LiveScrape is a live screen capture of a section of a website and gets updated in real-time in the inbox. With LiveScrape you only update content once, on your website, and re-use it in your email message, ensuring consistency throughout the different channels. Changes to your website are automatically reflected in your email, even after the message is sent.
Examples are product availability, new product arrivals, online exclusive offers, blogposts, trending stories.
With LiveScrape you typically want to track clicks and conversions.
Before getting started with LiveScrape, take the following into account:
- It’s important to avoid any content on your website that is moving via flash, animation, or video as this will most likely not be scrapable by our LiveScrape engines. Any static content on a website can by default be scraped.
- Use dynamic LiveScrape to account for situations where content may shift location on your site so it renders properly.
- LiveScrape can also be used to instantly render alternate LiveScrapes in email based on user-specific attributes by passing those attributes via ESP Custom Fields into the Liveclicker embed tag. For example, a user's preferred shop location can be used in the LiveScrape URL and new product arrivals for that specific shop are shown.
In this topic, we will discuss the different configuration options specific for the LiveScrape as well as the preview and embed codes. Check out the topic Create a new campaign, for more information on how to create a campaign.
Once a LiveScrape campaign has been created, a series of steps need to be followed:
1. Configure the LiveScrape
Configure basic settings
The settings configured in this section apply to all the different versions of the element, if these exist.
Linking — Define if a clickthrough URL is required or only the embedded image, without the possibility to click through. The actual URL is configured further down in the settings of the element itself and can be different for each of the versions of the element. It is recommended to always set a clickthrough URL as this drives engagement.
Alt text — This is the text that will be displayed when the image cannot be rendered. It is recommended to always set an alt text in case openers have disabled image rendering in their email clients or for openers that use screen readers. The alt text is appended to the embed code of the element.
Click Save and Next to save the changes to the basic settings and move on to the next configuration section.
Further LiveScrape configuration
When a LiveScrape campaign is created, there is always a default LiveScrape that will be the fallback image when the targeting rules do not apply to the opener of the email or when no targeting rules have been defined.
Start by configuring the default LiveScrape.
1. First, Choose your dimensions. This will be the image size in the email. The available options depend on the selected type of webscrape. Static webscrapes can only have a fixed width and height. However, dynamic webscrapes can have one of the following dimensions:
- fixed width and height
- fixed width, auto-scale height
- fixed height, auto-scale width
- use HTML area width and height
2. Add the LiveScrape URL of the website page you want to scrape information from. For example: http://www.meetmarigold.com.
Note: The LiveScrape URL can be personalized with Custom fields. This is set up in step 5.
If you want to use custom data from your ESP, you need to use the following syntax here in the source URL: http://www.meetmarigold.com/%%tag%% where the %%tag%% will be replaced with the custom field data.
3. Set the locale of the scraped website. This is the site location of your LiveScrape. By default, content from the US version is displayed. To change the scraped content to a different location version of the website, choose the locale option of your choice from the drop-down. If the local version cannot be found, the default website is used. (The list of locale is fixed. If your preferred locale is not in there, use the default location.)
4. Next, you can choose between a static and a dynamic web scrape .
Note: Dynamic LiveScrapes are recommended because the size of the webscraped area might change over time, the position of the area might move, the target link might change over time or the content of the webscrape needs to be changed before being used in your email.
- Static —
The content is scraped from a fixed area on your website that you select by drawing a fixed rectangular on your website. This area will always be scraped, regardless of the elements in your webpage or if the webpage changes over time. The size of this image depends on the dimensions set earlier in step 1. If there is any dynamic content on the website, this will be clipped from the screenshot
Click Get LiveScrape to launch the website and select the area to scrape.
You can move the rectangular box around to the location of your choice. The selected area's size and exact location is indicated below. You can adapt the area size to be scraped if needed.
Click Finish to save your selection and return to the configuration. Note that the scraped are size will be resized to the dimensions specified for the static webscrape. - Dynamic —
The scraped content is retrieved from a dynamically selected area on your page. The area is selected using a HTML element selector or by manually entering the DOM elements from your website, and so even if this element moves to a different location on the website, the content will always be retrieved for that specific element. Dynamic content in the HTML element will not be clipped.
Click Select area to open up a preview of the website and select the HTML element on the website to scrape from. The HTML selector field at the top is updated with the result of your selection:
Press Save to validate your selection, and return the HTML element to the configuration:
5. When selecting dynamic webscrape, advanced settings are loaded to personalize your LiveScrape even more. Click + to expand the options:
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Personalize source URL — When this option is selected, an ESP field can be selected from the drop-down and used to personalize the URL of the LiveScrape, configured in step 2.
The value in this ESP field will be used to replace the %%TAG%% in the website URL.Example: If you use https://www.liveclicker.com/%%tag%% as the source URL, and the value of %%tag%% in your ESP is "about-liveclicker", we will scrape from https://www.liveclicker.com/about-liveclicker/
Note: Take into account that when you personalize a URL for an element, the URL should be encoded.
