Familiarize yourself with the key concepts in Acoustic Personalization.
Exchange
Exchange is a cloud-based service that provides a mechanism to selectively exchange event and identity data between various business partner marketing automation and analytics solutions.
You must register Personalization in Exchange and integrate with an analytics library (such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics or Digital Analytics) for sharing the events data.
Click rate
Click rate is a metric that indicates how many times a visitor clicked the personalized content or the default content on the zone.
To capture the click events on the zones of your single-page application or multi-page application, you need to use trackEvent function. If you do not configure the zone to capture the click events, the click rate cannot be calculated. For more information, see Capture click events.
Control group
A control group is a group who belong to a segment that is targeted for personalization, but held back from receiving the personalization. That group is then used as benchmark to measure how the other group of visitors, who did receive the personalization, performed.
In Personalization, the control group receives the original content regardless of any rules in place. The visitors in the control group are randomly chosen from the visitors who match the personalization rule. The number of visitors allocated to control group depends on the control group percentage chosen during rule creation.
Control group is useful for evaluating the effectiveness of the personalization rule. If you see a statistically significant increase in conversions for the normal (non-control) group, whereas the control group remains the same, you know your personalization was effective. However, if there is no increase in the normal group over the control group, you can decide to change your personalization strategy.
The original content is what the website has before you apply rules for personalization.
Organization
An organization is the base entity in Personalization, and it usually represents the company that owns the channel being registered. For example, City Cool Corporation is organization that owns https://www.citycool.com channel.
Each organization is identified by a unique ID, known as the Org ID. An organization can have multiple channels registered under it in Personalization.
Personalization library
Personalization library, formerly known as Online Engine (OLE), is a software package in Personalization that helps in rule matching and achieving personalization on the channel.
Personalization library is responsible for matching the rules that are created by the Personalization marketer. It works on the client website and interacts with behavioral data to form the correct results. Based on these results, the personalized content is shown on the website.
Personalization library is available on Acoustic JFrog artifactory.
Maximum rule impressions
Maximum rule impression is defined as the maximum number of times a personalization rule is to be applied or run.
When the "Number of times applied" metric matches the "Maximum rule impressions" count, then the status of the rule changes to Active - Completed.
Note: The maximum rule impressions cannot be less than or equal to 0.
Example
You can use maximum rule impressions metric to limit the number of times a rule is evaluated to prevent a piece of content from being shown on zone after certain number times.
You want to use Acoustic Personalization as an advertising management solution. You want to show a promotional offer on your website, but want it to be displayed to only 1000 visitors. After 1000 visitors see the promotion, you want to stop the offer that is displayed to the visitors immediately. So, all the remaining visitors would see either the default content or separate personalized content, depending on the segment they fall in.
You can use maximum rule impressions field as follows:
- You can define the value for maximum rule impressions when you create a new rule in Acoustic Personalization. Set a value for maximum rule impressions field to 1000.
- Save and publish the rule.
Note: The "number of times applied" metric shows the number of times the published rules for the zone matched the visitor behavior and personalized content that is shown on the zone.
After the number of times applied crosses 1000, personalization will not be applied and the status of your rule changes to Active - Completed.
The status of rule changes to Active - Completed in the following scenarios:
- When the rule hits the maximum rule impressions limit, before the end date
- If the end date of your rule is reached, before the rule hits its maximum rule impressions limit
Rules
Rules are a set of conditions that specifies the criteria for showing personalized content to the channel visitors. Rules provide a mapping between multiple concepts: zone-content-segment-goals
A rule specifies the content to be displayed on the zone to channel visitors that match the selected segment and, optionally tracks the effect of personalization for the specified goal.
A zone can have multiple rules.
Rules are ordered and evaluated by priority. For a channel visitor, If they belong to the segment for a higher priority rule then they get shown the content for that rule. Other rules are not evaluated.
Using a rule builder, marketers can create complex rules by using conditions for personalizing the content.
Lookback time frame
Lookback time frame is the number of days of historical visitor behavior data that is used by the various algorithms to generate product recommendations.
You can set the value for lookback time frame to either 1 day, 7 days, or for 30 days.
On a high-traffic website with millions of hits per day, you can choose a shorter time window of 1 day. However, if there are not as many active visitors on the website, you should select a bigger time frame (7 days or 30 days) so that your recommendations are more accurate. A shorter window enables product recommendations to be more responsive to changes in the market. However, recommendations are based on the number of visitors on your site and get more accurate with more visitors.
Zone ID
Each zone has a unique identifier, referred to as the zone ID. When registering a zone for personalization, you must provide this zone ID.
In the case of multi-page applications, the zone ID is specified by the website developer while creating the HTML source code for the web page.
In the case of Angular single-page applications, the channel developer must identify the components where personalization is to be applied and subscribe those components for personalization by passing a unique ID that is same as the Zone ID specified in Personalization. When registering a zone for personalization, you must provide this Zone ID.
The combination of zone name and the Zone ID must be unique within the channel being personalized.
The valid characters for a Zone ID are A-Z, a-z, 0-9, hyphen (-), and underscore (_).
Zone ID should not contain a space, or special characters, except hyphen (-) and underscore (_) characters.
To view a zone ID in a website, complete the following steps:
- Open the website that you want to personalize in a web browser, for example Google Chrome.
- On the website, decide the section (zone) that you want to personalize. For example, header banner.
- Right-click on the selected zone and click Inspect from the context menu in Google Chrome. If you are using Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer / Edge browsers, click Inspect Element.
The div element associated with the zone is highlighted. - Note the unique ID for the HTML element. For example, div id = “WelcomeBanner”
This is the zone ID that you need to specify during zone registration.
If the website that you want to personalize does not have unique identifiers for the section, then it is recommended to assign a unique zone ID to each HTML element that needs to be personalized.
More resources
Here are some of the next steps or related topics you can browse through.