Extending Segments with Analytics Cloud

Liferay DXP’s built-in segmentation tools provide a solid foundation for personalizing content based on profile data and simple behaviors. However, for deeper, more nuanced personalization, integrating with Liferay Analytics Cloud significantly enhances the ability to identify, segment, and target users based on richer behavioral insights, goal conversions, and comprehensive journey analytics.

This lesson explores how Analytics Cloud expands segmentation capabilities and outlines best practices for configuring them together for optimal impact.

Benefits of Integrating Analytics Cloud

Integrating Liferay DXP with Analytics Cloud brings advanced tracking and behavioral analysis to the segmentation engine, enabling:

• Deeper Behavior-Driven Segmentation: Move beyond simple "page visited" rules to segment users by engagement level, goal completions, content affinity, and funnel drop-offs.
• Custom Event-Based Targeting: Create segments based on highly specific interactions, such as watching a video, downloading a whitepaper, or interacting with a promotion.
• Cross-Session and Cross-Device Tracking: Improve user identification and continuity across different sessions and devices.
• Real-time Updates: Evolve segments based on the latest user activities, providing highly responsive personalization.

For Clarity, this means moving beyond simple role-based targeting to target users who exhibit specific behaviors and intent. For example, they can target users who repeatedly searched for “children’s glasses” and then abandoned the checkout process, indicating strong but unconverted intent.

Comparing Segmentation Data

Liferay Analytics Cloud goes beyond the data leveraged by Liferay DXP’s OOTB tools when creating segments. Building effective segments depends on understanding how these data sources differ.

• OOTB Liferay DXP Segments: These segments are primarily based on local user profile data, roles, and organizations. As such, they are ideal for role-based, identity-driven personalization. However, they do also provide basic session properties for targeting unauthenticated users as well (e.g., cookies, browser types, etc.).
• Analytics Cloud Segments: These segments include robust tools for both anonymous and authenticated users, enabling you to base them on visitor behavior, sessions, custom events, and more. As such, they are best for journey tracking, engagement scoring, and advanced behavior triggers.

Overall, Analytics Cloud enables richer targeting for more nuanced scenarios. This makes it essential for comprehensive behavioral segmentation and advanced personalization strategies.

Managing and Maintaining Segments

To enable personalization, you can create segments in both Liferay DXP and Analytics Cloud. However, where you create segments significantly affects how they’re managed and maintained. This is because Analytics Cloud segments automatically sync with Liferay DXP, but segments created in Liferay DXP do not sync with Analytics Cloud. To ensure effective and consistent personalization across both platforms, consider these best practices:

• Defining Segment Ownership: Use Analytics Cloud for behavior-based or anonymous segmentation. Use Liferay DXP for identity-based rules (e.g., role = ‘Distributor’).
• Managing Behavior-Based Segments: Since segment changes in DXP do not sync back to Analytics Cloud, always manage behavior-based segments in Analytics Cloud.
• Naming and Documenting Segment Logic: Use clear, consistent names and descriptions for segment rules. Record why segments exist and identify the content they support.
• Coordinating with Content Teams: Ensure segments align with available content experiences and planned campaigns.
• Monitoring Sync Status: Regularly check that synced segments from AC are updating correctly within DXP and triggering experiences as expected.

Adhering to these best practices can help ensure accurate segmentation and consistent personalization across your Liferay instance.

Behavior Triggers in Analytics Cloud

At their core, behavior triggers are rules that automatically add users to a segment when their behavior matches specific conditions. Liferay Analytics Cloud tracks a wide range of user events out-of-the-box. Examples include page views, form submissions, content views, CTA clicks, and video plays.

When you define these rules, you determine the conditions for adding a site visitors to a segment. These conditions can target individual actions or complex patterns of behavior. Here are some examples:

• Individual Events: Viewing the Products page.
• Frequency of an Event: Viewing the page three times.
• Time Frame: Viewing the page within the last seven days.
• Sequence of Events: Viewing the Products page and then viewing the Request a Demo page.
• Absence of an Event: Adding items to the cart but never viewing the Order Confirmation page.

Once the rule’s conditions are met, Analytics Cloud adds the site visitor to the specified segment.

Clarity wants to target users who show interest but are hesitant to finalize their purchase. To accomplish this, they can define a specific segment in Analytics Cloud that combines multiple conditions. For example, users who have

• Visited the Progressive Lenses category
• Added a product to the cart
• Didn’t complete checkout within 24 hours

Once defined, this segment can be published to Liferay DXP and linked to a special homepage Experience. This Experience could then offer a discount code or a product comparison guide to encourage conversion.

Conclusion

Integrating Liferay DXP with Analytics Cloud significantly enhances personalization strategies. With dynamic, behavior-driven segmentation, you can target both anonymous and authenticated users to deliver experiences that drive engagement, conversions, and long-term business growth. The key is to treat Liferay DXP and Analytics Cloud as complementary tools.

Next, you’ll explore how you can segment users based on geographic region.