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Audience Manager and SmartTarget

Audience Manager enables marketing departments to gather information about audiences, such as interests, preferences, and characteristics and use this information to target audiences. If you have Audience Manager installed and the Ambient Data Framework running (including the Audience Manager cartridge), you can use Contact details and Segments as triggers for promotions.

The following diagram shows how Audience Manager integrates with SmartTarget:

Audience Manager
Audience Manager consists of Contacts and Segments.
  • A Contact contains details of an actual person or organization.
  • A Segment defines a target audience of known Contacts accessing content on your Web sites.
Synchronization Target
A Synchronization Target is used to synchronize Contacts and Segments in the Content Manager with the Presentation Server. When you update Segments or Contacts in the Content Manager, these are synchronized with the Presentation Server (and vice versa).
Audience Manager presentation-side components
The Audience Manager presentation-side components update the trigger-types.xml in Fredhopper.
trigger-types.xml
The trigger-types.xml contains the triggers which users can use to define promotions in the Business Manager. Segments are automatically added to the trigger-types.xml file, but you need to configure manually the Contact detail fields or Contact extended detail fields you want to use as triggers for promotions.
Audience Manager cartridge
The audiencemanager_cartridge.jar puts Segments, Contact details and Contact extended details from Audience Manager into the Claim Store. When a visitor logs on to Web site, the Audience Manager cartridge uses the Contact API to:
  1. Retrieve Contact details about the current visitor.
  2. Retrieve all Segments.
  3. Evaluate which Segments the visitor belongs to.
The cartridge then puts these values into the Claim Store. SmartTarget then renders the Fredhopper query. It retrieves the used triggers and visitor data from the Claim Store and appends these to the query.