Personalize Content Channel Items

Often, content is published to your site using Content Channel Items. Rock provides a built-in way to show, hide or prioritize Content Channel Items based on whether the person viewing them meets the criteria of the personalization segments or request filters you've created.

Personalization for Content Channel Items is enabled at the Content Channel level under Admin Tools > CMS Configuration > Content Channels. Edit the Content Channel and check the box for Enable Personalization.

With personalization enabled, you can now start updating your Content Channel Items. Each item can be assigned one or more personalization segments and request filters. How these segments and filters are applied to the Content Channel Item is determined later, which we'll talk about in a minute.

The Content Channel Item configuration is accessed under Tools > Content or by drilling down from the Content Channel.

  1. Personalization Profile - Note that we've selected two segments. As part of our segment strategy, we have reusable segments like these to identify men and women. When multiple segments are selected like this, the person viewing the item can meet either of them. The same is true for filters. However, if you have both segments and filters listed, the person must match at least one segment and one filter for the personalization to apply. In this example the person must be either female and a college student, or male and a college student.

With the above pieces in place, you'll head over to your external website where the content is being shown. You'll want to update the settings for the Content Channel View block, as pictured below. This is where you decide how the segments and filters configured above should be applied to the Content Channel Items.

  1. Personalization Options - Use these settings to decide how segments and filters are applied. The options include:
    1. Ignore: This is the default setting. Segments and filters won't be considered when displaying content channel items.
    2. Prioritize: Prioritize puts content channel items that match the segment or filter at the top of the list of items. If multiple items match, they will be ordered according to the Order Items By block setting. The remaining items will be displayed after the set of matching items and will be separately ordered according to the Order Items By block setting.
    3. Filter: If this option is selected then only content channel items that match the segment or filter will be shown. Items that have no filters or segments will always appear since they have nothing to filter on.