Personas and Footprints

Use personas and Footprints to let the user see a Web page as another user, or as if other conditions applied.

Personas

A persona is a fictional Contact that represents a target demographic. You can create these fictional Contacts in Content Manager Explorer. By defining an Address Book of fictional Contacts, you turn that Address Book into a set of personas. These personas appear in the dropdown in the Preview tab of the ribbon toolbar.

Footprints

A Footprint is a specific property of a browsing session, such as the browser being used, the geographic location from which the Web page is accessed, and so on. Combine Footprints, set to specific values, into a Footprint Set to enable the user to see what the Web page would look like if those conditions would apply.

SDL Tridion supplies a number of built-in Footprints. You can also create your own custom Footprints. In either case, a user who selects a Footprint Set only sees changes to the page if your Web page can respond to the changed set of conditions. A Footprint refers to a Claim in the Ambient Data Framework that should trigger a change on the Web page. Typically, you would use SmartTarget for this, and this means that you must ensure a Trigger Type is configured that responds to the Claim. For more information about Trigger Types and how to configure them, refer to the SmartTarget documentation.

This overview shows for which built-in Footprints a Trigger Type is already configured in the supported SmartTarget release:

Footprint nameTrigger Type already set up?
Browser Typeyes
Content Languageno
Recurring Visitorno
Operating Systemyes
Search Termno
Session Lengthyes
Session Referrer URLyes