Personalization collects information on your website visitors. This information includes, but isn’t limited to, location, first time visitor, device type, and browser type. The attributes are stored in the visitor profile identified by the cookie ID.

To segment and target users based on the content they are interested in, you can use URLs for common strings. You can also leverage Drupal taxonomy on content to build a more robust view of a visitor’s favorite topics of content.

See Data warehouse for full instructions for mapping taxonomies in Personalization.

Using field mappings

In Personalization, there are three default field mappings, based on Drupal taxonomies, that are the foundation of content tagging in Personalization.

• Persona
• Content section
• Keywords

The taxonomy terms used under the headings can be set according to your website’s needs. You may have existing taxonomies matching these mappings, or you can create new taxonomies to use specifically with Personalization. To use a different taxonomy mapping, see Mapping taxonomy terms to Personalization.

Persona

In Personalization, a persona is a distinct audience for your content. A website visitor may only have one persona, but the persona may change over time.

For example, a fitness website may have two high-level personas, with differing motivations:

• Active Mom: Motivated by messaging about nutrition and exercise for families and children
• Elite Athlete: Motivated by content about competitions and research into new diet and exercise trends

For example, if a visitor to your website engages with Elite Athlete content more than they engage with Active Mom content, the visitor would fall into the Elite Athlete persona. Although visitors can only fall into a single persona at a time, a visitor’s persona can change over time if their content consumption habits change on your website.

Content should be tagged with a persona only if the content is applicable to that persona. If a content item is relevant to more than one persona, such as an About Us page, it shouldn’t be tagged with a persona.

Content section

The Content section field enables you to tag your content by topic, allowing Personalization to identify the types of content a visitor likes, and serve them more of their favored content. Content should be tagged with only one or (at most) several terms from the vocabulary linked to the Content section field.

For example, a fitness website contains a Drupal taxonomy called Activity linked to the Content section field in Personalization and includes the following terms:

yoga, running, strength, cycling, swimming

A particular piece of content on the website can be tagged with any subset of the terms for Activity. Single terms or several terms are acceptable, such as:

• strength AND cycling
• yoga AND running
• strength

If a visitor primarily viewed content tagged strength, Personalization would identify the visitor’s favorite Activity content section as strength.

Acquia recommends you handle most of your tags as a Content section. The first time you set up tags in Personalization, you will be asked to complete a set of field mappings. The first Content section is configured in the existing Field Mapping section, and you can create other content sections as needed. See Data warehouse for more detail.

Other content sections are displayed under User Defined Field Mappings and Event Mappings, starting with Context to map to the event_udf4 field.

Keywords

Keywords provide you with more flexibility with your content tagging. Keywords are best used for terms changing seasonally or with trends. For example, the fitness website may use the keyword Zika Virus because it’s a trending news topic, but not a topic that will always have much content. Similarly, you can use tags such Annual 5k, Meditation, and Business Travel.

Keywords can also be used for topics you may want to use for a persona or content section in the future.

Understanding content tagging with Personalization