Optimizing Content

Displaying content is just the beginning. Ultimately, the goal of any content management strategy is to ensure your content is as effective as possible. Liferay provides tools that you can use to help optimize your content display. These tools support a number of approaches to content optimization:

• Monitoring Content Performance
• A/B Testing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Personalization

Here you’ll explore each approach, as well as the primary tools Liferay provides to facilitate optimization.

Monitoring Content Performance

Content authors and marketers typically consider content performance from two perspectives: the overall sufficiency of content for the site’s audience (macro level) and the performance of individual content items (micro level). Liferay provides tools to address both:

Content Dashboard

The Content Dashboard is an instance-wide tool for viewing and filtering all content. This enables authors to manage their work, administrators to oversee content based on various metadata, and marketers to assess content coverage across categories. As such, this tool can help managers and contributors understand whether their content meets the needs of different site audiences, who might be interested in different types of content. You can explore official Content Dashboard documentation to learn more.

Content Performance Tool

The Content Performance tool offers insights into individual asset performance, including views, reads, and traffic sources for assets using display page templates. This includes web content, documents, categories, custom object entries, pages, and more. However, this tool relies on data from Analytics Cloud, and only provides a relatively small amount of information for each asset. For a comprehensive view of data collected, you should consider using the Analytics Cloud interface.

Analytics Cloud

Analytics Cloud provides a comprehensive view of user interactions with Liferay sites and applications. This allows for detailed exploration of individual asset usage and overall site and page performance, including segment-based analysis. You’ll learn more about segments in a later section because they form the foundation of Liferay personalization.

A/B Testing

A/B testing enables you to determine the most effective content variations by testing alternatives with different user groups. With this approach, the majority of visitors see the current version of your content and page design, while a select group sees a variant. By comparing the performance of the original content against variants for specific goals (e.g., bounce rate, click-through rates), you can identify which version drives better engagement.

A common application is testing different call-to-action text to optimize user interaction. Users are more or less motivated to click links or buttons based on their text. So A/B testing is useful for determining which variant is more effective to ensure you are driving users to the pages and information you want them to consume.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While on-site content performance is crucial, ensuring external discoverability through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is equally vital for driving relevant traffic to your site. SEO is a technique focused on improving the ranking of your sites, pages, and assets in search engine results. The goal is to increase higher quality traffic from organic search.

Liferay provides several built-in features to define and configure key SEO elements. This includes HTML titles, meta tags, and canonical URLs, as well as tools for managing robots.txt files and XML sitemaps. You can also manage social media meta tags (e.g., Open Graph) through the UI. Besides these configurations, Liferay provides the Page Audit tool to assist with SEO.

Page Audit Tool

This tool leverages Google PageSpeed Insights to provide specific recommendations for Liferay DXP. Using this tool, content authors can gain valuable insights to:

• Verify that Pages are optimized for search engine indexing and visibility, so Pages rank better in search results and reach the right audience.
• Check the Page’s compliance with best accessibility practices, improving the usability and overall experience for all individuals.
• Use actionable information to correct the SEO and Accessibility issues affecting the Page.

For SEO in particular, the Page Audit tool evaluates several Liferay elements. This includes missing meta descriptions, invalid hreflang and canonical URLs, missing <title> elements, whether all links are crawlable, and more. You’ll learn more about using this tool to improve accessibility in the Planning for Accessibility article.

Personalization

While great content is essential, delivering the right content to the right user at the right time maximizes its effectiveness. This is where personalization comes in. Liferay provides the ability to create multiple variations of pages, so you can display the most appropriate version of your site to individual users based on their specific characteristics and behavior.

This tailored delivery is accomplished through three tightly interconnected features:

• User Segments: These enable you to group users based on various criteria, including their profile information, location, interactions with content and pages, and more.
• Page Experiences: Each experience is a variant of a content page mapped to a specific user segment, ensuring that users meeting the segment's criteria see the tailored version.
• Personalized Collections: Once you’ve created a content collection, you can create personalized variations by mapping them to specific user segments, curating the content displayed to those users.

Together, these features enable you to deliver targeted content and experiences to specific users, maximizing engagement and relevance.

User Segments

You can create user segments within both the Liferay DXP and Analytics Cloud user interfaces. Segments defined directly in Liferay DXP primarily leverage known information derived from user, organization, and session properties. This makes them most effective for authenticated users. That said,it it is possible to segment anonymous users based on information like language, location, and data stored in cookies.

Analytics Cloud segments unlock additional capabilities based on behavioral data tracked by the platform. This means you can create behavioral segments that leverage a user's navigation history and content interests.

Regardless of where they are defined, all segments are synchronized between Analytics Cloud and Liferay DXP. However, they do have different primary uses:

• In Analytics Cloud: Segments primarily filter collected analytics to understand, for example, which pages are viewed by different user groups.
• In Liferay DXP: Segments primarily define experiences and personalized collections to present targeted information to users based on their segment membership.

Personalizing Clarity

To enhance engagement with potential customers, Clarity Vision Solutions can leverage Liferay’s personalization features. For example, if a website visitor browses several product pages or blog posts specifically about sunglasses, this behavior can indicate a strong interest in that product line. Clarity can then create an “Interested in Sunglasses” user segment. Then they can create an alternate home page experience that showcases new sunglasses and special offers to this segment on subsequent visits. This targeted approach ensures that visitors see the content most relevant to their interests, increasing the likelihood of engagement and potential conversion.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the effectiveness of your content management strategy extends beyond mere display to encompass ongoing optimization. By strategically leveraging Liferay's robust suite of tools, you can ensure your content easily discoverable and resonant.

Next, you’ll explore the fundamentals of Liferay search.