As we all know by now EPiServer R2 Wave provides the new Visitor Group functionality across all EPiServer products. This allows editors to personalise content for individual visitor groups. But how do editors know how many people are matching each group that they’ve set up?

Enter the “Visitor Groups Statistics” gadget. This is a new gadget that has been added into the upcoming release of EPiServer CMS 6 R2. It allows editors to see the number of matching hits for a particular group. In order to enable the statistics for a group editors need to enable it when setting up a group by checking the “Enable statistics for this visitor group” checkbox when setting up a group:

Once this has been selected then its possible to track the number of views for this particular group in the EPiServer dashboard using the new Visitor Groups Statistics gadget:

This gives site editors some basic analytics about how their Visitor Groups are performing on the site.

Note on performance (updated)

It’s worth noting at this point that this functionality uses the EPiServer DDS to store the number of matches for a particular group. Originally I thought this was written each time a group was matched so could have an adverse affect on performance. However after an update from Jonas Bergqvist it turns out this isn’t the case.

EPiServer have thought about it and ensure that all matches are stored in memory then flushed out to the DDS at regular time intervals (changeable in a configuration file).

This should ensure decent performance, even with lots of visitor group statistics counters enabled.

Conclusion

This is a another great feature of Visitor Groups and is something that further empowers site editors to track the performance of their site.

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