An Analytics Session for Launch Sitecore

Now that we’ve talked about our team’s Engagement Plan, Goals and Personas for Launch Sitecore, let’s take a quick look at the data Sitecore Analytics can provide us for a visitor to our site.  I will be having much more detailed posts around our upcoming Engagement Intelligence release, but for now we’ll take a look at things that are readily available in Sitecore 6.5.
The data we will see in this report will be based on our ideal visitor to Launch Sitecore:

1. A prospect that has been engaged by our Sales Engineering team (had a tech deep dive with the product, wanted to learn more by downloading and installing Sitecore)
2. The prospect registers at Launch Sitecore
3. The prospect downloads the Launch Sitecore package (and reads some additional articles along the way)
4. The prospect spends time with the evaluation (and hopefully has some more conversations and communication with the Sales Engineering team)
5. After a successful evaluation, the prospect comes back to Launch Sitecore to give the team some feedback.

Incidentally, this prospect will go through all phases of our Engagement Plan:

 

In the Engagement Analytics Reports, we can find the Recent Activit—>Latest Visits reports:

I’m at home behind my Comcast Cable ISP service, so that’s how my DNS record resolved.  These reports do have the ability to more clearly classify session records if the DNS only resolves to the ISP.
Clicking on Comcast Cable gives us insight into all recent activity from this “company”…which will be really meaningful in your case when your visitors sit behind a company DNS record:

We can now see Total Engagement Value generated from this company (over a selectable time frame).  We can see the total number of unique visitors from this company, the last time they visited and a Google Map to show the geographies they came from.
In the Top 20 Visitors column, we can see individual visitors and any Tags we were able to apply to this session.  In the case of Launch Sitecore, we are able to easily use the Web Forms for Marketers feature to Tag any field of an input form, so when I went to Register just now, I included mikecaseynow as my Name.  The Name field was Tagged and now shows up to identify the Visitor in this report.

 

Further down the report we get a nice summary of conversions for this company.  Notice all the Goals we discussed in this series.
Clicking “mikecaseynow” in the above report will now drill down to the specific visitor (Me) and describe the activity from that single visitor (across multiple visits)

 

I can see that I’m always showing up from NH, that I’ve accomplished the range of Goals at Launch Sitecore.  At the bottom of this drill-down, now I see the specific visits I’ve made to Launch Sitecore recently.  Clicking on my 9th visit from 11/4/2012, we get the most granular report in the drill-down chain:  the specifics of a single visit:

 

At the top of this report we get an interesting summary of the activity in this single visit.  We made a decision at Launch Sitecore to only calculate Visit Value for downloads of Launch Sitecore the first time it happens, and since I’ve tested this site a lot, I had already downloaded the package.
We get a nice list of this visit’s conversions, and a great readout of the probable Persona the visitor was trending to in this visit.  Since I read some infrastructure-focused articles on this visit, I was scoring heavily in the Technology Profile Key (and because of this, I would be looking like Ivan the IT Pro in the Launch Sitecore Personas).
Further down, we get a detailed Session Report:

 

Here we see specific time spent on pages and the associated Goal accomplishments, Campaign triggers and Tags.  Since I clicked on one of my Blog articles to start this visit and the Blog link included the Campaign ID, my Campaign was triggered on my entry to the home page of Launch Sitecore.
This report is truncated at the 5th page, but it details all pages visited with any associated detail.  Since in this session I also accomplished the Feedback Goal, I can actually see the Feedback directly in the report:

 

….and our Engagement Plan is able to email out the Feedback to our Sales Engineering Team (or, in our future, enter this directly to the CRM).

 

Previous Post:  The Engagement Plan for Launch Sitecore

The Engagement Plan for Launch Sitecore

I think Engagement Plans in Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Plan stand to be one of the most exciting parts of the platform, but I’ve honestly had a difficult time to date describing them without seeming overly complex.  The public Launch Sitecore site (www.launchsitecore.net) has given our team the ability to really see an Engagement Plan in action and to have goals, motivations and paths that are real and meaningful to us.  We are able to treat Launch Sitecore as a mock company which provides us with some real-world challenges—great ideas balanced with limited time (although Chris Castle should be the spokesperson for a high-powered energy drink), differing opinions on a feature roadmap, security concerns and more.
Among the many opportunities this site provides us is the capability to see the progression through an Engagement Plan that leads towards our Sales Engineering team goals.  Here’s the whole plan:

OK, back to my comment about being confusing.

If we break it down and I describe our motivations for this Plan, it actually becomes quite simple.  At Launch Sitecore, we’re trying to

Create hugely successful experiences for organizations evaluating Sitecore.

My previous post describes our discussion around the goals (that our visitors will accomplish) towards that end.  An Engagement Plan allows us to truly map out the paths we anticipate our visitors will take as they accomplish the goals we set for our organization.  We started by breaking this down to 4 major steps, as shown in the diagram below:

---

The Campaign Phase.

