A profile group represents a segment of your target audience. You create these groups in the Profile Groups window by defining rules that include or exclude visitors according to their profile properties. For example, you could create a profile group called HighEarners that includes female college graduates earning more than $150,000 per year but excludes people from California. The rules that define this group might look something like this:

Include these people:
   people whose Gender is Female
   and whose educationLevel is College Graduate
   and whose annualIncome is greater than 150000.00
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Exclude these people:
   people whose Home address.state is California

Once you set up this profile group, you can use the Targeting > Content Targeters window to create targeting rules for delivering personalized content to people who match the HighEarners criteria. For example:

Show this content:
   newLuxuryCars.jsp
To these people:
   people in group HighEarners

As you can see, segmenting your target audiences into profile groups can simplify your targeting rules and make them easier to maintain.

Important: In the Business Control Center, profile groups have been replaced by user segments, which provide additional functionality (a more flexible editor for specifying the rules that make up a group). If your installation uses ATG Content Administration, it is strongly recommended that you use the Business Control Center rather than the ACC to accomplish the tasks described in this chapter. In addition, if you are working in a multisite ATG environment (one in which a single instance of ATG products supports more than one Web site), please be aware that profile groups do not have any multisite capability. User segments created through the Business Control Center are multisite aware. For more information on user segments, refer to the ATG Business Control Center User's Guide. For information on a multisite environment, refer to the ATG Multisite Administration Guide.

Using Profile Groups with Organizations and Roles

Profile groups can exist independently of organizations and roles (see Using Organizations and Roles). You do not have to set up a user directory in order to perform content targeting with profile groups. Conversely, you can set up a user directory and use it to perform content targeting without creating any profile groups; instead, you can create content targeters or scenarios that use a person’s assigned organization or role to determine the content to display. For examples, see Creating Scenarios.