Working with Targeted Content in Multisites working-with-targeted-content-in-multisites

If you need to manage targeted content, such as activities, experiences, and offers between your sites, you can take advantage of AEM’s built-in multisite support for targeted content.

This document describes the following:

To set up how your sites share personalized content, you need to perform the following steps:

At any time you can suspend or restore inheritance. In addition, if you do not want to suspend inheritance, you can also create local experiences. By default, all pages use the Master Area unless you specify otherwise.

Introduction to multisite support for targeted content introduction-to-multisite-support-for-targeted-content

Multisite support for targeted content is available out of the box and lets you push targeted content from the master page that you manage through MSM to a local live copy or lets you manage global and local modifications of such content.

You manage this in an Area. Areas separate targeted content (activities, experiences and offers) used in different sites and provide an MSM-based mechanism to create and manage the inheritance of targeted content together with site inheritance. This prevents your having to re-create targeted content in inherited sites as was required in AEM prior to 6.2.

In an area, only activities linked to that area are pushed to live copies. By default, the Master Area is selected. After you create additional areas, you can link those to your sites or pages to indicate which targeted content is pushed.

A site or live copy links to an area containing the activities that need to be available on that site or live copy. By default the site or live copy links to the master area, but you can link other areas besides the master areaas well.

Use cases use-cases

You can set up multisite support for targeted content in several ways, depending on your use case. This section describes how this would work theoretically with one brand. In addition, in Example: Targeting Content Based on Geogrpahy, you can see a real-world application of targeting content in multiple sites.

Targeted content is wrapped in a so-called areas, which define the scope for sites or pages. These areas are defined at the brand level. One brand can contain multiple areas. Areas can be distinct between brands. While one brand may just contain the master area and therefore is shared across all brands, another brand may contain multiple brands (for example, by region). Brands, therefore, do not need to mirror the set of areas between them.

With multisite support for targeted content, you can, for example, have two (or more) sites with one brand that have one of the following:

You could also have multiple brands that are used in one site, which could be more complex than this example.

Example: Targeting content based on geography example-targeting-content-based-on-geography

Using multisite for targeted content lets you share, roll out, or isolate personalization content. To better illustrate how this feature is used, consider a scenario where you want to control how targeted content is rolled out based on geography as in the following scenario:

There are four versions of the same site based on geography:

Each site shares personalized content in geographic regions:

For the northern hemisphere, we have a winter activity created but in the male audience the marketer in North America would like a different image for winter, so he or she changes it in the United States site.

After refreshing the tab, the Canadian site changes to the new image without any action on our part. It does so because it shares the master area with the United States. In the Great Britan and Australia sites, the image does not change.

The marketer would like to roll out these changes to the European region and rolls out the live copy by tapping or clicking Rollout Page. After refreshing the tab, the Great Britain site has the new image as the Europe area inherits from the master area (after rollout).

The image in the Australia site remains unchanged, which is the desired behavior, as it is summer in Australia and the marketer does not want to change that content. Australia’s site does not change because it does not share an area with any other region nor is it a live copy of another region. The marketer never has to worry that the Australian site’s targeted content will get overwritten.

In addition, for Great Britain, whose area is a live copy of the master area, you can see the inheritance status by the green indicator next to the activity name. If an activity is inherited, you cannot modify it unless you suspend or detach the live copy.

At any time, you can suspend the inheritance or detach the inheritance completely. You can also always add local experiences that are only available to that experience without suspending the inheritance.

Creating an area versus creating an area as livecopy creating-a-new-area-versus-creating-a-new-area-as-livecopy

In AEM, you have the option of creating an area or creating an area as livecopy. Creating an area groups activities and anything that belongs to those activities, such as offers, experiences, and so on. You create an area when you want to create either a completely distinct set of targeted content or you want share a set of targeted content.

If, however, you have inheritance set up via the MSM between the two sites, then you may want to inherit the activities. In this case, you create an area as a live copy, where Y is a live copy of X and therefore inherits all the activities as well.

For example, in the following diagram, there are four sites where two share the master area (and all the activities that are part of that area), one site that has an area that is a live copy of an area, so that it shares the activities upon rollout, and one side that is completely separate (and therefore requires an area for its activities).

To achieve this in AEM, you would do the following:

Creating new areas creating-new-areas

Areas can span activities and offers. After you have created an area in either one of them (for example, activities), you also have the area available in the other one (for example, offers).

To create an area:

Creating areas as live copies creating-areas-as-live-copies

You create an area as a live copy to inherit the targeted content across site structures.

To create an area as a livecopy:

Linking sites to an area linking-sites-to-an-area

You can link areas to either pages or to a site. Areas are inherited by all subpages unless those pages are over layed by a mapping on a subpage. In general, however, you link at the site level.

When you link, only those activities, experiences, and offers from the selected area are available. This prevents accidental mixup of independently managed content. If no other area is configured, the master area of each brand is used.

To link a site to an area:

Detaching live copy or suspending inheritance of targeted content detaching-live-copy-or-suspending-inheritance-of-targeted-content

You may want to either suspend or detach inheritance of targeted content. Suspending or detaching the live copy is done per activity. For example, you may want to modify experiences in your activity, but if that activity is still linked to inherited copy, you cannot modify the experience or any of the activity’s properties.

Suspending the live copy temporarily breaks inheritance, but in the future you can restore inheritance. Detaching the live copy permanently breaks inheritance.

You suspend or detach the inheritance of targeted content by restoring it in an activity. If a page or site links to an area that is a Live Copy, you can view an activity’s inheritance status.

An activity that is inheriting from another site is marked green next to the activity name. A suspended inheritance is marked red, and a locally created activity has no icon.

Suspending inheritance suspending-inheritance

To suspend or detach inheritance of targeted content in an activity:

Breaking Inheritance breaking-inheritance

To break inheritance of targeted content in an activity:

Restoring inheritance of targeted content restoring-inheritance-of-targeted-content

If you have suspended inheritance of targeted content in an activity, you can restore it at any time. However, if you have detached the live copy, you cannot restore the inheritance.

To restore inheritance of targeted content in an activity:

Deleting areas deleting-areas

When you delete an area, you delete all the activities in that area. AEM warns you before you can delete an area. If you do delete an area that a site is linked to, the mapping for this brand will automatically remap to the master area.

To delete an area: