Best Practice: Use Display URLs

An important Cleverbridge best practice is to use a display URL on your website that points to a destination URL. The display URL remains on your website and doesn't change. The destination URL can be changed when the need arises.

Display URLs are instrumental in the Commerce Assistant for running special campaigns, optimizing the cart, or multivariate testing. You can perform all these functions without having to change the entry website URL.

Using display URLs reduces website maintenance. Instead of having several different entry links on your website that point to the cart, with one display URL, you can update the URL in one place. This provides greater flexibility for the ecommerce manager and less work for the technical team.

The technical term for a display URL is a PURL (Persistent Uniform Resource Locator). For more information about Cleverbridge URL types, see Links (URLs) & Checkout Pages.

Diagram

The following diagram illustrates how display URLs and destination URLs work:

url displays bp

Additional Benefits

Additional benefits for using display URLs are:

Example – How to Use

Some examples for how to use display URLs include the following:

  • Use a display URL to limit which regions include certain recommendations.
  • Use a display URL to limit the languages to those that product content has been translated for. As more product content is translated, you can easily update the destination URL without having to change the website. This can be done using the following parameter: &languages= . See List of Checkout Process Parameters > Language Settings.
  • Use a display URL to route traffic from embargoed countries to an information page. All other traffic is routed to the Cleverbridge product catalog.

Example – Use Case

The product Internet Security Basic Extended is available in English and German. The following destination URL is created with the &languages=en,de parameter:

https://www-shieldwareexamplecompany.com/123/?scope=checkout&cart=97771&languages=en,de

The following display URL is created and used online:

https://shieldwareexamplecompany.com/123/purl-isbe

A few months later, Japanese is added as a language for Internet Security Basic Extended. The destination URL is modified to include ja (for Japanese) to the language parameter:

https://www-shieldwareexamplecompany.com/123/?scope=checkout&cart=97771&languages=en,de,ja

The display URL remains unchanged.

Where to Create a Display URL

In the Commerce Assistant, a display URL can be created with these two features:

  • Saved links
  • MVT campaigns

Which feature is best for you to use depends on your business needs. For more information, see Create a Display URL (PURL) and Perform Multivariate Testing.