How to personalize your content with Pimcore: Increase your website conversion rate

If you’ve come across Pimcore, you surely know its personalization capabilities are incredible.

But do you know how to use Pimcore’s personalization engine? There aren’t many resources available that could help you, so we decided to give you a helping hand.

In this short guide, you’ll learn how to personalize your website and increase your website conversion rate as much as possible.

If you’d like some help with your business, look no further! We’re an expert Pimcore development agency and we’re certified as Pimcore Silver partners!

Whatever challenges you may take on, we can help you.

Anyways, let’s get down to business.

Step 1: Define your target groups

You can personalize your website content for every specific target group you define.

Depending on the target group, we can distribute them different content that’s going to resonate with the members of that group.

First, here’s how to define a target group.

When you first open the Pimcore dashboard, click on “Marketing”, then click on “Personalization/Targeting” and finally click on “Target Groups”.

On this dashboard, you can see all of the existing target groups and you can create new ones.

Let’s see how can you create a new target group!

For the sake of the example, we’ve created a new target group and named it “Test group”. We’ll use this one to showcase some of the Pimcore’s capabilities.

When you first create a target group, you’ll need to define its name, description, and its threshold.

You can also activate and deactivate every target group, depending on your marketing strategy.

The threshold is an extremely important field when defining your target group.

We can define as a quantitative limit for a target group. Hold on to this thought, we’ll discuss it in detail later in the article.

Now, let’s see how can a visitor become a part of our newly created target group.

Step 2: Assigning a visitor to a target group

There are 2 ways of assigning a visitor to a target group — by assigning a target group to a document and by using global targeting rules.

We’ll show you how it works, step-by-step.

How to use global targeting rules?

You can use global targeting rules to define a situation in which a visitor gets assigned to a target group.

Now, how to access it and create a new rule?

First, on the left sidebar click on “Marketing”, then click on “Personalization/Targeting” and finally click on “Global Targeting Rules”.

You should then see something like this.

When defining a global targeting rule, we need to define settings, conditions, and actions for our targeting rule to work.

In settings, you need to define the name, description, and action scope.

Action scope may be a novelty for some, so let’s talk about it for a bit.

Here we have 4 different action scopes. Each of these scopes is unique, so we’ll explain them shortly.

• Hit — represents actions executed on every request
• Session — represents actions executed per each session
• Session (with variables) — represents actions executed per each session in which visitor information is changed (e.g. if a visitor get assigned to another target group)
• Visitor — represents actions executed once per visitor.

Now, when we got the settings for this rule defined, let’s see what can we do with conditions.

There’s a good amount of different conditions to choose from.

Just imagine how many combinations you could create by using different conditions.

To show how they work, we’ll be using Pimcore’s demo website. You can try it out too by visiting demo.pimcore.fun/admin. The username is admin and the password is demo.

Give it a go and have some fun with it!

Anyways, let’s create a simple condition for our targeting rule.

The conditions here tell us that every time a visitor visits the Ford Muscle cars landing page for at least 15 seconds, he’s good to go.

In that case, he’s fulfilled the conditions for this targeting rule and the defined action will be executed.

Now, let’s see what kind of action is going to be executed.

There are 6 different actions to choose from.

From assigning a visitor to a target group to tracking the visitor’s activity, there are many possible combinations that can be defined.

Let’s create a simple action here.

We’ll go with “Assign Target Group”.

Now when we’ve defined the action, our global targeting rule is complete.

This targeting rule tells us that if our visitors fulfills all of our predefined conditions, he’s going to be assigned to our newly-formed target group.

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Now, pay attention to the “Weight” field. It comes with every action we define.

So, what is the weight?

We can define weight as the quantitative impact of an action defined by the global targeting rule.

Remember when we said that we’re going to talk more about the threshold? Now’s the time!

Both weight and threshold are connected in a specific way.

We’ve set the threshold for our target group to 3, and the weight of our executed action is set to 1.

In essence, for a visitor to become a part of our target group, he’ll need to fulfill the conditions of our targeting rule 3 times.

To give us more flexibility, we can set more global targeting rules that are going to result in assigning a visitor to a target group.

You can go wild with these global targeting rules. All that’s required is marketing logic and you’re all set.

Now, as we said, there’s another way for assigning a visitor to a target group.

P.S. It’s a bit simpler.

How to assign a target group to a document?

Besides assigning a target group to a document, we’ll talk more about personalizing your website for each specific target group and defining customer automation rules.

This is an extremely important part of the Pimcore’s personalization engine and we’ve discussed it more in-depth in our latest article on Pimcore’s personalization — and we’d love for you to read it!

You’re just one click away from an important piece of information, so you know what to do!