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 (that is, an Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database). Customer Characteristics are associated with a specific user ID. Customer Characteristics usually consist of name-value pairs.
You collect Customer Characteristics directly from a visitor through a Web form or are taken from a CRM database. The information is not automatically gathered by SDL Web, but needs to be implemented by API calls on the Presentation Server. The Profiling & Personalization API enables you to use Customer Characteristics that you have gathered about specific visitors in conjunction with Tracking Keys in order to personalize Web content.
For example, if your Customer Characteristics include the user's age, you can specify that this Target Group should only contain users in the 19-to-24 age bracket by saying that the Age property must have a value larger than 18, and lower than 25.
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.
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. You can choose to hide or show content for a specific visitor (personalization) based on their membership of a Target Group. Membership of a Target Group depends on a combination of Customer Characteristics and Tracking Keys criteria.
You can define Target Groups based solely on the Tracking Keys you have defined, although you must then first collect data about a visitor's browsing behavior before you can offer them personalized content.