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!