ACQUIA Personalization - Chapter 2
I am more excited to meet you all again in Chapter 2 of ACQUIA Personalization. If you missed reading Chapter 1.
Recap on the last chapter (1)
1. Understanding the personalization
2. Acquia approaches on personalization tool
3. Components of Acquia personalization
4. Installing Acquia personalization on the drupal website
5. Confirming Acquia personalization activation on your drupal website
6. Finally Events and Report abilities.
Agenda for the present chapter (2)
1. Composer tips on installation of drupal modules of personalization and content hub
2. Configuration screen values walkthrough
3. Other features of Acquia personalization interface
4. Content hub roles and their connectivity in Segments and Slots.
5. The architectural flow between Drupal website and Acquia Personalization
Marketing getting tougher than before, we need to understand the client's mind second by second. After you understand the client's expectations, we should provide what they need. Acquia personalization has very closer ways of those monitoring techniques and equipped.
ACQUIA provides the very best way of personalization on smoother implementation with better control over different aspects. Always need not be understand the needs of the customer by one-to-one discussion. Can understand using one-to-one superintend. I am sure, Acquia personalization do’s that.
Let's get into a few more technical chunks of works, to complete our installation and activation of the personalization tool on the drupal website.
Composer installation with dependencies
In the last chapter, I have mentioned a couple of commands for composer installation for personalization 3. With this chapter, we will see the detailed installation of version 4. Before we execute the “composer require” we should pull in the source of the drupal repository. The below command will help us a complete sequence of commands to do the installation of the personalization module including a content hub with dependencies.
ACQUIA Personalization Installationscomposer config repositories.drupal composer https://packages.drupal.org/8composer updatecomposer require drupal/acquia_lift:~4.0Content Hub Installationscomposer config repositories.drupal composer https://packages.drupal.org/8composer updatecomposer require drupal/acquia_contenthub:~2
If you already using the Acquia personalization with version 3, below are the steps to upgrade yourself with the latest.
How do I upgrade Personalization from 3 to 4?
Step 1: Raise a support ticket asking to upgrade your account from 3 to 4
Step 2 : Login to https://app.lift.acquia.com/
Step 3 : Add your website (Configure > Sites)
Step 4 : Go back to Dashboard > Migrate, Select the way to migrate (Entire exists account / Specific Site / Specific Rules)
Step 5 : Select one of the option to Migrate, “Confirm” to import to Personalization 4.
Step 6 : Go to your Drupal instance > ACQUIA lift configuration / Settings.php. Please update the Assets URL as https://builder.lift.acquia.com
That's it. We are done with Upgrade your existing personalization account to 4.
This chapter has been constructed completely on top of Version 4.
Configuring your site with Acquia personalization
After you executed the installation command, navigate(http://<hostname>/admin/config/services/acquia-lift) to the drupal administrator panel to configure the Acquia lift and content hub.
To get these credentials, we should be logged in to the Acquia personalization account to grab this information. This information will not be available ready, we should create a site in the Acquia account with Name(site name), Site Id (It is user choice, but it should be unique for each site.), and URL(It should be the public exposed domain name of your site. eg: https://example.com).
In the above screen, you can see the required information to be configured for the drupal instance. When you compare Version 3 to 4, the major difference in the configuration on Assets URL.
Another important configuration to enable content hub connectivity. The content replacement option in the configuration is most important to place personalized content based on customer data. To keep this most effective you should be opted the configuration values as “Trusted”.
After you have configured the above screen credentials to your drupal instance. Personalization will call on the page load to get the unique identity value for every account. [window.acquialift.liftwebidentity]. This identity value you can use in the profile manager to track the website activity. Using the Drush command(drush cget acquia_lift.settings) you can see all the ACQUIA lift configuration values in one shot.
When you did the configuration for personalization, we should be getting into configuring the content hub. It is intermediate between personalization and drupal instance, where you can share your data across the site and keep the content on the cloud.
What is Content Hub?
A content hub has a module, which provides the connectivity between the Drupal instance and personalization interface in the ACQUIA cloud. The below screen is the configuration window of the content hub in a drupal instance. This link will help you to get the respective values for the configuration section.
Get the content hub hostname respective to your account region. Otherwise, we will not be able to save the configuration in a drupal instance. There are certain elements that are playing major work to achieve the architectural work behind the content hub service.
