Profiling

You use profiling to track who visits your Web site content, the type of content they access, the specific Pages and Components they view, and the links they click. You use Tracking and Tracking Keys to implement profiling.

Tracking Keys
Tracking Keys provide insight into the type of content visitors access and so measure what content is interesting or uninteresting to your visitors. Tracking Keys provide a basis for you to personalize Web content. Tracking Keys track Keywords that are associated with content on your Web site to identify the type of content a visitor has viewed.
Tracking Keys have a numerical value that represents how often the user looked at that specific type of content. For example, you might specify that this Target Group should only contain users for whom the value for 'Sports' is higher than 100 (indicated a strong interest in sports).
Tracking
Tracking tracks the Pages and Components that a visitor requested and the Component Links that a visitor followed. Tracking information is collected for a specific time period: monthly, weekly, daily or hourly.
Profiling cookies
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, otherwise the visitor is identified using the cookie.
Profiling data stored in the Content Data Store
Tracking Keys and Tracking information gathered is stored in the Content Data Store: a Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle database. Depending on whether you have implemented Tracking Keys and/or Tracking, the following information is stored in the database:
  • Users—the User ID is used to identify each visitor for Customer Characteristics, Tracking Keys, Page visits, Component visits, and Component link visits.
  • Customer Characteristics—taken from customer databases or forms on the Web site
  • 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 information—Pages, Components, and Component Links that a visitor requests within a time frame.