Unofficial Sitecore Training - Data enrichment and personalization
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The document is an unofficial training session focused on Sitecore's personalization capabilities, emphasizing the challenges faced by developers due to a lack of knowledge. It covers the importance of data enrichment, strategies for effective personalization, various types of personalization methods, and measurement techniques to assess the impact of personalization on website performance. The training aims to empower newcomers to Sitecore by providing insights and practical approaches to enhance their understanding and application of personalization in their projects.
Unofficial Sitecore Training - Data enrichment and personalization
- 1. Unofficial Sitecore Training - Session 9 **UNOFFICIAL
- 2. Introduction Amanda Shiga Toronto, Ontario | Nonlinear Creations Sitecore MVP 2012-present https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandashiga/ https://twitter.com/amandashiga Personalization enthusiast!
- 3. Sitecore Stack Exchange – Public Beta
- 6. 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
- 7. Sitecore development ain’t easy
- 8. We just want to help avoid
- 9. 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
- 11. 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!
- 12. Known and contextual facts about an anonymous visitor, such as location, campaign, referer CATEGORIES PERSONALIZATION 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
- 13. 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
- 14. 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
- 15. Screenshot – rules engine for a sublayout
- 16. 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
- 17. 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
- 18. 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
- 19. Example: Targeting international students
- 20. 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%
- 21. Meat and potatoes 2: Measurement How do we know if personalization is making any difference? Method #2: Sitecore 8 Personalization Report
- 22. 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
- 23. 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”
- 24. Administration Screenshot- tagging an item with EV / marketing center
- 26. 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
- 28. 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
- 29. 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)
- 30. 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
- 31. 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
- 32. Finding opportunities: High volume, low engagement (sitecore analytics)
- 33. Success: big lifts from small tweaks Skiweekends.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”)
- 34. 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
- 35. Keep it simple, agile, experimental
- 36. 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
- 38. 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
- 39. Overcoming obstacles - FAQs Where can I find step by step instructions on the mechanics of configuring personalization in Sitecore? Sitecore documentation Walkthrough: Personalizating components
- 40. 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
- 41. 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
- 42. 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.
- 43. 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.
- 44. 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
- 46. 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!