After you have set up user segments and content groups, you need to tell the system which content groups to show to whom and the circumstances in which to do it. One way to do this is by setting up content targeters, which are business rules that you create through the Targeting and Segmentation option in the ATG Business Control Center. Content targeters define the content that you display to each user segment.
A content targeter can contain two kinds of business rules: show and hide. Each rule type is made up of specific conditions related to content, people, time, and environmental factors and generally reads as follows: Show/Hide this content… to/from these people… at these times… under these conditions. For example, suppose you wanted to show new feature articles (in a content group called newMemberFeatures) to registered site users (in a user segment called registeredMembers) every Monday. In this case, you could create a targeter called newFeatures with the following rule:
Show this content:
items in group newMemberFeatures
to these people:
people in group registeredMembers
at these times:
every Monday of every month
When this targeter is invoked, it initially looks at all conditions except the content conditions. First, it checks to see if the registeredMembers property in the user’s profile is set to “true” (the people condition). If this or any other condition fails, the targeter completely ignores the rule. If the condition passes, it goes on to see if the current day is Monday (the time condition). If all of these conditions pass, the targeter looks at the content condition to determine the items to show or hide. In this case, it shows the user all items in the newMemberFeatures content group.
After you create a targeter, a page developer uses a targeting servlet bean to embed it in the appropriate site pages so that it will display the specified content to visitors who meet your targeting conditions. (Typically, page developers use the Document Editor window in the ATG Control Center to embed targeters in JHTML or JSP (JavaServer Page) files. For more information, see the ATG Page Developer's Guide.)
Note: Multiple targeters can be used to produce a single Web page. For example, nine separate targeters are invoked to produce the “investor” home page (investorhome.jsp) in the Quincy Funds demo.
Using Scenarios to Match Content to Users
If you use the Scenarios module, you can match content to user segments in two ways: you can either create targeters (as described above), or you can use scenarios to achieve essentially the same results. The method you choose depends on whether you require the advanced features that scenarios provide, or whether the slightly simpler features of targeters meet your requirements. You can also set up a combination of the two methods. Note, however, that you create scenarios through the ACC, not through the ATG Business Control Center. For more information, see the ATG Personalization Guide for Business Users.
