The tasks that a business user performs with ATG 9.3 cover a range of planning and management activities related to setting up and maintaining a Web site. You perform all these activities in the ATG Control Center. However, the tasks you carry out depend on the parts of the ATG product suite that you have installed.
This chapter presents an overview of the steps you carry out to set up a fully personalized site with the ATG platform.
Set up visitor profiles
At the foundation of ATG’s personalization system are visitor profiles, a collection of properties that you use to store a range of data about everyone who visits your Web site. You use this data to tailor the content of your site so that, on subsequent visits, each person sees information that matches his or her interests and requirements.
The ATG system creates visitor profiles automatically, but there are some setup and maintenance tasks that you may need to perform to prepare them for the next step in the personalization process.
For more information, see Setting Up Visitor Profiles.
Create profile groups
The next step is to put your visitor profiles into groups that represent your Web site’s target audiences. For example, you could set up groups based on income range, geographic location, or buying style. You use the profile groups to determine what content you show to whom – for example, you might advertise a specific product to one group and a different product to another.
For more information, see Creating Profile Groups.
Set up content items
Web site content is the text, images, and other items (for example, magazine articles or product descriptions) that your visitors see on your site’s pages. Content is usually created by a site designer or page developer, and it is stored in content repositories. Like a visitor profile, each content item has a range of properties that defines it. You use these properties when you set up content groups, targeting rules, and tracking sensors for your site, and preparing these properties is one of the tasks you perform as part of setting up a personalized site.
For more information, see Setting Up Content Items.
Group content items together
In the same way that you group visitor profiles together, you must also identify similar content items and put them into groups. For example, if you based your profile groups on geographic location (one for U.S. visitors and another for European visitors), you would then create content groups that defined the content that was appropriate for each profile (articles on the New York stock exchange for the US group, articles on European markets for the European group).
For more information, see Creating Content Groups.
Match content with your target audiences
Now that you have set up visitor profile groups and content groups, you can create business rules (called content targeters) that match the two together – in other words, business rules define the content that you show to each profile group. For example, you could write a rule telling the site to display items from the content group that includes articles about the US stock market to anyone in the profile group for site visitors from the US. In addition to varying content delivery according to a visitor’s profile, you can also change it according to the date, the time of day, and other conditions. For more information, see Matching Content with Your Target Audiences.
If you use the Scenarios module, you can create and use scenarios instead of targeting rules to control the content that you display to each profile group. See Creating Scenarios for more information.
Track visitor behavior
An important part of the process of personalizing a Web site is updating visitor profiles with fresh data. This step allows you to consistently show visitors the content that is most relevant for them. For example, you probably want to track the site pages that each visitor displays so that you can determine the content that interests him or her the most. To do this, you set up tracking sensors that monitor your visitors’ Web site behavior and activities and update their profiles accordingly. For more information, see Tracking Visitor Behavior.
If your site use the Scenarios module, you can use scenarios instead of sensors to track visitor behavior and update their profiles. See Creating Scenarios for more information.
Preview your Web site
The ATG Control Center provides preview features that you use to check how your Web site will look to visitors with certain profile properties under various time conditions. For example, you can see how a particular page in the Quincy Funds demo will appear to visitors who describe their investment strategy as “conservative.” For more information about previewing, see Previewing Your Web Site.
Analyze data
This step applies only if your site uses ATG Customer Intelligence.
Creating business reports allows you to capture and analyze a wide range of data related to your site visitors and their activities at your Web site. By analyzing this data, you can improve your visitors’ experiences at your Web site, predicting their needs and responding by providing more relevant content. You can also use data from reports to fine-tune your scenarios and make changes to your Web site design. For more information, refer to the ATG Customer Intelligence documentation.