- Cloud Content Hub
- Content Hub Client
- Content Hub API
- Content Hub SDK
Every time, when you configure the content hub in drupal instance client name should be unique, remember this information will not be editable once saved information. If the name is duplicated content information will not be available properly in the personalization account. When you save the content configuration, you will get a UUID generated by the drupal instance.
It has to be configured using profile manager credentials from the ACQUIA Lift account. API Key, Secret Key, and Client name should be getting from the Acquia account. Below the screen, where you will get all those values from the account.
Configuration of the personalization can be doable using the DRUSH command like “ach-connect”. The Drush interface commands guidelines for the content hub available here.
Personalization can be enabled by an entity based. The personalization module provides you the configuration section, where you can choose the specific entity for personalization content. Most importantly you should keep the user role in the configuration of entity selection as an anonymous user role. Experience builder is the major role on personalization point in drupal. It replaces the drupal HTML view with Static HTML with personalization elements on the fly, which is provided by ACQUIA Content Hub. It has nodes, paragraphs, and blocks.
The architectural representation of personalization
The connectivity between the content hub and Acquia personalization is a value-added to the service of the personalization tool. It enables the content authoring expertise to smoother than previous with different user-centric content.
The above architectural representation will be helping us with the communication between the customer site and the personalization tool. At present cloud content hubs services are present in the 3 regions to serve the information.
- Americas
- Europe, Middle East, and Africa
- Asia-Pacific and Japan
Every piece of the content in drupal can be shared using a content hub module with different sites. Campaigns can be created in 4 different ways like Mixed campaigns (Multiple rules play around the mix and match scenarios), A/B Test, Targeted Personalization, and Content Recommendation Campaigns. Each campaign should have Goals to achieve as an end result. Depends on the goals, may that could different on the steps and way of implementation.
Calendar view on the campaign page, this feature will be more useful for the marketer to keep their plan on track. We can monitor the campaign start date and end date, accordingly we can plan for the next actions towards the campaign. When we double-click on any of the campaigns, we will be able to see complete analytics information of the respective campaign.
Quick information about Events and Segments
Events can use column metadata. To complete the creation of the column metadata in the Profile manager, we should add the following fields like Display Name, Table, Type, Display order, accessor, and Description. In segmentable value, we should provide the match criteria with the table name. We can also use trigger a google tag manager as the custom event establishment. Followed by the trigger, we should create a trigger in the tag manager. Once the tag is created, connect the trigger with the tag.
Segments are the placeholder to keep the track of general audience behavior. It will provide you the provision to create slots. When the user performs the actions to the specific slot we will be able to collect the analytics on top of segments with visited user information. For example, you can track user information like geolocation, behavior, custom data, etc… We will get leverage to create a segment with the main criteria with sub-criteria for content view. After you created the segment in ACQUIA Profile manager, come back to the web page and refresh the page you will be able to see created segments using “Window.Acquialift.currentsegments” in the console command.
On the above screen, you can be able to see the campaign builder with the default segment window. Depends on the segment you can switch over the screen representations with different UI elements. Each segment's personalization has to be targeted using slots.
Slots are the sections, where we will set action and update content(reuse the content from the content hub) depends on different user behavior that keep a track of the user activity. These can be configured in 2 ways, manual slots which the user can create on page level with embed code. “Point & Click slot”, which is new in personalization 4. It has the flexibility to create the slot as per user wish on different sections of the page.
In the process of campaign creation, we have the ability to give from date and to date to make the campaign active. Also, we can save the latter with future dates, that will schedule the campaign in auto-publish mode. In the calendar mode, we can manage the upcoming campaign depends on the start date and end date.
Campaign Preview will take us into builder mode with your website. There you can see the campaign in different segments to the user experience. This view will give us a better view of slots and segment setup for the different persona.
Note: Generally recommend to use the lift integration and module installation only in production/staging environment. Other environments should be turned off the lift module for usage. Otherwise, your analytics information will become more dump.
This marks the end of this post. I believe I have taken you through almost every feature of the Acquia personalization experience. I hope, you have enjoyed it. Now you should be able to set up and create a Drupal instance with an Acquia personalization account. Please share your feedback here
Catchup you soon with the Acquia personalization exam experience.
