AEM Sites Personalization Use-case Overview

A web page shows some promotional content. By default, it renders a default author-selected content.

At runtime, Adobe Target swaps it for a personalized Content Fragment based on the visitor audience, e.g.:

• Magazine Lovers → magazine-themed offer
• Adventure Lovers → adventure-themed offer
• Everyone else → the default Content Fragment

Audience can be defined as per the business use-case.

Some simple examples: You can use previously visited page URL containing certain keyword 'magazine' or 'adventure', current page url params have some campaign id like “?campaign=NewYear”, etc.

Prerequisites

• AEM as a Cloud Service (Author + Publish) with the EDS site connected.
• Adobe Target access in any Adobe IMS organization.
• AEM ⇄ Target IMS integration configured
• “Promotion” block in AEM Sites (available in release v2.8.0 or higher)

Setup

Let’s set up the flow in your own environment. We need three things:

Step 1 — Connect AEM and Adobe Target

1. Establish the AEM ⇄ Target IMS based integration so AEM can export Content Fragments to Target (IMS based integration instructions here).
2. Next, Go to your Adobe Target instance.
3. Click on Administration tab.

4. Go to Implementation section.

5. Look for latest at.js and download it.

6. Go to your EDS project’s github repository and replace the content of following file with your “at.js”:
   /scripts/at-lsig.js

Step 2 — Create Content Fragments in AEM

1. In AEM Author, open Assets → Files and your content folder (e.g. /content/dam/<site>/cf/promotions).
2. Create → Content Fragment using the CTA model.

3. Author the Default promotion (e.g. promo-default): title, subtitle, description, banner image, CTA label, CTA URL.
4. Create the Magazine offer (promo-magazine) with magazine-themed content.
5. Create the Adventure offer (promo-adventure) with adventure-themed content.
6. Publish all three fragments

7. Using AEM Assets Admin interface, export the content fragments to Adobe Target.

Step 3 — Create Audiences in Adobe Target

1. Go to Target → Audiences → Create Audience.

2. Define your own audience e.g.:
   1. Magazine Lovers: rule based on the previous/referring page URL or campaign url contains 'magazine'.
   2. Adventure Lovers: same approach with 'adventure'.
3. Save both audiences.

Step 4 — Create the XT (Experience Targeting) activity

1. Target → Activities → Create Activity → Experience Targeting (XT).
2. Choose the option “Other/API”.

3. Form Left Pane, Click "+" button to add an experience.

4. Choose your audience e.g. Magazine Lovers:

• 

5. Set the activity location to match the mbox (default is “target-global-mbox", if not present type it to create automatically) and the content fragment to the offer you would like to show e.g. “Magazine Offer” in our case.

• 

6. Similarly repeat this for your second audience e.g. “Adventure Lovers”.
7. Proceed and activate the XT activity.

• 

Step 5 — Author the Promotion block on the website

1. Open the desired page in the Universal Editor and insert the Promotion block.
2. Default Content Fragment (required): pick promo-default.
3. Display Style: Default (card), Image Left/Right/Top/Bottom.
4. Text Alignment: Center / Left / Right.
5. Target Mbox Name: leave “target-global-mbox “or set the named mbox used by your XT activity.
6. Publish the page.

If no default CF is selected, the editor shows a placeholder and no card renders on publish.

The Demo

1. Default: open the page with no qualifying audience; confirm the default CF renders.
2. Magazine Lovers: navigate to a 'magazine' section page and return to the home page (by clicking the brand logo)
3. Adventure Lovers: repeat with 'adventure' to view the personalized experience.