To provide your marketing team with real feedback from users, you can define the user actions you want to track using Metrics. Metrics are used in reports to measure the effectiveness of a campaign by tracking certain user actions.
Metrics filter the analytics data gathered by the Audience Targeting Analytics engine to obtain the number of times a certain action was performed on a given element or content by users and their user segments.
Metrics are created by developers and deployed as extensions. Out of the box, Audience Targeting includes metrics to track the most common user actions. These metrics are described below.
Content
Tracks the number of times content has been viewed. Use the content selector to set the content to be tracked.
Page
Tracks the number of times a selected page has been viewed. You can track views on both both public or private pages.
Form
Tracks how many users view a form, interact with it (i.e., type or select values in the inputs), or submit it. If you select the All option from the Event type field, the custom report shows the figures for the three events simultaneously. You must also provide the form you want to track, which is selectable from the Form metric.
Link
Tracks how often links are clicked. This helps campaign administrators determine if they’re sufficiently visible or helpful.
Similar to forms, you must provide the ID of the link you want to track. If you don’t know it, you can inspect the HTML of the page where the link is and extract this information.
YouTube Videos
Tracks how users interact with embedded YouTube videos. You must enter the
video’s ID. You can extract this ID from the video URL as the value for the v
parameter. For instance, in the URL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EPZxIC5ogU the YouTube video ID is
2EPZxIC5ogU. Then select one of the available events, or All to track all of
them. For further reference on the meaning of these events, read the official
YouTube API documentation.
Notice that this option only works if the YouTube video is embedded as an iframe. The iframe code is available from the YouTube video’s Share → Embed menu.
Using Metrics
Suppose you want to run a campaign for an event that your company is hosting next month. You have created a main page for the event with a YouTube video and a Register Now banner. You also have a blog entry about the event displayed on several different pages and a Register page with the form to pay for registration. In this campaign, your goal is to get as many people to register as possible, but there is other information you want to track to ensure that everything is working as expected:
- Visits to the main page of the event
- Clicks to view the video
- Number of users who watched the video until the end
- Clicks on the Register Now banner
- Views of the blog entry about the event
- Views of the Register form
- Number of users who started to fill out the Register form
- Number of users who completed the registration
You can assign metrics to a campaign report, which is elaborated on in the next section. To access the Metrics palette,
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Go to a pre-existing campaign.
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Select the Reports tab.
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Add a custom report.
The Metrics palette is accessible at the bottom of the New Report wizard.
You could drag and drop metrics from the palette to track all the actions mentioned above. More types of metrics can be created by developers and deployed as OSGi plugins. See the Tracking User Actions with Audience Targeting tutorial for details.
Audience Targeting Analytics
Metrics uses the Audience Targeting Analytics engine that can be configured per site or per Liferay DXP installation.
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To configure the analytics engine per Site, go to Site Administration and click Configuration → Site Settings → Advanced → Audience Targeting Analytics.
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To configure it per portal instance, Go to Control Panel → Configuration → System Settings → Audience Targeting Analytics.
The following analytics options are available:
- Anonymous Users (not available per site)
- Pages
- Content
- Forms
- Form Views
- Form Interactions
- Form Submits
- Links
- YouTube Videos
Tracking all the actions of all your users can be a heavy load for your server. Therefore, it’s best to disable tracking any actions about which you don’t need information. For example, by default, guest behavior analytics are tracked. This stores a large amount of data to the database. If you’re not interested in tracking guest users,
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Disable the Anonymous Users selector.
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Click Save.
If you want to collect anonymous user data, but you are still mindful of database resources, you can change the interval for how often anonymous data is cleaned up. You can find the anonymous data storage setting under Audience Targeting Service.
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Check Interval and Check Time Unit define how often data cleanup takes place. If interval is set to 1 and unit is set to Day then the clean up task occurs once per day.
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Max Age and Max Age Time Unit define how old the data must be to be deleted, so that data created immediately before the cleanup task is not immediately deleted. If the age was set to 10 and the unit set to Hour, any data older than 10 hours is removed, and any data less than 10 hours old is preserved until the next cleanup.
Figure 1: You can manage anonymous data cleanup here.
Disabling analytics for certain entities means they aren’t tracked. Carefully manage analytics to optimize your Audience Targeting experience.
You can also store your analytics data in a separate database schema, which allows for independent scalability. To separate the storage of analytics data from Liferay’s database schema,
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Navigate to the Control Panel → Configuration → System Settings → Web Experience
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Select Audience Targeting Analytics Storage.
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Fill out the external storage fields to point to your alternative database schema.
Figure 2: By filling out the external storage requirements, you configure your Audience Targeting analytics data to be stored in an alternative database schema.
Once you’ve saved your external datasource configuration, you must restart the Audience Targeting Analytics component.
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Navigate to the Control Panel → Apps → App Manager and select the Liferay Audience Targeting app suite.
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Select the Options (
) button for the Analytics component and click Deactivate.
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Select the Options (