unofficial sitecore training - data enrichment and personalization
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Unofficial Sitecore
Training - Session 9**UNOFFICIAL
Introduction
Amanda Shiga Toronto, Ontario | Nonlinear Creations
Sitecore MVP 2012-present
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandashiga/
https://twitter.com/amandashiga
Personalization enthusiast!
Sitecore Stack Exchange – Public Beta
Sitecore Slack
Sitecore Community Updates
Purpose of this Training series
After years of working with Sitecore partners and their developers both onshore & offshore, we realized that the reason for poor project choices are based on lack of knowledge.
Sitecore training and certification is great but -- without going too much into details -- it difficult for even a seasoned .NET developer to bridge the gap.
Our hope is to help newcomers to the Sitecore XP gain a better understanding and hopefully clear any doubts about working with Sitecore. Even though we cannot cover everything, we will try to cover all the parts we feel are important.
***Not intended for seasoned Sitecore developers
Sitecore development ain’t easy
We just want to help avoid
Overview
Data enrichment and personalization
Getting started: the importance of xDB data enrichment
Building your strategy: types of personalization in Sitecore
and how/when to apply them
Keeping personalization manageable for marketing ops
and website performance
Measuring success: how to determine if personalization is
making a difference
Useful extensions: some helpful approaches to extend
Sitecore’s personalization capabilities
#personalizationgoals
Great news!
You have a wonderful platform that facilitates all sorts
of personalization
You can be a Personalization Hero, impressing your
clients, stakeholders and colleagues and actually
influencing the customer journey
It’s easy to start!
Known and contextual facts about an
anonymous visitor, such as location,
campaign, referer
CATEGORIESPERSONALIZATION
CONTEXTUAL
Implicit, behavior-based assumptions
about an anonymous visitor, such as
interest in a product area
BEHAVIOURAL
Known facts about a known visitor how
has willingly self-identified, such as
transactional history, demographics
EXPLICIT
Quickest wins Mitigates
“creepy” Opportunity
When is personalization most effective ?
When one site serves multiple business processes, particularly if the
audience for one of these services is low volume by high value
“Big fish” donors on a non-profit site
Alumni on a higher-ed site
When audiences differ significantly in their motivations for visiting and
information needs
Prospective vs. returning customers
When audiences differ in their emotional response to offers
Baby products vs. sports products
Toronto | Ottawa | New York | Calgary | São Paulo | Florianópolis 13
Sitecore’s personalization paradigm
Platforms “do” personalization differently
What’s a segment?
A group of users defined by a set of characteristics and behaviours
Some platforms define segments separately from content and location
In Sitecore, segments are defined via Rules Engine clauses, in the location
where content will be targeted to them
Pick your spot to personalize (more on that later)
Define targeting behaviour specific to that component
Screenshot – rules engine for a sublayout
Meat and potatoes 1: Platform stuff
Make sure your Sitecore version, license and architecture supports personalization
XP-friendly page architecture – component-based and datasource-driven**
Sitecore 6.5+ and 7 support personalization
Sitecore XP introduces personalization reporting (woohoo!!)
Check your Sitecore license – do you have CMS-only?
Check your Sitecore instance and ensure xDB is enabled
Switch to Costa Rica Eco-Luxury
Meat and potatoes 2: Measurement
How do we know if personalization is
making any difference?
Method #1: The “before and after”
with engagement proxies in any
analytics platform
Make sure you ISOLATE!
BEFORE AFTER
Isolate impact and make
measurement easier
Run your experiments sequentially so you can isolate impact, at least to start
If you have a hard outcome, measure changes in conversion rate for visitor segment
before and after.
