Standalone Pages
Great for campaigns when you need to direct the traffic to a standalone entertainment property or a sub-brand.
This method is suitable for use cases or campaigns when you want to direct traffic to a standalone URL property or sub-brand off your main website. Monterosa platform hosts and serves up the whole site including headers, footers and navigation.
If you wish to have the Experience include a custom header and footer, this may involve development and a custom Experience created by either our Solutions team or your developers. Either way, the integration method is the same.
Steps to integrate
Set up the Experience as a sub-domain or a sub-page on your website
Make sure the Experience is on-brand, add your header and footer if required
Integrate with your analytics, SSO or other services
Domain name
This type of integration often requires either a separate domain name registered for the experience (e.g. exceptionalexperience.com) or a subdomain of your main domain (e.g. exceptionalexperience.yourdomain.com).
In both cases, we will expect you to register a domain, create SSL certificates and configure DNS so that you retain full control over your brand's properties.
Monterosa will deploy the Experience and make it available via CDN. We will expect you to provide us with the SSL certificate for the chosen domain before we start setting up production infrastructure for your Experience. Please raise a ticket with our support and they will advise you on the infosec-approved way of sharing the certificate with us.
We will then share the technical domain name with you so that your team can configure DNS (create a CNAME record) to direct the traffic to our CDN.
Sub-page of your website
This type of integration results in the experience appearing on your website's URL map as a sub-page — e.g. yourdomain.com/exceptionalexperience.
There are two ways to achieve this behaviour:
Full-page proxying, where Monterosa hosts the entire page (including your website's header, footer and navigation) and your website tech "brings that page in" by forwarding your users' requests to our CDN in the background and sending our CDN responses back to the users. This is more complicated to set up but brings in some benefits like better UX and seamless integration with services that heavily rely on cookies and local storage, e.g. SSO, consent management, personalisation, etc.
Partial-page iframe embed, where you set up a dedicated page on your website featuring your header, footer and navigation, and then embed Monterosa Experience to that page as an iframe. This is much easier to set up in most cases but makes integration work more complicated.
The decision between the two cases above will depend on the capabilities and degree of flexibility of your content delivery infrastructure, plus the breadth of the integration requirements between your services and Monterosa Experience. A Monterosa Solution Architect will work with you in the early stages of the project planning to help you make the right choice.
Below you will find a more detailed explanation of each of the solutions:
Full-page proxying
Although the term "proxying" is borrowed from a concept of HTTP proxy servers, we do not take it too literally and rather assume that your website is fronted by a CDN or similar caching delivery infrastructure, which allows origin configuration on a page-by-page basis. Here are the relevant docs for AWS CloudFront, CloudFlare and Akamai CDNs, feel free to contact our technical support or your Monterosa Solution Architect if you need any help setting this up.
This setup requires a communication channel between your content delivery infrastructure and Monterosa's. A user will communicate directly with your website, but under the hood, the requests will be forwarded to and fulfilled by our CDN. That way the user browser will assume Monterosa Experience to be an integral part of your website and will share all the cookies and storage with Monterosa front-end code, making the integrations much easier.
There is no one-size-fits-all technical solution for this setup as it almost entirely depends on the capabilities and degree of flexibility of your infrastructure, so during the technical planning phase our Solution Architect will bring together experts from both sides to find the best solution possible.
Add your header and footer
As the Experience page should blend in as a sub-page of your website, it is beneficial to add your header and footer to ensure UX continuity.
This work is planned on a case-by-case basis as every customer website is different, but a rule of thumb is that we would expect you to provide us with a set of HTML/CSS/JS embeds and some documentation explaining how to place them on our page.
Partial-page iframe embed
If the full-page proxying is not an option, but you still want the Experience to become a sub-page of your website, the next best option is to embed the Experience as a partial-page iframe with your header, footer and navigation around it. It is typically simpler to set up your end and requires less UI integration on our end (as we likely won't need to bring in your header, footer and navigation) but creates barriers to integration with your services, so might not be the most economical choice for deployments requiring loads of integration work.
Please refer to Inline Page Embed or Using the SDK to embed guides for more details on how the embedding could be done.
