Although Personalization allows you to view information about your website visitors while serving them personalized content, you can track other pieces of information about your visitors, across different applications. You may already have a business analytics application allowing you to combine information about your visitors and subscribers to draw better insights about their behaviors. You can create export files of recent Personalization visitor information you can later use in your applications.
Export files can contain up to 31 days of visitor data, consisting of their person, event, and touch information. These files are saved to your assigned Amazon S3 directory.
Creating an export file
To create a visitor information export file, complete the following steps:
- Sign in to Personalization as an administrator, and then click Configure.
- Click the Import/Export link.
- At the bottom of the webpage, click Export data.
In the From field, select a beginning date for the information in the export file. The export file will contain all selected information from the current date to midnight of the beginning date you select.
Note
You can’t select dates more than 31 days in the past.
- In the Data Exports section, select one or more of the following check boxes to decide which information to export:
- Person: Visitors uniquely identified with first-party cookies, their email addresses, or some other identifier.
- Touch: A series of contiguous events (such as content views) with a duration between events of no more than 30 minutes.
- Event: Discrete visitor actions, such as a content view of an article or a click-through on a subscription offer.
- Rankings: Links to the Person, Touch, and Event tables separated by metadata classifications. For example, the
person_rankingtable can track the number of times a person has accessed a webpage by platform. - Matched Segment: A list of the events and segments associated with each segment, linking the Segments table to the Event table.
- Segment: A list of the segments defined in the Personalization service, synchronized with the configuration database.
In the Identifier Types section, select one or more of the following checkboxes to limit the export file’s results to display information from visitors with the selected identity properties:
- Purged: Displays results for visitors with an associated tracking ID purged from the database.
- Email Address: Displays results for visitors with an associated email address.
- Tracking ID: Displays results for visitors with an associated tracking cookie ID.
- Account ID: Displays results for visitors with an associated account ID, which can be an identifier from another tracking system.
- Facebook ID: Displays results for visitors with an associated Facebook username.
- Twitter ID: Displays results for visitors with an associated Twitter username.
- Name: Displays results for visitors with an entered name, including first, middle, last, or any combination.
Note
The Identifier Types section also includes any custom identifier types you have added to the subscriber.
- Click OK.
Personalization begins to export your requested information. Depending on your selections in the Data Exports section, the Personalization service will create a file for each export option, with filenames including the selected option.
The Import/Export webpage will update the list of files with each of the new pending export files. The export file creation process can take some time to complete.
To refresh the list of files and their statuses, click Find on the webpage.
Note
Entering values in the fields at the top of the page can limit the displayed file results. If your export file isn’t displayed on the page after clicking Find, clear the filter fields at the top of the webpage, and then click Find again.
After the Personalization service completes an export file, it changes the file’s status to Complete, and you can download the file.
Retrieving your export file
Personalization saves completed export files to an Amazon S3 directory associated with your account. To download your export file, complete the file retrieval steps described in Amazon S3 file management with Personalization.
Examining the export file
To ensure other applications can read the export file’s data as expected, Personalization adds escape characters ( \ ) to the export file. For more information, see Amazon S3 file management with Personalization.