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:
Additional Benefits
Additional benefits for using display URLs are:
- Display URLs mask the URL information, which helps with setting currency, region, price, quantity, or other parameters in the URL.
- You can customize links with customer An individual or business purchasing your product or service by placing an order through Cleverbridge. The customer is the end user of this product, as they are not allowed to resell the purchased products or services. A customer is unique per client. If a customer purchases products or services from two different clients, there are 2 separate records of said customer.-friendly names to give them a nicer look than a standard URL.
- You can route customers by region, language, browser, or operating system.
- You can customize URLs using the Display URL field in the Saved Link and MVT Multivariate testing (MVT) is a technique for testing two or more different variables in the checkout process to determine which variable creates more revenue or a higher conversion rate. Campaign portals.
- You can view reports for display URLs (this feature is unavailable for destination URLs).
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.