Month: June 2023

360Agileweb

Sitecore personalize and mobile app projects series – part 4b

Sitecore Personalize APIs integration architecture

Introduction

On this series of blog posts, I am documenting my journey of delivering personalized content to end users of a mobile app.

Sitecore Personalize API Flow executions

As follow up to the previous blog post on Personalize APIs, let us look at how you can leverage the Personalize REST API flow execution service to automate running a flow for you experiments or experiences.

Experiences vs Experiments

Below is a summary key capabilities with experiences and experiments:

  • Experiences – Web allows you to add experience to your website and monitor performance.
  • Experiences – Full stack drives API triggered and interactive experiences.
  • Experiences – Flows export segments to external third-party systems for highly targeted campaigns
  • Experiments – Web runs A/B tests for your website
  • Experiments – Full stack runs A/B tests on API driven triggered and interactive experiences

Characteristics of API flow execution service

A flow execution service allows you to run a flow for either web-based or mobile apps, in order to deliver great personalization in real-time. A simple use-case will be trying to encourage your guest to add a product into their shopping basket.

Below are characteristics of a flow execution service:

  • Facilitates personalization in experiences and experiments, including interactive and web
  • Invokes real-time responses
  • Supports using decision models in interactive experiments to return the next best offer or action

How to send a flow execution request

Two options are available:

  • You can send a flow execution request using either the browserId, email, or identifiers attribute. This flexibility is particularly useful when interacting with guests who have never been identified online and do not have a browserId attribute. You can use the email or identifiers attribute to execute a flow that uses a decision model to return the next best offer or action.
  • You can also send a flow execution request for an experiment or experience when you want to send the output of the decision model in real-time to an external system such as a marketing cloud. The browserId attribute is not relevant or captured by this type of external system, so we recommend using the email or identifiers attribute to execute the flow

Calling the Personalize API

You will typically initiate an asynchronous call using POST REST API.

Below is a sample request to achieve this.

HTTP POST
/v2/callFlows

This will run an interactive experiment over any web-based or mobile app. As expected, you will need to specify either browserId or email or identifiers

Flow execution request using browserId

HTTP POST {{apiEndpoint}}/v2/callFlows
{
    "clientKey": "{{ClientKey}}",
    "channel": "MOBILE_APP",
    "language": "en",
    "currencyCode": "EUR",
    "pointOfSale": "{{myPOS}}",
    "browserId": "{{ref}}",
    "friendlyId": "{{friendlyId}}"
}

Where:

  • {{apiEndpoint}} will be the base url to your Personalize tenant, .e.g., api-engage-eu.sitecorecloud.io
  • {{ClientKey}} will be your public Client key
  • {{myPOS}} will be your Point of Sale
  • {{ref}} will be your browserId 
  • {{friendlyId}} when you create an experiment or experience, Sitecore Personalize automatically creates an ID when you name the experiment or experience.

Next Steps

This completes this blog, where I have walked you through Personalize API Flow executions. I hope you find this useful, and feel free to leave me any comments or thoughts.

In my next blog, I will be looking at sharing more details on my Sitecore Personalize integrations with my mobile app project. Stay tuned.