One of Sitecores features is the ability to assign profile cards or profile key scores to pages. As visitors browse the website the profile key scores from each page are added to the visitors profile. Visitors are then assigned a pattern card using N-Dimonsional Euclidean Distance to calculate the closest matching pattern card to the visitors profile.

However before a pattern card is assigned to a visitor they must visit a minimum number of pages. The default for this is set to 3.

Reasons for changing this could be that you actually want to be more certain of a users profile before triggering personalisation this could be to avoid visitors landing pages on the site heavily dictating which persona they initially become profiled as, which in turn could influence personalisation that keeps them in that persona.

Or it could be because you want to lower the number of pages for a more immediate effect.

Whatever the reason to change the default from 3 you need to add the following setting to your config:

This can happen in any ASP.NET Web Application, but as Sitecore 8's default web.config file is now 246 kb this makes it extremely susceptible to exceeding the default 250 kb limit.

To change the size limit you need to modify/create the following registry keys:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\InetStp\Configuration\MaxWebConfigFileSizeInKB  (REG_DWORD)

On 64-bit machines you may also have to update the following as well

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\InetStp\Configuration\MaxWebConfigFileSizeInKB (REG_DWORD)

You will probably find that these keys need to be created, rather than just being updated. After changing them you will also need to reset IIS.

Alternatively

Alternatively you can leave the default values at 250 kb and split the web.config files into separate files.

More information on doing this can be found here:

http://www.davidturvey.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/how-to-split-the-web-config-into-mutliple-files/

My personal preference for Sitecore projects is to update the the max file size as this allows keeping the web.config file as close to the default install as possible. The benefit of doing this is it makes upgrades easier, rather than needing to know why your web.config doesn't match the installation instructions.

A few weeks ago I blogged about extending profile matching over multiple visits in Sitecore. The basis of the post was to look at options on how you could extend Sitecore so that personalisation could use historical persona data rather than just data from the current session.

In this post I'm going to be looking at the SBOS Accelerators module which lists as one of its features "Historical Conditional Renderings".

So what does it do?

Rather than change the way data gets recorded about a user, the SBOS Accelerator adds an additional 5 personalization rules to the rule set editor. These are:

• where the specific campaign has been triggered within x days
• where the specific goal has been triggered within x days
• where behaviour based on last x days matches the specific pattern card in the specific profile
• where the specific page has been visited within x days
• where the value of specific profile key compares to specific value, based on behaviour from last x days

As well as allowing a rule to look at profile data over a number of days, the days option can also be changed to look at profile data over a number of visits.

This option of allowing us to specify a number of days or a number of visits helps to overcome the issue of data needing to degrade at different rates over time. We can set rules to promote something that a user may still be interested in by limiting the data to the last week, or we can target personality traits that shouldn't change by taking a few months into consideration.

What's important to note though is profile data is still being recorded on a per visit basis, so we still don't have an overall accumulation of points over time and an assigned pattern card is still being based on an individual visit. But we're able to create rules based on pattern cards assigned in multiple visits.

Some things to note

The SBOS Accelerators are currently only available for Sitecore versions 6.6 - 7.2. It currently hasn't been updated to work with the new Mongo based analytics db in 7.5+.

The module has been written by Sitecore Support and is marked as being tested by Sitecore, so you can expect a decent level of reliability. However it is not covered by your Support agreement with Sitecore so you may not get any help with issues you encounter. The source for the module is available for you to edit though.

Links

SBOS Accelerators on the Sitecore Marketplace