What's in this page
There are a few things to ensure before using the product. If you're unsure about any of the points here, we're happy to help assess your use case.
1. Can you modify the source code?
This is the most obvious requirement: you should be able to modify the source code in each component of the system in which you'd like to embed personalization. This might be your server-side, your client website and apps, or both: it is not rare to have decision making done in the server whilst data collection is made directly from the client.
If your application is based on an off-the-shelf platform, verify you have access to the parts of code where calls are to be added. Some CMS and eCommerce platforms are highly customizable, such as WordPress and Magento. Other platforms such as Shopify aim to simplify and streamline the development process, at the cost of lesser control. For such cases, consider using the built-in integrations.
2. Are you able to serve fresh content per user?
Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network, such as Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, etc.) is common practice for serving static assets such as images, CSS, and Javascript files, and has no impact on personalization. It is also pretty common to cache the full HTML for some of the pages in your site in order to save on both the rendering and serving time, as well as your compute resources.
For pages that are fully cached, so that everyone who visits these pages sees the same thing, there is no way to personalize that page unless via some layer of post-processing. Our classic integration via a client-side is actually a good way to modify content in such pages. If you wish to personalize pages via API as you're rendering them, the final page layout needs to be composed dynamically embedding any chosen variations.
However, this does not mean that all elements have to be fully re-built! To the contrary, you're encouraged to use techniques such as fragment caching to only re-render the parts that are really dynamic in the page. If the dynamic portion of the page is below-the-fold and can be loaded asynchronously, you can decide to load that part as a separate process after you've done displaying the cached above-the-fold content.
3. Where in the world is your data center?
Our API gateway is currently hosted in two locations: one in the United States and the other in the European Union. Note that these are two separate and complete instances of our system and no data is shared between them. This setup makes it easier to comply with local regulations on data privacy, especially within the EU. When starting to use our product, your Customer Success Manager will assign your account to the appropriate instance based on your needs.
- Our US-based servers are located in AWS North Virginia's data center, fondly known as us-east-1 region.
- Our European servers are located in AWS Frankfurt data center, or eu-central-1 region.
Please ensure your servers, and any other components making synchronous calls to get content variations where latency is important, have good connectivity to the servers in your chosen Dynamic Yield location. Even if you're not using AWS, many other providers have good connectivity to the nearest AWS regions. Moreover, please see the tips in the Best Practices section on how to further optimize your network calls.