An important part of the process of personalizing a Web site is gathering information about each visitor and then tailoring the content of the site to meet that visitor’s preferences and probable requirements. As explained earlier in Setting Up Visitor Profiles, you can gather information by asking visitors to supply information about themselves directly. For example, you can have them fill in a registration form in which you ask them to supply their age group or income range. You can also gather information implicitly by monitoring what visitors do on your site. For example, which pages do they visit? Which images do they display? What products have they bought? You then use this information to tailor the content of your Web site for each person. The next time a visitor comes to your site, he or she sees content that better meets his or her needs. Over time, you can develop detailed profiles of your site visitors, allowing you to provide better service for your customers and build more reliable relationships with them.
If your Web site does not use scenarios, you can use the Targeting > Tracking Sensors window in the ATG Control Center to gather implicit information about your site visitors and change content accordingly. You set up tracking sensors to monitor visitor behavior on your Web site, including their session activity and the specific content they view. You then create action statements for these sensors that tell the system how to change a visitor’s profile in response to each event. These statements take the following form: When a visitor <does this>, perform these actions. For example:
When a visitor:
views this type of content
Add the value of Aggressive Index to the person's Aggressive
Index attribute
You then set up targeting rules that display different content according to the properties in each user’s profile. For more information on targeting rules, see Matching Content with Your Target Audiences.
Using Scenarios to Track Visitor Behavior
If you use the Scenarios module as part of your ATG product suite, you must use scenarios instead of sensors to track visitor behavior and change their profiles.
The rest of this chapter describes using tracking sensors. For information on using scenarios instead, see Creating Scenarios.
