Managing Campaigns

A campaign represents an effort to expose certain user segments to a set of assets within a specific period of time. To manage campaigns for a site, navigate to Site Administration → Configuration → Audience Targeting → Campaigns. To create a new campaign, select the () button. You need to select the user segments to target, a start date and an end date, and a priority, as well as a name and, optionally, a description. You also have to indicate whether or not the campaign you create should be active or inactive. When you’ve entered the required information, click Save. The user segments you select when creating a campaign represents the portal users targeted by the campaign. The start and end dates together specify the duration of the campaign. There can be multiple campaigns active at the same time that target the same user segments. In these situations, the priority attribute of the campaigns determines which campaign takes precedence. Finally, you can activate or deactivate a campaign via the Active attribute of a campaign. Deactivating a campaign disables the effect of the campaign within the portal. Deactivating a campaign is like deleting the campaign except that a deactivated campaign can be reactivated later. It can be useful to deactivate a campaign if a problem is found with the way content is being displayed. Once the problem has been corrected, the campaign can be reactivated.

Figure 1: Navigate to Site Administration and click *Configuration* → *Audience Targeting* → *Campaigns* to manage campaigns for a site.

For example, suppose you wanted the ability to display certain content (for example, advertisements about your new Android app) to female baseball fans during the months leading up to the World Series. To achieve this, you could use the Gender rule (configured to female), the Device Rule (configured for Android devices), and the Score Points rule to define a user segment called Female Baseball Fans. The Score points rule assigns 1 point to a user each time the user visits a page or views an asset categorized under the user segment Female Baseball Fans. When a user accumulates a certain number of points (specified by the value of the Score Points rule’s Score Points Threshold attribute), the user matches this rule. After creating this user segment, you would create a new campaign targeting this segment, select start and end dates, choose a priority, choose Active, and then click Save. To actually present content to the users belonging to the Female Baseball Fans user segment, you need to use the Campaign Content Display application.

Once you’ve created a campaign, you can open its summary view, which displays relevant data and configurations.

Figure 2: Select a pre-existing campaign to view its Summary page.

To configure permissions for creating, editing, and deleting user segments, visit the Roles section of the Control Panel. Then click on the Actions → Define Permissions button corresponding to the role you’d like to configure permissions for, and search for Audience Targeting.

Managing Campaign Priorities

The priority of your campaigns becomes important when multiple campaigns are running at the same time on your website. The Campaign Content Display application can be configured to display content based on the campaign your users match. When a user matches multiple campaigns, the one with the highest priority takes precedence.

If you have several Campaign Content Display applications around your website configured to display different content per campaign, changing the priority of one campaign automatically affects all the Campaign Content Display applications. Similarly, if a campaign is deactivated or if a campaign’s date range is exceeded, all of the Campaign Content Display applications on your website are affected.

Defining Metrics

One of the most interesting features of campaigns is that they allow you to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. This provides your marketing team with real feedback from users. When creating a campaign, you can define the user actions that you want to track. This can be done by defining Metrics.

Note: Metrics were previously known as Tracking Actions and were aggregated as part of the campaign editing options. Since Liferay DXP 7.0, Tracking Actions have been renamed to Metrics and are aggregated in custom reports. As part of the upgrade process to Liferay DXP 7.0, for each campaign containing Tracking Actions, a custom report with the equivalent Metrics is automatically added.

The Audience Targeting app can display reports of how often those actions are triggered. For example, suppose you want to run a campaign for an event that your company is hosting next month. For this event, imagine that you have created a main page for the event which contains a Youtube video and a banner which says Register Now. Imagine also that you have a blog entry about the event displayed on several different pages of your website and a Register page which contains the form to pay for the event. In this campaign, your goal is to get as many people to register as possible. However, you will probably be interested in tracking the following information to see if there is something not working as your team 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

Figure 3: Drag and drop metrics to the right to configure a campaign.

You can assign metrics to a campaign report, which is elaborated on in the next section. To access the Metrics palette, select a pre-existing campaign, select the Reports tab, and then 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.

The metrics use an analytics engine called Audience Targeting Analytics that can be configured per site or per Liferay DXP installation. You’ll learn about this next.

Audience Targeting Analytics

To configure the analytics engine per site, go to Site Administration and click Configuration → Site Settings → Advanced → Audience Targeting Analytics. To configure it per portal instance, go to Control Panel → Configuration → Instance 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 (even guest 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, Audience Targeting, by default, stores anonymous users’ behavior analytics. This stores a large amount of data to the database. If you’re not interested in tracking anonymous users, you can turn that functionality off for your Liferay DXP installation by disabling the Anonymous Users selector.

Figure 4: There's no need to track anonymous users if you're not interested in their behavior.

Disabling analytics for certain entities means you won’t track them using Audience Targeting. 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, navigate to the Control Panel → Configuration → System Settings → Web Experience and select Audience Targeting Analytics Storage. Fill out the external storage fields to point to your alternative database schema.

Figure 5: 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.

1. Navigate to the Control Panel → Apps → App Manager and select the Liferay Audience Targeting app suite.
2. Select the Options () button for the Analytics component and click Deactivate.
3. Select the Options () button for the Analytics component again and click Activate.

Now your analytics data is stored in an alternative database schema!

Next you’ll learn about Campaign Reports.

Campaign Reports

Reports are available for campaigns. You can select the campaign name and click the Reports tab to see the list of reports available. More reports can be created by developers and deployed as OSGi plugins. See the Reporting User Behavior with Audience Targeting tutorial for details. You can create a custom report by selecting the a campaign and clicking the Reports tab → Add Custom Report ().

The Content Views report shows the number of times that different assets have been viewed via the Campaign Content Display application by users in the context of the current campaign. For example, if you configured three Campaign Content Display applications around your website to display content for a campaign, the Content View report for the campaign would show how many times that content was interacted with by different users.

Figure 6: You can build your own custom campaign report to fit your needs.

You can track many other user actions by creating a custom report. You can drag and drop different kinds of metrics to track for your campaign, which shows the number of times each metric has been triggered by users. For a complete reference of all report metrics available, see the Audience Targeting Metrics tutorial.

Consider the example that we introduced earlier in the section on metrics: you’ve created a campaign for an event that your company will host soon. For this event, you have created a main page for the event which contains a Youtube video and a banner which says “Register Now”. You also have created a blog post about the event which is displayed on several different pages of your website. Lastly, you have a Register page which contains the form to pay for the event. For this example, a custom Metrics report could show you how many users visited the event page, how many watched the video, how many clicked on the banner, how many viewed the blog post about the event, how many started filling the registration form, etc. This information helps you measure the effectiveness of your campaign. You can use this information to evaluate whether or not the users are following the engagement path you had prepared.

Figure 7: This campaign report displays several event types for content in the campaign.

The metrics you apply to a report can be tracked in several different ways. For instance, if you added the YouTube Videos metric to your report, you have several different event types to track. Some adminstrators may be interested in how many users played the video, while others are only interested in those that finished the video. You can track these events with the Event type field. You even have the option to track all events, if your interested in all the metrics for an option.