Acquia Personalization - Chapter 1
Personalization is the most trendy need in the retail world. when we want to retain or make your customer more comfortable on your website. We should give them an impression of the users, we are understanding their needs. Without understanding their intention and interest, If we show the content to users, that doesn’t help businesses to be successful in the long run. Those content might be completely irrelevant to them. When we understand their interest, we will be able to serve them more relevant content to them.
Personalization is not a final strategy, It is a continuous learning!!!
ACQUIA is the most visible company in the enterprise market. They are in the market to serve the purpose of drupal users. All the products of them, it is mostly dependent on Drupal. In another way we can say, they understanding the drupal user needs in 360-degree angle and serving them relevant products. In the list, Personalization (Formally Acquia Lift) is a product for website personalization. ACQUIA Personalization can also be used in the non-drupal system. But in this post, we will be going through completely about drupal website personalization.
What is Personalization?
Personalization is unified customer data and profiles information from different resource to provide in-context and personalized content across any device.
Personalization is called one-to-one customer experience. It doesn’t mean that we will be serving content for individual customers. We will be serving the cumulative customer interesting content. To make it a more efficient way of personalization. We need to observe their interest and activity throughout the website journey.
Let's assume, I don’t have a personalization experience on my website.
What will be the content for the customer?
Very generic content, which might be nowhere related to my interested items/topics. For example, I am insterested to buy beauty cosmetic products, but the website shows the content of the home appliance.
How customer will feel when a website showing a particular product/service related content, which is nowhere related to their need?
I doesn’t want to continue the website journey. I will be looking for a better websites, which understands my needs.
Acquia approaches is crawl, walk, and run…
CRAWL - When Acquia personalization is installed on the website, it starts to collect information about the website in terms of visitors, location, browser, and device information.
WALK - Once your information is being collected by personalization. We will be able to understand the customer's intention and interesting areas. The complete journey of the customer on the website will be able to easily walk through and creating the personalized content for the respective customers.
RUN - Run through all the information about the customer, which is collected through different mediums like email campaigns, website, and CRM information. Which put together to build the omnichannel marketing targets.
The below example about video streaming websites. It will explain to us the actual use case of the crawl, walk and run,
- Viewed content X times - Mr.X is a hero, his videos viewed 1M times by 100 users. We will recommend more Mr.X videos as recommended content for those 100 users.
- Browsing Behaviour - One of the users has visited more Indian politics videos than other categories of content. We will highlight the content of Indian politics more to the specific user.
- Event-based - When the user watching the video, the site will show you a couple of advertisements. If he clicked on one of the ads. We will show more ads in the same category to the user. For e.g, if he clicked on a jewelry shop advertisement, next visit for the user we will recommend a similar kind of advertisement.
How does it work?
Personalization will work based on real-time data of the individual customers. It is not a one-time process, continuous learning about the customer journey and intent. To make this happen, we need to install certain modules in the drupal website to establish the connectivity between the drupal site and the personalization tool. Those modules are the Acquia lift module and Acquia content hub.
composer config repositories.drupal composer https://packages.drupal.org/8
composer update
composer require drupal/acquia_lift:~3.0composer config repositories.drupal composer https://packages.drupal.org/8
composer require drupal/acquia_contenthub:~1
What is a Profile manager?
It is an interface where you can see all the data are collected by the personalization module in the drupal website. It will give you the entire user journey understanding with their data on the website. You can create a rich personal profile of your visitors. These are the components of profile managers like Segments, Events, Slots, and Rules. Which will help us to achieve the personalization target.
What is Segment?
Groups of users, who has a common charactertics. Segments will be created using marketing campaign url, previous page behaviour, Geo location and other similar attributes.
What is Events?
Events are refer to the action of the users in the website like registration, login, clicking links, etc …
What is Slots?
Slot is the section in the website you configure to show the personalized content.
What is Rules?
A rules define the content to display to a given person in a given slot for a particular segment. There is chance person can be belongs to multiple segments at the same time, rules will priorized relatively each other.
Steps to connect profile manager with drupal instance
- Login to Profile manager using your ACQUIA personalization credentials.
- Go to Admin > Manage configuration data > Customer sites
- Select “Add new customer site”
- Fill the form with the following details like Name(Friendly name), External Id(It should be lower case and underscores, better avoid special characters), and URL(Optional) and save your form.
- Go to drupal instance Acquia Lift setting page, Enter the Site id as External Id, which we provided on profile manager.
- Along with external id, we should enter the other details like Account id, Assets URL, and Decision API URL. If your unsure about those details, please go back to Profile manager > Admin > Manage customers.
- After completing the above steps. Make sure, the site is connected with ACQUIA Personalization. Go to the home page of the website > “View source of the page”
Finally, you can ensure the profile manager is started tracking your information. Go to your browser cookies, find the “tc_ptid” and copy the value of it. Paste that value to Profile manager > People. You should be able to find the information on visitor information.
Track the user activity in the Profile manager
Each activity of the user can be tracked using the People section in the profile manager. Every action of the user on the website, we will consider as touches of the events.
They classified the touches into 3 ways,
- Playing a video
- Submitting a form
- Clicking a button.
Events can be created on Admin > Manage configuration data > Events
These events can be fired through Javascript / REST API. Events rollup into touches and Touches roll into unique visitors.
User Insights is the section, where we can observe the individual user information with different parameters like Content type, Persona, Content Sections, Keywords, and User-accessible rate of platforms either Desktop / Mobile.
Analytics information will give us an exact picture of all users and interactions with the website. It will provide an aggregate view of all user behavior. Based on the analytics information, we will be able to create more targeted personalization content for the segment. In addition to it, premium customers will get an option to “Explore data”. Which gives extensive system parsing data at our convenience.
The report is the major section, where we will able to extract all combinations of results including segments, events, goals, and peoples. These are the sections of the standard report, which are available in the profile manager.
- Conversions
- People
- Content
- Engagement
- Touches
- Events
- Segments
In the section, we have multiple fields of filter provision, where we can customize our parameters to mix and match. These are a couple of example fields to make more customization like goal name, slot name, rule name, etc … Each report has the option to Download them into different formats. If your premium customer, you will be able to create an own report with extensive fields and save the report template for future usage.
Let me close this post here. But I have some practical experiences to share with you including setup a slots, rules and goals for personalization. I don’t want to keep this post heavy. Will catch up soon on Chapter 2. See you soon…
