Real time segment information

Sometimes you need more fine grained personalization for your website. For this purpose the uMarketingSuite exposes a service called the IAnalyticsStateProvider. This service providers access to all analytics-related information for the current request, as well as segment information. Whenever you have a need to execute custom code that is specifically tied to personalization, you can use this service.

To get started you will need an instance of a IAnalyticsStateProvider, which can be resolved through Dependency Injection. For example consider the following case, where we  use route hijacking to execute custom code for our content typed called "Home":

using System.Web.Mvc;
using uMarketingSuite.Business.Analytics.State;
using Umbraco.Web.Mvc;

public class HomeController : SurfaceController, IRenderController
{
    private readonly IAnalyticsStateProvider _analyticsStateProvider;
    public HomeController(IAnalyticsStateProvider analyticsStateProvider)
    {
        _analyticsStateProvider = analyticsStateProvider;
    }
    ...
}

Umbraco automatically will resolve our service, without us having to write any code! We can now use the service in our request, by calling the .GetState() method to get the current state for the current request, which in turn exposes the PageView containing the concrete information we are looking for.

The PageView lies at the heart of uMarketingSuite's Analytics feature and exposes a lot of interesting information. For now, we will focus on reading all segments for the current pageview. Depending on your configuration, it is possible for a visitor to fall into multiple segments, as we can see by enumerating over all PageViewSegments.

Consider the following example (continued from above) where content of content type "Home" was requested. We will now tell Umbraco to execute this custom code whenever the template "HomeTemplate" is requested:

public ActionResult HomeTemplate()
{
    var analyticsState = _analyticsStateProvider.GetState();
    foreach (var pageviewSegment in analyticsState.Pageview.PageviewSegments)
    {
        if (pageviewSegment.Segment.Name == "MySegment")
        {
            // Execute custom code
        }
    }
    ...
}

We can for example check if the current visitor falls into a segment called "MySegment". Keep in mind that it is possible for a visitor to fall into any number of segments (zero, one, or all). A segment by itself does not do anything, and can thusly be regarded as purely informational, or as a "Flag" or "Label" if you will.

The actual personalization that is used by the uMarketingSuite to modify the appearance of a page is called Applied Personalization. A page request can have only one active Applied Personalization. Based on the current segments (and their sort order), the uMarketingSuite picks the first applicable Applied Personalization. This could be a multi-doctype or multi-page personalization (Marketing section) or single page personalization (content).

To inspect the resolved Applied Personalization, we can use the property AppliedPersonalization on the state's  PageView:

if (analyticsState.Pageview.AppliedPersonalization != null && analyticsState.Pageview.AppliedPersonalization.Name == "MyAppliedPersonalization")
{
    ...
}

Keep in mind that it is possible that no personalization has been resolved for the current request, so make sure to do a null check before reading the AppliedPersonalization property. The property SegmentId will tell you which active segment was responsible for triggering the Applied Personalization. It is possible that a Segment is used by several Applied personalizations, but only one personalization will ever be resolved and displayed. This implies several important things:

1) The Applied Personalization can only trigger on currently active segments (as found on Pageview.PageviewSegments)

2) Not having any active segments automatically means there will never be any Applied Personalizations active. So configuring correct segments is essential.

3) Having a maximum of one active Applied Personalization per request means that you might find an unexpected personalization was activated. Always make sure to check the segment sorting order.

When testing this it is always a good idea to inspect the Cockpit information in your front end requests so you can easily see which segments are active.