Using PathFactory for Your Resource Center

Some advantages of this option include:

• PathFactory opens a content track on top of your existing resource center – allowing the visitor to easily binge on content while you collect all the rich engagement data. When they are done consuming content, they can simply close the Content Track overlay and remain on your website
• It allows you to keep your existing resource center and the platform you use to maintain and build it (WordPress, built in house, etc.).
• Branding is typically already in place and consistent with the rest of your website

A disadvantage of this option:

• There is a light amount of web development work required to change the URLs of the content destination to PathFactory Content Track overlays.

Steps to complete this:

1. Add your content to the PathFactory Content Library
   Add all the URLs of the content that lives in your resource center into PathFactory. You can easily accomplish this with the csv upload option that will allow you to do this in batches. For more information, see Adding Content.
2. Create your content track(s) with like content that should be grouped together
   When creating the content tracks that will sit behind your resource center, you can either use Target Content Tracks where you choose the content you want to package together (in a linear fashion) OR you can use Recommend Content Tracks and allow machine learning to surface the most popular content in a pool you define. Since you are replacing the links to all of the content in your resource center, you can make as many or as few Content Tracks to support your resource center as you wish. Each content piece in a track has its unique URL to link to.
3. Add the PathFactory Content Track URLs to your website via HTML
   Follow these steps when adding a content track to your website.

Some advantages of using this method are:

• Links to content on Explore pages automatically open content tracks in a new tab, allowing the visitor to easily binge on content while you collect rich engagement data. They can easily navigate back to the Explore Page to select another piece of content, filter or search through content or continue consuming content one piece after another.
• Explore pages are really easy to set up and provide various branding options to make it look and feel like an extension of your website (you can import your website header, footer and styling).
• If there are any updates to the content that need to be made, it will automatically be reflected in the experience, no replacement of links are necessary.
• If at any point there are updates to the look and feel of the page, updates to the content presented, etc. PathFactory makes it really easy to do so, and all the power lies in the marketers hands – there is no reliance on the web development team to support.

A disadvantage to this option is:

• The Explore page and content tracks you use with this approach are best served using a custom subdomain. The Explore page you will use as your resource center is a PathFactory hosted page (not part of your website CMS) so savvy visitors may notice they’ve moved to a subdomain URL.

Steps to complete this:

1. Add your content to the content library
   Add all the URLs of the content that lives in your resource center into PathFactory. You can easily accomplish this with the csv upload option that will allow you to do this in batches. For more information, see Adding Content.
2. Create one content track with all of the resources you want in your resource center
   When creating the content track that will sit behind your resource center, you can either use a Target Content Track where you choose the content you want to package together (in a linear fashion) OR you can use a Recommend Content Track and allow machine learning to surface the most popular content in a pool you define. Each explore page can only be tied to one Content Track, so clients using this approach will typically power their resource center with one one Explore Page underpinned by one Content Track, although some PathFactory customers have used multiple Explore pages tied together with custom navigation to power their resource center.
3. Create an Explore Page which will be your Resource Center
   Build an Explore Page that will sit on top of the Content Track you just built. There are a number of different layouts and configurations you can use. Be sure to add search capabilities and filter options to make it easier for your visitors to find the content they are looking for when they hit your Resource Center.

PathFactory supports your SEO strategy and plays friendly with the SEO settings of the modern website CMS. PathFactory won’t do anything to harm your SEO, since it offers flexible settings to choose how you want to handle crawlers and avoid concerns of duplicate content, both on Content Tracks and Explore Pages. Plus, you can use your own subdomain in the URL, allowing you to use descriptive keywords like “resources” or “documents” that support your SEO strategy. So regardless of which of the two above options you choose, PathFactory will never harm your SEO and can often have a positive impact. Your SEO is in good hands with PathFactory!

For full details around different options PathFactory offers for SEO, see How does using PathFactory affect my SEO?