Working with visitor groups for personalization and segments

Personalization is about customizing content to suit specific individuals or target groups. A simple way of personalizing content In Episerver is to use visitor groups. This built-in functionality uses information like cookies and device IDs to group website visitors in visitor groups. These visitor groups can then be used when deciding which content to display.

Visitor groups are managed in Episerver CMS, and can be used for personalization in other parts of the Episerver platform, such as Episerver Commerce.

For even more powerful and granular personalization you can use Episerver Visitor Intelligence (formerly Episerver Insight). Visitor Intelligence tracks online visitor behavior and stores user profiles in a database. From this data, you can create a segment which is a collection of user profiles filtered out based on some criteria, such as visits to a specific page on your website or visitors from a specific location. You can also create a segment consisting of visitors matching a specific visitor group.

You can then use the segments with profile data when personalizing content or setting up marketing campaigns, for example, email campaigns using Episerver Campaign.

Visitor group scenarios

The following scenarios describe typical actions needed to set up visitor groups that can be used in different parts of the Episerver platform.

• Creating a visitor group in Episerver CMS. The visitor group can then be used by other Episerver products.
• Applying a visitor group to a specific piece of content, for example, a block in Episerver CMS.
• Using a visitor group to target a discount in Episerver Commerce.
• Creating a visitor group from a segment in Episerver Visitor Intelligence.
• Using a visitor group to create a segment in Episerver Visitor Intelligence.

Creating visitor groups

Administrators can create visitor groups based on many different types of criteria, for example, number of visits to a specific page, or a geographic location. A number of criteria are included by default in Episerver CMS, see Built-in visitor group criteria for a list of those. Developers can also create their own criteria through code, see Episerver World.

See Managing visitor groups in the Administration interface section for more information on how to create visitor groups.

Applying visitor groups to content

Visitor groups can be applied to content such as a block, which will then only be displayed to visitors matching the defined criteria for the visitor group.

For example, you can show one price for all visitors browsing to your website from the UK, another price for visitors from the US, and a third price for all other visitors:

You can preview your page as it would look to different visitor groups.

See Visitor groups in the Episerver Personalization section for more information on how to apply visitor groups to content.

Using visitor groups for targeted discounts

You can also use visitor groups for targeted discounts in Episerver Commerce campaigns. You can create a visitor group called "Returning customers", and set the visitor group criteria to "Order Frequency: Ordered at least 2 times within the last 45 days."

You can then use this visitor group in the Personalization part of the Edit Campaign view when creating a campaign. This will make the campaign only available to customers that have made purchases at least twice within the last 45 days.

See Creating a campaign in the Commerce section for more information on how to set up Commerce campaigns.

Creating a visitor group from a segment

If you are using Episerver Visitor Intelligence, you have access to profile data which allows you to personalize content on a very granular level by setting up a visitor group that uses an Visitor Intelligence segment as a criterion. The segment can, for example, be set up to filter out all visitors from France who are identified with their email addresses and have visited your site within the last month. You can combine this segment with other visitor group criteria, such as visits to the product pages "A" and "B", and then personalize your website content for all users matching this visitor group specifically.

To do this, you need to create a segment in Visitor Intelligence and make it available to the visitor groups functionality. See Creating a marketing segment in the Visitor Intelligence section.

You then need to create a visitor group and add the segment as a criterion. See Administering visitor groups in the CMS administrator section.

Creating segments using visitor groups

If you are using Episerver Visitor Intelligence, you can not only create visitor groups using segments, you can also create segments using visitor groups. In this case, Visitor Intelligence tracks and stores when visitors are part of a visitor group. You can create a segment using this information, which in turn can be used for example when creating mailing campaigns in Episerver Campaign.

As an example, if you have a visitor group that filters out all users from France who have visited or your product page "A" during a specific day, Visitor Intelligence stores this data and you can create a segment in Visitor Intelligence that tracks data from this visitor group. Together with Visitor Intelligence data such as the visitors' email addresses, you can use the segment to target all your French visitors who visited your product page on Black Friday in a mailing campaign. See Creating a marketing segment in the Visitor Intelligence section.

A developer needs to set up tracking for the specific visitor groups to become available for selection in the Visitor Intelligence profile filtering. See Visitor group tracking on Episerver World.