), information about the campaign that generated the treatment is recorded in the SAS page tag log and later processed as part of the ETL.

See Processing Campaign Data for information about the type of data collected and how it is processed. See Configuring SAS Real-Time Decision Manager Integration for information about configuring your Web pages to interact with SAS Real-Time Decision Manager Web service.

Details

The following sequence of events and different components are involved in the integration of SAS Data Surveyor for Clickstream Data and SAS Real-Time Decision Manager:

When a Web page loads that is instrumented with the SAS page tag RTDM module, it passes session information (this could be a customer ID) to the designated RTDM Web service.
The Web service returns a response that contain information about what should be displayed on the page, such as a graphic and the link to be associated with the graphic.
The SAS page tag RTDM module uses the information to update the targeted component on the Web page.
If the customer then clicks the link generated by the RTDM Web service, the customer is taken to the target page and information of the click. The various tracking codes for the RTDM treatment are recorded in the clickstream collection server log.
The SAS Data Surveyor for Clickstream Data ETL processes the resulting SAS page tag log and generates a detail data set.
SAS Web Analytics can be used to incorporate information from the common data model to generate campaign-related reports.