Personalization

With the personalization module, you can create profiles, and profile your visitors by their activities on your website, and by the way they access it. Even if the visitors are not registered users.

You can then use template tags to personalize the content shown to your profiles.

You could, for instance:

Create personalized recommendations on completing a purchase
Show personalized content on the front page, based on Google search terms
Float profile-relevant products to the top of your web shop
Show campaign-related products for customers who have been referred to your site by a specific advertising campaign

In this manner, you can create personalized experiences for your visitors, increasing their satisfaction, and your conversion rate.

Watch a very short video introduction to Personalization below:

Personalization requires the Personalization module, which must be purchased separately.

For more information, contact your partner – or get in touch with our salespeople here.

Content personalization is an incredibly powerful tool, and requires careful planning.

You DON’T want users to buy one thing, get 20 profile points for the ‘ladies’ profile, and then never be able to see men’s products again.

To avoid most problems, make sure that:

DON’T personalize your entire website – stick to personalizing key areas
DO make sure there’s a "way out" of your personalized content
DON’T stop people from finding what they need today, based on what they needed yesterday

Basic Concepts

In this section, you will learn about:

Creating new personalization profiles
Personalizing content
Getting an overview of all your personalized content

Getting started with personalization

To get started with personalization:

Click Marketing on your accordion
Click Personalization on your marketing tree (Figure 3.1)

Figure 3.1 Finding the personalization tool on your marketing tree

From here, you can:

Create new profiles
Look at profile usage

Personalization Profiles

Personalization revolves around profiles.

A user can have one primary and several secondary profiles. If a user belongs to a certain profile, and which profile is primary and secondary, is determined by how many points they accumulate by their behavior on your site.

Points can be awarded on the basis on recognition rules - defined in the personalization profile settings - and by the actions of the visitor on your website, if you have defined personalization profile points for specific actions.

You can then use template tags and content specific personalization to show customized content, based on the primary and the secondary profiles of a visitor.

Creating a personalization profile

To create a personalization profile:

Click Create new profile on your marketing tree (Figure 5.1)
Specify a name and description for the profile
Select a number of recognition rules appropriate for the profile (if any)
Save the profile

Figure 5.1 Creating a new personalization profile

Adding recognition rules

You do not need to add recognition rules to a profile, to use it as a dynamic profile. If you simply create a profile with a name and a description, you can award profile points on specific content, without using recognition rules at all. Read more below, under personalizing content.

Recognition rules help define a profile, by adding profile points to a visitor session even before they take any actions on your site.

When creating or editing a personalization profile, you will see the regognition rules area (Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2 The recognition rules area

To add a recognition rule, simply:

Drag and drop the rule from the Available rules section to the Selected rules section
Specify conditions and values for the rule (if any are needed)

The rules available to you are:

Check for external advertising campaign, medium, source or term.
Check for IP addresses, either individual or in a range
Check if a user is logged in to their extranet account
Check if a visitor comes from a mobile device
Check if a user is a returning visitor
Check the user agent language, i.e. the language of the visitor’s browser’s user interface
Check if the visitor is a member of a smart search user group
Check the referrer URL
Check the target language (website) of the visitor (based on website language settings)

Configuring and removing recognition rules

Once you have added a recognition rule, you may have to configure it.

To configure a rule:

Select a condition – such as equal to, contains, or starts with. The conditions available to you depend on the individual rule.
Type or select a value for the rule to be checked against

Rules that are binary values (is logged in, is mobile device, is returning visitor) do not need a condition or value.

Hover your mouse over Actions in the Edit column to move a rule up or down, customize the point value of the rule returning true for the visitor, or to remove the rule:

Figure 7.1 Recognition rule actions

If you are running an advertisement campaign with Google Analytics, you can use the advertising recognition rules to profile visitors who have been referred to your website from that campaign. Do so by implementing the campaign variables utm_campaign, utm_medium, utm_source and utm_term from Google Analytics.

Example: You send out a marketing email every month with special offers on certain products. When you link people to your website in that email, the href value could look like this:

http://www.mycompany.com/?utm_source =monthly_newsletter&utm_campaign=January&utm_medium=email

When a new visitor arrives on your website through the campaign link, they will be allocated 10 profile points, and you can now customize the content shown to them even before they take any actions (Figure 7.2)

Recognition rules to listen for the variables:

Figure 7.2 Using recognition rules to listen for Google adwords variables

Grouping recognition rules

Recognition rules can be grouped, giving you even more control over your profile point distribution (Figure 8.1).

