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Since Liferay Portal 7.2, you can use the Personalization Capabilities to define Segments that allows matching the different types of audiences you have identified for your site and deliver personalized experiences for them. You can define those Segments combining User, Organization and Session criteria.

Now with Liferay CE 7.3, the Segments definition has been improved, and you can reuse existing segments and combine them with complex rules to create new audiences.

Creating a segment based on segments

Imagine you already have defined two Segments:

• Engineers, defined to include every user whose “Job title” is equal to “Engineer”,

• American Employees, that will include every user that belongs to any “Organization” that has the “country” field set to “United States”

Now imagine, you need to define a new Segment to target all the Engineers within American Employees. Of course, you could simply add a new segment and replicate the same rules that you used to define the first segments, combining them with an AND operator. But what if you could reuse those Segments to compose the new “American Engineers”? Now, with 7.3 you can.

In Liferay Portal CE 7.3, the segments editor includes a new section named “Segments” with a draggable field “Segment”. This field allows you to select existing segments and combine them with groups and conjunctions. Following the previous example, let’s combine the “Engineers” and “American Employees” segments into one:

This new segment will filter those users that belong to both segments simultaneously, as reflected in the member's preview. You can refine your segment criteria even more by adding more segments, or other User, Organization and Session criteria. But keep in mind that segments based on segments cannot be further reused to create new segments.

Following the previous example, imagine that you want to target “Inactive Engineers”, in other words, those who haven’t accessed the homepage in the last 3 months. This is something you could do with the help of DXP and Analytics Cloud. In this case, you first define a segment as described in the Using Analytics Cloud With User Segments section. This segment is automatically synchronized to DXP and then you can combine the “Engineers” segments with the “Inactive Users” segment (and any other desired criteria) to create the new segment.

Using a segment based on segments

Once your segment is created, you can use it to create new personalized experiences for that audience. Following the example, we can create an experience for “American Employees” and “Engineers” at the same time with the “American Engineers” segment.

Conclusion

With segments based on existing segments feature, you can reuse existing segments and combine them with complex rules to create new audiences with more powerful criteria and then use it to create new personalized experiences for that audience.