Sitecore Symposium 2018 - Getting Value Out of Your Data

Editor's Notes

• #11: Sitecore will allow you to tag specific content with a numeric value in lieu of a hard conversion metric in order to glean greater insights into your user’s behavior and customer journey. Sitecore introduced the concept of engagement value to help measure the quality of a customer visit. High EV indicates that a visitor is taking the desired actions. Each Engagement Value is relative to the visitor’s level of communication, trust, and commitment. All goals with Engagement Value Points must move the visitor toward the strategic objectives. This foundational part of Sitecore Marketing. YOU HAVE TO DO THIS. So many pieces of Sitecore analytics and functionality, from AB testing to Value per Visit, rests on EV so it’s necessary to take the time within your organization to develop, implement, and consistently apply your EV scale. EV weights goals, pages, content, etc. and prioritizes them, so you are measuring a complex set of interactions across your website, which provides a more complete understanding of impact.
• #12: When it comes to your individual visitors, EV is calculated based on user actions, like goals, and stored in the xProfile of the individual contact. This allows you, as a marketer, to know precisely how valuable each contact is. Engagement Value is a metric relevant within its Segment and Dimension. It will help inform on where to spend marketing efforts, as it relates to that segment or dimension.
• #16: One of ways to track or identify these mismatches is in experience analytics. Using dimensions and segments it is possible to zoom in on the paths where your time and money will make the biggest impact.
• #22: Path analyzer is an incredibly cool functionality. Basically, it lets you map the path that your visitors take as they travel through your website, and to create custom maps based on different data points and experience types, like first time visitors or campaign interactions. It allows you to understand paths through your site based on traffic, engagement and efficiency. Like A/B testing, Path analyzer works best when goals and events are functioning across and throughout your website. This is one of those foundational tasks that will make your life a thousand times simpler if you plan it out from the beginning. Goals and events are attached to engagement value which helps Path Analyzer more clearly identify paths that are successful or not, which content works well and what content should be optimized.
• #23: Finding a path with a high number of visits but low value presents it’s own opportunities. As we discussed earlier, these pages need conversion/engagement tactics. Spend your money improving conversions. There’s another good example here – see the green node surrounded by all the red? That’s another great opportunity for optimization
• #24: Once you’ve identified a highly converting path, you can save it as a funnel without alteration or you can build one that suits your specific tracking needs in the Marketing Control Panel. This segment needs traffic generating tactics and we want to spend our money improving traffic in this segment. Jumping into page analyzer can tell us where the traffic is coming from and where we’re losing them, because the tool allows you to narrow in on paths to and from the specific page you’re interested in.
• #25: This page provides us some excellent examples of user traffic that does convert AND user traffic that does not. We can study the incoming paths to see what those that result in high value have that we might be able to utilize. Is this a poor performing page in general, or only under certain circumstances? We also have another trick in our bag…
• #26: From Path Analyzer we can see which contacts have visited this path, and that helps us build a targeted marketing strategy for those users to drive more traffic to this highly converting page. You can see all the date about
• #27: You can see all the data about these contacts in Experience Profile, more commonly known as xProfile. You can access it through the Sitecore Launchpad for a more general view, but for this path, and these visitors, we can skip right to the good stuff with the handy direct link just below the contact name.
• #29: Sitecore displays all contact records through the xProfile. This includes both Anonymous and Known users. The Sitecore Global Analytics cookie tracks this information between sessions, devices and user states. Sitecore constantly merges the contact records in order to store all record data.