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Version: 2024.4

Pimcore Concepts for Personalization

The following core concepts are the essential parts of Pimcores personalization engine.

Target Group​

It is recommended to group your visitors into target groups. They help you to keep track and have an overview about what content you need to provide and about which content is delivered to what visitor.

So, a Target Group is an entity which is used to personalize content for.

Target groups are defined centrally, have an unique name and can have a description.

Target GroupsTarget GroupsTarget Groups

See Define Target Groups for further information.

Global Targeting Rule​

Global Targeting Rules define the rule set based on which visitor profiling and content personalization takes place. Thus they allow to assign target groups, redirect the visitor to certain pages or inject code snippets (special java scripts, etc.) to the response based on behavioral conditions.

Available conditions are Browser, Country, GeoPoint, Device, Language, Operating System, Referring Site, Search Engine, Target Group, Time On Site, URL and Visited Pages Before. They can be combined with boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and brackets to archive complex conditions.

Targeting Rules ConditionsTargeting Rules ConditionsTargeting Rules Conditions

Each targeting rule has name, may have a description and a scope:

  • Hit: Actions are executed on every request.
  • Session: Actions are executed once a session.
  • Session (with variables): Actions are executed once a session and when visitor information changes, e.g. every time when assigned target groups of current visitor change.
  • Visitor: Actions are executed once per visitor.

The session expiry depends on the used storage engine. In default configuration the session expires when browser is closed. See Dev Docs for details.

The visitor is identified via a browser cookie (named _pc_vis). As long as this cookie is available, a visitor is identified as unique.

See Visitor Profiling and Create Personalized Content for further information.

Personalized Document Content​

Pimcore Documents provide the possibility to create varying content variants for each defined target group. Once a target group is selected, all content elements within the document can be overwritten and personalized. For not overwritten content elements, the content is inherited from the default variant of the document.

When delivering content to the visitor, the best matching variant is picked by Pimcore. Best matching is in this case is the variant of the target group with highest assignment count of the current visitor that has content set.

Personalized Document ContentPersonalized Document ContentPersonalized Document Content

See Create Personalized Content and Deliver Personalized Content for further information.