Change in revenue per visitor from Boston visitors
Increased conversion rate from “Kevin” persona visitors
If not, measure against bounce rate reduction, time on site, number of pages visited
Example: Targeting international students
Results
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0.35
0.4
0.45
Pre-personalization Post-personalization
Bounce Rate
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
Pre-personalization Post-personalization
Visit Duration
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
4.5
Pre-personalization Post-personalization
Pages per Visit
-23%
23% 14%
Meat and potatoes 2: Measurement
How do we know if personalization is
making any difference?
Method #2: Sitecore 8 Personalization
Report
Engagement value!!
This metric drives a significant amount of “stuff” in
Sitecore (analytics, test success, path analyzer, etc)
The Basic Premise:
Not all visitors are created equal
Some suggest they are more valuable through the actions
they take on your site
Actions that indicate trust or commitment may suggest
a visitor is valuable
Tagging EV – a 30-minute exercise
We tag micro- and macro-conversions on the website with EV in a relative scale, depending on the value of the action
We usually use a scale of 5-100
Build your micro-interactions such that informative behaviours can be easily distinguished and tracked
Item views and “onclick” are easiest
Form submission – important!
Filtering a list; viewing the “full article”
Administration
Screenshot- tagging an item with EV / marketing center
Get to know “trailing value/visit” metric
Your new BFF!
It will tell you if the visitor’s engagement
increased after they viewed the targeted
content
This is a concrete way to demonstrate that personalization made a difference
Building your strategy
First and foremost, examine your business objectives
What segment of visitors should be “nudged”?
What campaigns are you running?
Understand the types of personalization in Sitecore, when to apply them
Look at your current analytics to help find those golden opportunities
Types of Sitecore Personalization
Anonymous Rules-based personalization
Personalization rules based no easily observable values:
Geography
Number of visits to site
Organization
Profile-based personalization
Based on visitor profile
May simulate visitor personas
Driven by content visitor views
Known
Explicit personalization
Draws on information about the visitor
usually stored in a CRM system
Can be very powerful if rules are
crafted carefully
Only applicable for portion of visitors
who log-in (or had logged in on a
recent visit)
Rules-based: where we love to start
You can create rules based on any of the following (or combinations of the following):
Area code
City
Country
Latitude and Longitude
Metrocode
Postal Code
Region
Anonymous vs. logged in
IP Address
ISP name
Business name
Source of visit
Visit number
Page visited
Specific goal achieved
Campaign has been triggered
Device
Finding opportunities: Behaviour
varies by visit (google analytics)
10.11%
8.65%
6.94%
4.03%
New Visitors
Second time visitors
Third time visitors
Fourth+ visit
Home page visitors going to
fees and expenses - MBA - by
visit number
4.42%
5.47%
5.67%
6.54%
New Visitors
Second time visitors
Third time visitors
Fourth+ visit
Application deadlines from MBA
Fulltime page
13.49%
11.09%
10.53%
7.16%
New Visitors
Second time visitors
Third time visitors
Fourth+ visit
Admissions criteria from MBA
Fulltime page
Finding opportunities: High volume,
low engagement (sitecore analytics)
Success: big lifts from small tweaksSkiweekends.com Tourism New Brunswick Monarch Airlines EasyJet
- Personalized promotions
- Pre-populates coach pick-
up points and airport search
fields
- Uses persona profiling so
content, holiday packages,
promos and incentives are
tailored to the visitor's most
applicable persona profile
- Uses engagement value as
a threshold to encourage
deeper engagement such as
sharing to social media
- Use of homepage badges
to segment visitors
- Personalizing landing
pages for originating from
location-based ad
campaigns
for example, visitors from
Quebec were typically more
interested in beach
vacations than those from
Ontario, who prefer Bay of
Fundy.
- Homepage, flights page
and offers are personalized
for visitors based on flight
searches, booking activity,
location and search referrer.
