Liferay’s Segmentation and Personalization shows the right content to the right people at the right time. It provides the tools you need to manage different audiences and dynamically provide personalized experiences for people using your site. For example, if you’re creating a campaign to promote new financial service products, you need a way to display offers to customers who are likely to be interested in those offers. You don’t want to display information on a basic free checking account for an “advanced” customer who carries a high balance across several types of accounts, but you do want to show that information to a visitor who entered the site through a landing page from a promotion at a local college. At the same time, you probably don’t want to recommend options for optimizing retirement account contributions to the college student, but the other customer might be a great target for that campaign. By using data like user attributes or visitor interactions, you can dynamically target relevant content to your site’s guests.
Defining Segments
The first part of the equation is defining the types of segments that you need. You can create Segments to capture every case. Segments are composed of different criteria. In the previous example you might have a segment for Free Checking Account Prospects that contains criteria based on user data, like customers that don’t currently have an open checking account; or based on user behavior, like visitors who came to the site through specific channels. To learn more about Segmentation options, see the overview of the Segment editor, practice creating basic Segments, or create more complicated Segments with custom fields and session data.
Integrating Segments with Analytics Cloud
There are two different stories that User Segments can tell. One is targeting content to specific audiences that encourages engagement and positive user experiences. The other is defining groups of users and visitors to analyze their behavior and interactions with your site. To tell the second story, you must integrate with Analytics Cloud.
Analytics Cloud is a Liferay service that provides in-depth information on who uses your site and how they use it. Analytics Cloud is a key component to fully utilizing Segments and Personalization, since it enables you to see the full picture of how users and visitors on your site behave and interact with both standard and targeted content. You can learn more about this in Using Analytics Cloud with User Segments.
Personalizing Experiences
The most important piece of the puzzle isn’t defining groups or analyzing user behavior. It’s the final step of using the data to provide users and site visitors with the best possible experience, and driving campaigns and content engagement. If you strategically create segments, you can then use that to enhance user experiences, and make sure that users see content targeted to them. Content Page Personalization and Content List Personalization are two key aspects of this.
Content Page Personalization
Content Page Personalization dynamically changes the page layout and content based on who is viewing the page. You can create Experiences for any Content Page which provide different text, images, widgets, and even different layouts based on the segment criteria of the user viewing the page. You can see a step by step demonstration of this in Content Page Personalization.
Content Set Personalization
Content Sets organize and display content. Content Set Personalization provides dynamic selection of Content Sets based on User Segments. This means the Content Set which displays in a given context is determined by their segment criteria. For example, you could use a content list to display “featured” articles at the top of a page. Then you could create Segments containing users who should receive more specialized content, rather than the default. Those Segments would then see content personalized to their interest rather than the default. You can see a step by step demonstration of this in Content Set Personalization.