Liferay Audience Targeting – Enhancing Enterprise Portal Engagement by a Mile

The endeavor to provide a single-window view of enterprise wide information and knowledge assets has led to a frenzy of activity around the enterprise information portal development landscape. The current portal in a company consists of the following:

1. Intranet or Extranet sites
2. Social networking communities
3. Web and enterprise content
4. Enterprise search
5. Business intelligence, insights and analytics
6. Business apps

The various applications need to provide a seamless and engaging user experience. This will help a better adoption of the portal within the company and help employees extract beneficial and relevant information quickly. Considering the below key trends noticed for an enterprise portal, the above points holds immense significance –

1. The average attention span of web users is 6 secs
2. Smartphone users check device 150 times/day
3. 60% of online traffic through mobile devices

At the heart of the system is the need for enriching and engaging user experience.  Getting this point right is absolutely essential in order to drive the below advantages successfully –

1. Increase in user adoption of the portal system
2. Improve productivity and foster greater collaboration
3. Delight end users
4. Reinforce the singular and distinct image of company brand
5. Empower various stakeholders such as customers, partners and employees

Some of the ways in which user experience can be enriched and made engaging are by making it –

1. Illustrative – using branding, content, creative design and presentation 
2. Informative – through content relationship, taxonomy, search feature, and user friendly layout and navigation
3. Interactive – using channels such as videos, comments, call-to-action, customization and other personalization medium

Now that we know the basics around enterprise user experience, let’s look at an exciting new tool to drive this at a strategic level – Audience Targeting from Liferay

An introduction to Audience Targeting

For the last 11 years, Liferay has been revolutionizing the way enterprise content is sorted, stored, accessed, backed up and retrieved. With advanced features such as business apps integrated within it, the tool is an all-round open source enterprise portal.  As a part of continuous efforts in providing its customers with better value for the product, it has now released a new app for Liferay 6.2 – Audience Targeting.

The app seeks to take customer engagement to a whole new plane. On a high level, the app helps to –

1. Segment your audience
2. Target specific content depending on the user consuming it
3. Create targeted campaigns and measure its efficacy

Audience Targeting determines patterns from the time spent by user on the portal and provides valuable insights in enriching the user experience. It tracks characteristics such as

1. User Behavior (Visited Content, Pages Viewed)
2. Social Rules (Facebook Likes, Shares, Comments)
3. User Attributes (Age, Gender, Role, Designation, Department)
4. Session Attributes (Location, OS, Device etc.)

Audience Targeting works with Liferay Portal 6.2 EE GA1+ (version 1.1.1 and above), and has been found to be compatible with the below types of Environments

1. Tomcat 7 + MySQL 5
2. JBoss 7.1 + SQL Server 2012
3. Glassfish 3.1 + PostgresSQL 9.2
4. Weblogic 12c + Oracle 11.2

The Audience Targeting app adds an ‘Audience Targeting’ Section to the Site Administration portion within the Control Panel. It simultaneously adds an ‘Audience Targeting’ Simulator to the Dockbar.

Some of the ways in which AT can be put to productive use include –

1. Content Display based on User Attributes such as age or gender.
2. Content Display based on User Behavior depending on parameters such as which page is visited frequently or which type of pages have been visited in past.
3. Content Display based on Session attributes that helps show the right app store link depending on whether the user is browsing from an Android device, Windows device or an iOS device.

Audience Targeting can also help different departments achieve distinct functionalities as illustrated below –

1. Sales and Marketing can achieve data confidentiality with help of role-based content display enabled by Audience Targeting (e.g. sales report, corporate targets, list of key accounts, that are typically accessible only to VP and above)
2. Finance and accounts team can achieve task prioritization and multi-tasking efficiently with help of location specific activity management (e.g. signature verification or daily data entry)
3. HR can achieve branding and employee retention (e.g. handling social shares and followers in career section of portal)

Given the high degree of customer engagement the Audience Targeting app drives, businesses on Liferay 6.2EE can utilize its immense prowess to their benefit. Click here to know more about our experience with the Liferay AT app.