Gating Setup Step-By-Step

ONEcount is a powerful gating/paywall solution that allows you to manage all of your business rules in the software, rather than hard-coding them into your web site Content Management system.

A gated resource or product is a URL that ONEcount will only allow web visitors to access if they are both known and subscribed to that product. These are two different concepts that must be satisfied in order for the visitor to access the URL.

If a user is "known" to ONEcount, meaning ONEcount has set the appropriate cookies and know who he or she is, AND the user is subscribed to the URL product or a package that contains the URL product, then when the user clicks on the URL, they will see the contents of the URL without any forms or authentication.

If a user is "known" to ONEcount and not subscribed to the product or a package containing the product URL, he or she will be directed to a subscription form that is pre-populated with their demographic information. They will be required to subscribe to the product or package, including processing a credit card if the product or package has a price attached to it.

If a user is "unknown" to ONEcount, this means that the appropriate cookies have not been set for ONEcount to identify the user. The user must first be identified to ONEcount. There are two ways to identify the user: the user can log into the system with a username or e-mail and their password. Or, the user can look up their account using information they may already know about their account. This "lookup" feature is ideal for ONEcount customers who have databases of users with no e-mail address on file. The Lookup feature allows users to look up their accounts with a customer ID and a zip code, or some other combination of personally-identifiable information.

This guide will walk you creating a gated web product, including setting up a form, merchant account, etc. The goal of this will be a gated asset that user's can subscribe to online.

Setup Demographics: First, you need to determine what demographic data you will collect about your users. ONEcount ships with a skeleton set of demographic questions, however, you can change those questions or add new questions to the system with the Demographics Tool under the Inventory Tab. Go to the Demographics Tab and set up the demographic questions you will use on your gating forms. You can learn more about Demographic Tool here.

Set Up Products: In order to gate content, you will need to create a "Product" that contains the URL you would like to gate. There are many different kinds of Products that you can create within the system. A section or URL product is what you need when you are gating content on the site. In order to create a gating product, you will need the URL(s) that you are going to gate, and a name for your product. Although ONEcount asks you for a default form for each Product, you will not be able to set that at this time because you haven't created any forms. However, once you do create a form, you will need to go back to the product definition and tell ONEcount, which form will be the "Primary" form for this product. 

A primary form for a product or package means that, absent any other offers, when a web site visitor clicks on a URL, which form should be shown to that user.

To learn how to setup products, click here.

Set Up Packages: A product is a single element that ONEcount will manage, such as a newsletter list or a web site section or a URL. A package is a little bit different. A package is a collection of one or more products, combined one or more terms. A term is a combination of subscription length and a price. The price on a term can be zero. So to rephrase, a package is a collection of one or more products combined with a subscription length and possibly a price.

To learn how to set up packages, click here.

Set Up Source Codes: Source codes provide a way to track transactions from users. A source code can be used to track campaign effectiveness, to differentiate between different offers of the same product, or to qualify and quantify users for a circulation or postal audit. Source codes are very simple string values. You should not use spaces or punctuation in a source, but every transaction or subscription in ONEcount requires you to have a source code. You will need a source code to build your subscription form so that ONEcount can track transactions through that form. To learn more about source codes, how to set them up and how they are used, click here.

E-mail Configurations: When your forms are submitted, you may want to send users e-mail confirmation of their subscriptions or transactions. The e-mail is defined within the form definition, so you can create very specific confirmation e-mails for every offer. However, there are default configurations that must be configured first. These are done in the Config Manager under E-mail Configuratons.  Most importantly, you will want to set the "From" name that your messages will come from. Config Manager is under Utilities on the main menu. To learn more about the Config Manager, click here.