Sitecore Experience Platform’s extensive measuring capabilities enable you to evaluate the performance of your marketing activity, and define detailed user profiles for each of your site’s visitors. By understanding how users are interacting with your content, you can see where the sticking points are and readjust your strategy to ensure you’re effectively moving users through a slick and successful user journey.
There are multiple measurement terms that Sitecore uses to help you gain a deeper understanding of how users are interacting with your site:
Events
Events can be used to track any interaction you wish to measure. They are broad by definition, and a user completing these actions doesn’t necessarily create business value. However, tracking Events has many benefits, as it helps to build up a more complete picture of a visitor’s behaviour as they navigate your website.
Examples of Event actions include:
- video play
- vote
- download
- login
- site search
Goals
Goals should be used to track interactions which create business value. Essentially, you create goals to track and measure how visitors engage with the website and campaigns. They are typically key milestones you want users to reach throughout their journey. Once you have created goals, you can measure the conversion rate for each. You can find charts and dashboards that show goals and conversion rates in Experience Analytics.
Examples of goals include:
- sign up
- job application
- register for a newsletter
- location search
- download of a document
- complete survey
- leave a review
With certain goals you can create personalisation rules that show content to the user based on the type of goal they have triggered, and their behaviour throughout the website. Users can be segmented by a number of factors, including:
- geographic location of visitor
- the marketing campaign visitors respond to
- where they are on the customer journey
- whether they are a new or repeat visitor
- what product or service they view the most
Content editors can create quick personalisation rules within Sitecore using the Sitecore Rule Set Editor.
Failure actions
Failure actions can be used to track friction points in the user experience that could cause users to abandon their journey. It can be the result of a technical error (e.g. displaying an error message after a failed login), or a visitor action (e.g. a ‘no search results’ message after an unrelated search query). You are able to track failure actions in Sitecore Analytics.
Engagement actions
Engagement Value (EV) is a Sitecore metric used to measure the visitor’s level of engagement and commitment. Similar to lead scoring, this functionality enables you to determine the impact of specific digital goals by assigning Engagement Value Points to each action. The more ‘important’ the goal, the higher the number of points are that are assigned to it.
As a user completes actions across the site, they are assigned an EV. For example, registering for a newsletter might be 10 points, and filling out a ‘contact us’ form might be 100.
As a user moves through channels or interacts with different campaigns, Sitecore will track which marketing activity resulted in the highest, aggregated Engagement Value from all visitors. Unavailable through traditional web analytics, EV is a true measure of visitor behaviour and can help greatly when tracking ROI.
Sitecore is constantly developing its platform with new and innovative tools, features and measuring actions to help marketer’s become more effective with campaigns. By understanding how users interact with your brand, where they are on the buying journey, and what they are experiencing from your digital channels, your marketing can become incredibly effective.
