Staging and Live Environments

A staging environment is an environment available internally in your organization where you develop functionality and content for your Web site. A live environment is a public-facing Web site where Web site visitors can access content.

Content Explorer
Create Components ( content items ) in the Content Explorer screen and publish these to a Fredhopper environment so that they are available in Promotions and Experiments.
Targeting Dashboard
Create Promotions and Experiments in the Targeting Dashboard. Promotions and Experiments are displayed in lists corresponding to the Web site where they are available. In the simplest scenario, you will have a Staging and Live environment).
  • Staging is the internal Web site where Experience Manager is set up for inline editing and testing
  • Live is your external, public-facing Web site
When you select a list, you can see all the Promotions or Experiments available for that specific Web site. You can then manage (create/edit/delete/modify/copy) the individual items in the list.
Experience Manager
Open the Editing Sites screen and validate Promotions and Experiments in Experience Manager. When you have finished fine-tuning, copy them to your live environment.
Fredhopper Preview and Live Environments
Experience Optimization uses Fredhopper as a targeting engine:
  • the Fredhopper Preview environment handles requests for targeting content displayed in Experience Manager.
  • the Fredhopper Live environment handles requests for targeting content from your public-facing Web sites.

When you have finished validating content in Experience Manager, you copy Promotions and Experiments to the live environment. The following diagram provides a simplified overview of the Experience Optimization staging and live environments.