Skip to main content
Version: 2026.2

Pimcore Concepts for Personalization

Personalization builds on three core concepts: target groups, global targeting rules and personalized document content. This page introduces them; the following chapters show how to configure each one in Pimcore Studio.

Target Group​

Group visitors into target groups to keep track of what content you need to provide and which content is delivered to which visitor.

A Target Group is an entity you personalize content for. Target groups are defined centrally, have a 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 that drives visitor profiling and content personalization. A rule assigns target groups, redirects the visitor to a page, or injects a code snippet into the response when its conditions match.

Shipped conditions cover Browser, Country, Geo Point, Hardware Platform, Language, Operating System, Referring Site, Search Engine, Target Group, Time On Site, URL and Visited Pages Before. Combine them with boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and brackets into complex conditions.

Targeting Rules ConditionsTargeting Rules ConditionsTargeting Rules Conditions

Each targeting rule has a name, an optional description and a scope:

  • Hit: actions run on every request.
  • Session: actions run once per session.
  • Session (with variables): actions run once per session, and again whenever the underlying visitor data changes, for example when the visitor's assigned target groups change.
  • Visitor: actions run once per visitor.

Session expiry depends on the storage engine in use. With the default storage, a session expires 30 minutes after its last update; see Targeting Storage for details.

A browser cookie named _pc_vis identifies the visitor. As long as this cookie is present, Pimcore treats the visitor as the same unique visitor.

See Visitor Profiling and Create Personalized Content for further information.

Personalized Document Content​

Pimcore documents can hold a varying content variant for each defined target group. Once you select a target group in the document editor, you can overwrite any content element for that group. Elements you don't overwrite keep inheriting content from the default variant.

When delivering the document to a visitor, Pimcore picks the best-matching variant: the variant for the target group with the highest assignment count for that visitor that has content set.

Personalized Document ContentPersonalized Document ContentPersonalized Document Content

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