Personalization
Personalization lets you use the information gathered through profiling to define types of Web visitors and to mark content as being only interesting for a specific type. You implement Personalization by creating Target Groups, and associating Component Presentations on a Page with one or more of these Target Groups.
To implement personalization, you need to decide what kinds of Target Groups you can distinguish among your Web site visitors and when you create Target Groups whether you want to involve external data (Customer Characteristics) about the people who will be accessing your Web site. (You can also choose not to use Customer Characteristics for Personalization.)
- Customer Characteristics
- Customer Characteristics are properties of your customers that you have collected and stored in the Content Data Store (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or DB2 database). Customer Characteristics are associated with a specific user ID. Customer Characteristics usually consist of name-value pairs.
- Target Groups
- Target Groups are categories of visitors. 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.