To group rules, simply:

Select the rules you want to group by clicking their checkboxes
On your content tab, select all must apply or any must apply, whichever is appropriate

Figure 8.1 Grouping recognition rules

Once grouped, your rules will look similar to Figure 8.2.

Figure 8.2 Grouped recognition rules

Note that points for rule-groups are awarded for the whole group, not per rule – hence why the examples above say ‘Total points: 1’, even if the rules before being grouped had a total point value of 3.

Personalizing content

Content personalization consists of two things:

Making content exclusive to certain profiles
Awarding personalization profile points for interacting with content

You can personalize both paragraphs, pages and products. Here’s how!

Personalizing pages

To personalize a page:

Right-click on the page in the Content tree and select page properties (Figure 10.1)

Figure 10.1 Personalize pages by customizing page prooperties

Go to the Advanced tab (Figure 10.2)

Figure 10.2 Page Properties - advanced tab

You can now access the Personalize and Add profile points buttons for the page.

Click Personalize on a page, to see the personalization settings window (Figure 10.3).

Figure 10.3 The personalization settings window

From the personalization settings window, you can:

Enable personalization by selecting a preset or specifying your personalization settings manually
If you choose manual specification, you must decide to personalize the content based on only the primary profile of the visitor, or on any recognized profile
Select if you want to show or hide the content from your personalization profiles
Once you have configured the settings to your liking, click OK to apply the personalization
- You can also save the settings as a preset, to be used in other places

Besides custom personalization profiles, you can also always select ‘Not profiled users’. Keep in mind that many of your visitors will not be profiled, and that you should also have content for them!

When a page has been personalized, it will show a little person-icon in your content tree (Figure 11.3).

This makes it easy to recognize personalized content at a glance - or you can use the Profile Usage overview

Figure 11.3 Personalized pages can be recognized by the little person-icon next to them

Personalizing paragraphs

To personalize a paragraph:

Go to your paragraph
Go to the Marketing tab

Figure 12.1 Go to the marketing tab of your paragraph to personalize it

You can now access the Personalize and Add profile points buttons for the product or paragraph

When you click Personalize on a paragraph, you will see the personalization settings window (Figure 12.2).

Figure 12.2 The personalization settings window

From this window, you can:

Enable personalization by selecting a preset or specifying your personalization settings manually
If you choose manual specification, you must decide to personalize the content based on only the primary profile of the visitor, or on any recognized profile
Select if you want to show or hide the content from your personalization profiles
Once you have configured the settings to your liking, click OK to apply the personalization
- You can also save the settings as a preset, to be used in other places

Besides custom personalization profiles, you can also always select ‘Not profiled users’. Keep in mind that many of your visitors will not be profiled, and that you should also have content for them!

Once a paragraph has been personalized, you will see a little personalization icon and description next to content (Figure 13.2). This makes it easy to recognize personalized content at a glance - or use the Profile Usage overview.

Figure 13.2 A little person-icon next to a paragraph means that it has been personalized

Personalizing products

To personalize a product:

Go to your product
Go to the Marketing tab

Figure 14.1 Personalize a paragraph by navigating to the marketing tab

You can now access the Personalize and Add profile points buttons for the product.

When you click Personalize on a product, you will see personalization settings window for products (Figure 14.2).

Figure 14.2 The personalization settings window for products

From this window, you can:

Enable personalization by selecting a preset or specifying your personalization settings manually
If you choose manual specification, you must decide to personalize the content based on only the primary profile of the visitor, or on any recognized profile
Select for which profiles you want to float this product to the top and for which you want it to be shown in the default manner
Once you have configured the settings to your liking, click OK to apply the personalization
- You can also save the settings as a preset, to be used in other places

Once a paragraph has been personalized, you will see a little personalization icon and description next to content (Figure 15.2). This makes it easy to recognize personalized content at a glance – or use the Profile Usage overview.

Figure 15.2 A little person-icon next to a product means that it has been personalized

Adding profile points from content

All content can be configured, so that a user viewing or interacting with it received personalization profile points.

To add profile points to content, click Add profile points from the marketing tab (paragraphs and products) or advanced tab (pages).

You will see the add profile points window (Figure 16.1).

Figure 16.1 Add profile points to content by using the sliders for each personalization profile

From here you can:

Choose between using a preset or specifying profile points awarded manually
Assign profile points to a profile by moving the slider for the profile to the right
Save your manual selection to use as a preset somewhere else