When you personalize an element's clickthrough URL or the source URL for a LiveScrape, information is being passed from your ESP to our platform, through an ESP tag. That ESP tag will be later used to compose a URL. Some characters are not valid in URLs and need to be encoded. For example, https://www.mysitio.com would be okay, but https://www.misitio.com?test=https://misitio2.com wouldn't since everything that is in the query string (parameters) should be encoded.
Example: https://www.parana.com/rrs/womensshoes/womensnewshoes/%20%20value%20%20 -
Set the timing of the webscrape — This option allows you define at which moment in time the website needs to be scraped. Select an option from the drop-down, ranging from scraping immediately to scraping in 1, 3, 5,10 or 15 seconds. If your website takes a while to get loaded, we recommend to foresee some delay.
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Use mobile viewport — If the mobile version of a website has a different layout or content than the desktop version, you can use this option to choose to display the mobile version of the website to scrape the content from.
If the option is not checked, the desktop viewport width of 1920px is used.
If the option is checked, the mobile viewport width of 414px is used. -
Clickthrough type — In addition to dynamically selecting which area of a page needs to be webscraped, you may also dynamically set the clickthrough URL.
Use the button Select area to scrape the website for the URL that needs to be used for the clickthrough URL. This way, your clickthrough URL is automatically updated when the website gets updated. Liveclicker will extract the href attribute of it and use it as the dynamic link.
Note: When you are using dynamic linking, make sure that the HTML area you select has a href attribute.
6. Once your static or dynamic LiveScrape has been configured, a preview of the image is displayed. If you see a red warning that your Your LiveScrape settings have changed make sure to click the Refresh Preview button to show an updated image.
7. Next, a clickthrough URL needs to be defined.
If you have chosen to use a static LiveScrape or a dynamic LiveScrape with a static clickthrough, enter the clickthrough URL here. This is the one that will always be used for the LiveScrape.
Note: You can use a regular clickthrough link or a mobile deeplink. Mobile deeplinks are URLs that the mobile device will interpret as an instruction to open the app if it is installed, and go to a specific location in the app. If the app does not exist, in general it will take the opener to the location where the app can be downloaded.
Note 2: Clickthrough URLs can be personalized with ESP tags. Please check out our dedicated topic on this subject if this is something you consider doing.
If you have chosen a dynamic LiveScrape and a dynamic clickthrough, the URL entered here will be used when the dynamic clickthrough cannot be rendered. Else, the dynamic clickthrough URL will be used.
8. Last, an Error Replacement Image and clickthrough URL needs to be configured. There may be rare occasions where there are issues preventing a successful LiveScrape (URL returns 404 not found), in which case we allow you to upload a custom 'error - LiveScrape not found' image.
Note: In the occasion that it isn't possible to generate a new image for the LiveScrape element and it is past the expiration time, it is possible to serve the last successfully generated image, instead of delivering the fallback image.
To do this, the corresponding account property should be enabled, so that the last successfully generated image for the element will be remembered at least 24 hours after the expiration time of the element. To enable this property, contact your Customer Success Manager.
9. Now you have finished the configuration of your first LiveScrape.
At this point you can either add an alternative version of the LiveScrape or move on to the targeting and testing section.
An alternative version can be used when targeting rules are implemented, presenting some of the viewers with one version, and others with another version.
10. If you want to do this, click the button Add Alternate LiveScrape.
11. Provide a name and click Continue.
12. The new version is added.
13. Click + to expand the configuration panel for this version and repeat steps 1 to 9 to configure the LiveScrape.
14. When done with the configuration, click Next to start defining the targeting rules.
Define targeting rules and AB test
1. In this last step, you can decide which subscriber should get a specific version of the LiveScrape through the use of targeting rules. A targeting rule will split up the audience and only target a segment of the audience. There are 2 options:
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Define targeting rules from scratch.
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When you have already defined targeting rules for a different element in this campaign, you can re-use these targeting rules for the current element.
For more details on targeting rules, please check out the dedicated topic.
2. In addition, you can also set up AB testing for this element. With A/B testing the final version of the image shown to the remainder of the audience, is determined by the A/B test.
3. When done, click Continue. You are taken to the next element to configure, if any. Otherwise, you are taken to the Preview.
2. Preview
The Preview tab for your campaign becomes available when all elements in your campaign have been configured. It provides you with the ability to test the look and rendering of the elements in your campaign, either as a static preview or as a dynamic preview, simulating an opener. You can also send yourself or others an email preview.
For more details on how to test your elements using preview, please read the corresponding topic.
3. Retrieve embed codes
In this last step, you need to provide some estimated campaign details, such as expected opens, launch date and Expiration date, as well as the Subscriber ID field.
All this information will be used by Liveclicker to optimize resources but also to create the embed code.
For more details on the Embed codes, check out this topic.
