The Personalization service stores information about visitors by using a person profile. The profile is structured to collect data about persons (information specifically about the visitor), events (captured visitor actions from a website or other location), and touches (a group of associated events that occur no more than 30 minutes apart from one another).
Although some of the fields in the person profile are required by Personalization for its operation (for example, geographic and device-related information stored in the touch), you can use certain fields to store additional data that you may want to use for personalization—for example, information about gender for your visitors. The Personalization service includes a certain number of custom fields for each type of this information:
The method by which Personalization does this is to create an alias
(also known as a column name) for your custom data to an existing data
structure element, which you are reassigning to collect and store the
data that you require. For example, custom field 10
in the Person
table might have the alias of gender
. Personalization displays
gender
as the field name in the person profile and in the segment
builder.
To view the custom field aliases that have already been configured for your Personalization environment, complete the following steps:
Personalization displays a list of the current aliases for your environment. To search for specific meta data items, complete the following steps:
The list of aliases displayed by Personalization contains several pieces of information:
Column | Description |
---|---|
Display name | The name of the column meta data item |
Table | The table to which this column meta data item belongs |
Display order | The order in which this column meta data item appears in the Properties section of the Person Detail page |
Is visible in person detail | Whether this particular column meta data item is listed in the Person Detail section of Personalization Web. For more information about the meta data items that are visible in this section of Personalization, see Examining visitor information |
Is segmentable | Whether this column meta data item can be used as criteria in a segment to track website visitors’ behavior |
Is rankable | Whether this column meta data item can be used to track the number of times that every permutation of values in this column has occurred, such as how many times a visitor has accessed your website, ranked by the type of platform on which the visitor accessed your website |
Description | An explanation of the column meta data item’s properties, purpose, and possible uses |
Actions | Additional steps you can take regarding this column meta data item, including deleting it |
Using the column names page, you can add new column names and edit or remove already existing column names.
Important
Do not modify the values for the following custom fields and their corresponding Accessors column. These fields are used by Personalization for internal data collection.
To add a new column name, complete the following steps:
Sign in to Personalization and click the Configure tab.
From the left menu, click Column Meta Data.
Click the Add new column meta data link.
Enter values in the following fields:
Display Name: Descriptive name for the column meta data used for display in Personalization. You can’t update the value specified in this field once you have saved the details.
Display Order: The order in which the column meta data appears in the Properties section of the Person detail page.
Table: Name for the table in Omnichannel. You can’t update the value specified in this field once you have saved the details.
Accessor: Method name used to retrieve the value of the column meta data. You can’t update the value specified in this field once you have saved the details.
Type: Available data types of the column meta data value (based on the selected Table and Accessor), which controls how you want the data to be displayed and managed:
You can’t update the value specified in the Type field once you have saved the details.
Is Visible In Person Detail checkbox: Select the checkbox to display a visitor’s value for the column meta data item in the Properties section of the Person detail page in Personalization.
If you want to create segments based on the values stored in the column, click the Segmentable checkbox, and then enter values for the following fields:
If you want the values stored in the column to be ranked, select the Rankable checkbox, and then enter values for the following fields:
If you want the column meta data to be visible on the Insights tab of the Person detail page, select the Rankable checkbox, and then enter values for the following fields:
Click Save.
To edit a column name, complete the following steps:
To remove a column name, complete the following steps: