Concepts in Profiling and Personalization

The concepts involved in Profiling and Personalization are Tracking Keys; Tracking; Users; Customer Characteristics; and Time Frames.

Profiling

In conjunction with explicit profile information that you may be gathering for your visitors (such as information gathered from Web forms), you can use Profiling & Personalization to track the types of content that a visitor accesses, and the specific Pages, Components, and links that a visitor uses.

To perform profiling, use the following software tools:

Tracking Keys

Tracking Keys identify the type of content a visitor has viewed. Tracking Key values are increased or decreased based on the content on the Pages that a visitor accesses.

Tracking

Tracking information tracks the Pages and Components that a visitor requested. Tracking information is time period-specific and can be used to obtain Web site statistics for specific time periods. Using Tracking, you can track:

  • Pages requested by a visitor
  • Components viewed by a visitor
  • Component Links that have been followed by a visitor

Tracking Keys and Tracking identify individual visitors using cookies. When a visitor accesses your site, Profiling & Personalization checks if the visitor has a cookie:

  • if not, a cookie is generated, which maps to a newly created record for the visitor
  • if so, the visitor is identified using the cookie

The Tracking Key and Tracking information that you gather is stored on a SQL-type (Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Oracle) database. Depending on what you have implemented (Tracking Keys and/or Tracking), the following information is stored in the Content Broker database:

Users
Information about your visitor. The User ID is used to identify each visitor for Customer Characteristics, Tracking Keys, Page visits, Component visits, and Component link visits.
Customer Characteristics
This is information that you may be gathering using a Web form or other direct visitor input. This information is not automatically gathered by SDL Tridion, but needs to be implemented by API calls on the Presentation Server.
Tracking Keys
Values of the Tracked Keywords. Depending upon your configuration, values for Keywords are increased or decreased depending on what a visitor accesses on your site.
Tracking
Pages, Components, and Component Links that a visitor requests within a time frame.
Time frames
Time frames are used by Tracking (not by Tracking Keys). For example, time frames can be used to identify what the peak Web site use is after you change your home page.

Personalization

You can use the profiling information to define Target Groups. Target Groups are categories of visitors. For example, you might define a Target Group for women between the ages of 30 and 50 who have shown interest in Graphic Design Software.

When you define a Target Group, you identify the Customer Characteristics and Tracking Key information that corresponds with visitor profiles. You then associate Target Groups with Component Presentations on Pages. When these Pages are published and a known visitor visits the Page, the visitor sees only the Component Presentations that match the visitor's profile.