- Sitecore-driven content is
injected into third-party
booking engine (Navitaire)
on the flights confirmation
page to encourage upselling
- Discovered that 40% of
customers coming to the site
knew they wanted to travel,
but were unsure where to
- "Inspire me" feature
matches travelers with their
perfect trip
- Travelers care more about
their holiday experience
than they do about how
they get there
- Sales up 16%
- 55% increase in conversion
of site visits to online booking
pages
- Bounce rate reduced by
22%
- 38% increase in unique
visitors
- 24% increase in product
page reviews
- 5% sales conversions
increase
- average passenger spend
increased by 1.64 pounds
- higher quality of traffic to
booking funnel
- Campaign doubled
customer engagement with
the email
- Quadrupled conversion
- Including the price
increased conversion by 42%
Location- and campaign-based rules
Injection into third-party booking engine
Segmentation campaigns (badges, “inspire
me”)
Success: recently at Nonlinear…
An engineering firm wanted to target a premier group of clients by IP address. We designed a campaign to auto-segment these visitors upon arrival to the website, and push forward relevant projects and contacts.
Type: We created a special IP membership rule
For a non-profit, we identified an opportunity to improve AdWords campaign performance. We’re implementing personalization on the landing page to reduce bounce rate, by tying content more closely to the AdWords copy.
Type: Campaign trigger
For a university, we saw high volumes of traffic from a visitor segment, but low engagement. Aha – a missed opportunity! The personalization campaign will look to drive much more value from that segment by promoting personalized events and thought leadership.
Type: Visitor profile
Keep it simple, agile, experimental
Keeping it manageable
For website performance
Sitecore “crash” threshold for concurrent experiments?
Recommend a fail-fast sequential approach
Beware of CDNs – personalized content needs a server request. A few hacks for this depending on context.
For your marketers and content authors
Personalization makes your UX a living, breathing thing; harder to keep full view of UX permutations
Keep track of experiment sequence, lifetime and result
Build a staggered roadmap
Keeping it manageable
Strike a balance between personalized content
and avoiding SEO penalization
Make sure the “default” page crawled by
Googlebot is sufficiently representative of the
page’s offering with no personalization applied
The “searcher intent” of an organic visit must still
match the “universal content” on the page –
don’t overshadow with too much personalization
Overcoming obstacles - FAQs
Where can I find step by step instructions on the mechanics of configuring
personalization in Sitecore?
Sitecore documentation
Walkthrough: Personalizating components
FAQs
My xDB is disabled or I have CMS-only mode
You can still do some in-session personalization
https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/81/setting_up__maintai
ning/experience_management/configuring/the_experience_management_pe
rsonalization_rules
FAQs
My solution is not XP-friendly
Refactor one high-value page to support Experience Editor and
personalization. Demonstrate a lift, and make the case for a broader
refactoring or rebuild
Introduce XP-readiness into your QA process
Testing scenarios for Sitecore XP readiness
FAQs
We didn’t have time to tag any engagement value or content profiling
Focus on the data you do have available (rules-based) and use engagement
proxies external to Sitecore.
Remember: isolate your experiments.
FAQs
I can’t get approval or funding to “do personalization”.
Start with the smallest, simplest experiment you can tie to a business objective
somebody cares about. (Try to avoid needing code changes to do so)
Demonstrate a lift and go from there.
Upping your personalization game
Focus on building a broader set of data you can personalize on – what
else can we access that lets us target a group of visitors?
Dip a toe into content profiling and personalizing to personas
Install SBOS XCCELERATORS from the Marketplace to give you more options for
Actions and Conditions in the rules engine
Build custom rules (it’s easy!). We built a rule in an SSO context to personalize on
membership expiry
There’s a whole world of personalization beyond the anonymous visitor
Keep an eye towards xConnect
CRMSocial
Media
Customer
SupportWebsite
POS AppsxDB
IoT
Thanks! And remember, keep it simple!
Keep good SEO rankings
Keep platform performance high (do not ask to
calculate a high number of permutations)
Keep your web team’s life manageable
Keep your tracking and measuring feasible
Be a personalization hero and actually go to
production with personalization!
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