Personalisation in CMS 13 Using Audiences

One of the common questions around CMS 13 is whether it still supports personalisation without requiring additional products. The short answer is yes.

CMS 13 includes built in personalisation using what were previously known as Visitor Groups. In CMS 13 these have been renamed to Audiences (Correction they changed to Audiences in latter versions of CMS12 which somehow I missed, Thanks Scott for pointing this out), but the core concept remains the same. You can define audiences based on visitor behaviour and use them to tailor content across your site.

Audiences are managed directly within the CMS interface. For example, you might create an audience made up of visitors who have viewed pages with a specific category more than a set number of times. Once an audience is defined, it can be used to control how content is displayed.

Personalisation is applied at the content level using standard content areas. Editors can choose to show or hide individual components such as a hero or jumbotron based on the selected audience. This allows targeted experiences without introducing additional complexity for editors.

CMS 13 also supports previewing content as a specific audience. This makes it easy to validate personalisation rules and understand exactly what different users will see before changes are published.

This approach provides traditional, rules based personalisation out of the box and offers a clear path to more advanced personalisation in the future if needed. For many organisations, it delivers exactly the right level of capability from day one.

A short video walkthrough is included below to demonstrate this in action.