Visitor Profile (jExperience)
In jExperience, Jahia’s personalization solution, the visitor profile is the complete set of data known about a visitor. It brings together their properties and, depending on context, their sessions and each recorded event (jExperience). It is what the marketing team relies on to segment its audience, personalize pages and understand journeys.
Definition and how it works
Without a profile, every visit starts from scratch. With one, the history carries on, provided the visitor returns with the same browser without having cleared their cookies, or logs in. The Academy glossary gives the term two meanings. It is worth keeping them apart in conversations between teams. In the narrow sense, the profile means a visitor’s property values, in the sense of a property (jExperience), such as their industry, their language or a stated interest. In the broad sense, it means the full record, including properties, sessions and events. Someone asking "what is in the profile" does not always expect the same answer.
The Academy material on jExperience describes the profile as a visitor’s properties, behavioral information, contextual information for each visit and classification information. It grows richer through browsing, logins and forms. With Forms, form fields can be mapped to profile properties. A profile does not necessarily identify a named person. It can remain anonymous.
Academy documentation: profile data in jCustomer
Related terms: Visitor · Property (jExperience) · Audience · Event (jExperience) · Forms
Resources that cover this term
Visitor profile vs visitor: the differences
A profile is an individual record. A visitor is the person it represents, more or less faithfully. Audiences and segments are groups built from many profiles.
| Concept | What distinguishes it |
|---|---|
| Visitor | The person browsing the site without being identified or logged in. The profile represents their activity, not the person. |
| Audience | All the visitors of a website. A segment groups part of them by shared properties or behavior. |
| Property (jExperience) | An attribute of a profile, a session or an event, such as number of children. The profile carries those that describe the person. |
Visitor profile in practice
On a first visit, an anonymous profile records the pages viewed. On the second, the visitor views more pages about the same offer. On the third, a segment based on those repeated visits shows them testimonials related to that offer. In the narrow sense, this profile holds almost no properties; in the broad sense, it already carries three sessions and their events. It never contained a name.
This scenario assumes the visitor returns with the same browser without having cleared their cookies, or logs in. Every piece of data added to the profile should also serve a planned segmentation or personalization.
Frequently asked questions
Does a jExperience profile always identify a named person?
No. A profile can remain anonymous and contain only browsing data and inferred or declared properties. It only holds a name or an email address if the person provided them, in a form or by logging in, or if the organization imported them from another source, such as a CRM. The existence of a profile is therefore not enough to infer the person’s real identity.
Who should approve the data stored in visitor profiles?
Marketing teams define the data that is useful for segmentation, but the decision is not theirs alone. As soon as a profile can hold personal data, the privacy rules that apply to your organization come into play, such as purpose, retention period and, where required, consent or opt-out. Involving the person in charge of data protection early avoids having to remove a property that is already in use.