This phase represents the time when our Sales Engineering team is working to engage with the prospect.  This is likely going to be before they’ve ever visited Launch Sitecore.  It’s generally the time period when a Sales Engineer has had a detailed tech deep dive with a group of developers and project strategists.  The prospect group is really interested in getting their hands on Sitecore and spending some time with the application.  We at Launch Sitecore have the perfect evaluation package for that situation.  The ways that the prospect can be engaged from here are:

1. The Sales Engineer can encourage the prospect to visit www.launchsitecore.net and Register for an account (or login with their Social Network credentials).
2. The prospect can click on a Sales Engineer’s Email Signature which has a link to Launch Sitecore (with the appropriate campaign id assigned for each Sales Engineer).  I cheated and any link from these blogs uses that campaign ID as well (check the query string in the above Launch Sitecore link).
3. The prospect can receive a full Email Campaign Newsletter from a Sales Engineer with links describing the download and install process for Launch Sitecore.  Since a prospect may receive an email, we have also included all the default Email Campaign Engagement Plan states (send not complete, message unopened, etc.)

---

The Active Evaluation Phase.

This is the bulk of the plan, where we check to see if our prospect has downloaded Launch Sitecore and, then, given the team feedback about the experience.

---

The Evaluation Complete Phase

This is our main decision point where we assess the outcome of our plan.  More on this below.

---

The Decision

This is an exciting roadmap item for us.  Since our group is very interested in the outcomes of our prospects’ evaluations, we want to see the results—how many of the prospects that engaged with the Sales Engineering team became happy Sitecore customers….and how many will be back for future discussions .
Our first step will be manual.  As we assess our customer wins, we will move the various prospects from those customers into the appropriate state or bucket (Happy Customer).  Our roadmap item is exciting though—through a connection to our Microsoft Dynamics system, we can tie account results from that system to our Engagement Plan and automate the process of moving these prospects to the appropriate state.

---

Back to the start, and the Campaign Phase
Each of our campaign phase options (prospect registering on the site, prospect clicking a Sales Engineer’s auto signature, prospect receiving an Email Campaign message) will advance the prospect to the “Evaluator has been engaged” state of the plan.

OK, they’re on the path.  Instead of going step by step through the process, let’s review the end game here.  We anticipate one of three things will happen with this prospect from here:

1. The prospect will download the Launch Sitecore package, spend some fantastic time evaluating Sitecore, come back to our Launch Sitecore site and give us some insightful feedback on how great the experience was (or how we could add to it).  Awesome outcome.  And in our Engagement Plan terms, this visitor will end up in the Complete Evaluation and Feedback State shown above and below.
2. The prospect will download Launch Sitecore and never get back to the site to give us feedback.  Pretty good.  Download No Feedback.
3. The prospect will never leave this “engaged” state because they never download Launch Sitecore.  Not good.  No Evaluation.

Here’s again how those “semi-final” states look in our Engagement Plan:

So now we just need to map out the possibilities of how they’ll get from point A (being engaged) and point B (one of the 3 outcomes).  And since we have a clearly defined optimal outcome, what can we do in these paths (dropping some candy in the right place, if you will) to increase the likelihood they will choose that specific path?
While it’s somewhat interesting to us what the visitor reads articles on our site (see my post on the Launch Sitecore personas), we are really focused on having this prospect download the evaluation package.  So, our first decision point is basically, “Have they downloaded or not?”.

This is a condition in the Engagement Plan.  It’s an opportunity to take advantage of the Rules Engine to see if something is true or false (see the Yes/No possibilities that branch from this condition).  In our case, the evaluation of the condition is simple—has this prospect downloaded the evaluation package.  As you can see below, we’re checking whether the “Download Site” goal has been accomplished by the prospect.

In our case, since the Launch Sitecore package is actually part of our Sitecore content tree (in the Media Library), we were able to assign the goal to the Media Library item directly:

The only other thing to keep in mind when wiring this up is to ensure you’ve put an appropriate “Trigger” on the current state the visitor is in when you assess this condition.  Remember back that our prospect is in the “Evaluator has been engaged” state.  If you click on a state in the Engagement Plan designer, you get an option to define the Triggers for this state.  In our case we used the achievement of the goal itself as the spark to assess the condition:

 

We will add some other Page Events to this (so that we can ensure the condition is tested for those that don’t download the package).  To describe our logic from here:

1. If a prospect downloads Launch Sitecore, we put them in the “Feedback Path”, where we will check periodically for the achievement of the Feedback goal (a visitor fills in a Web Forms for Marketers form to give our team feedback).
2. If a prospect doesn’t download Launch Sitecore, we will wait for 10 days.  If 10 days has passed, we will use Email Campaign Manager to send out a follow up email reminding the prospect of the benefits of downloading the package.
3. If a prospect has received a follow up email and has still not downloaded Launch Sitecore in 10 additional days, we will drop them into the “semi-final” state I discussed before.  This doesn’t need to stop there however as we consider what actions we will take if a prospect is heading down this path.  For instance, we can email the Sales Engineering group and suggest that someone reaches out to the prospect to offer some help (maybe something happened with the download process?).  As a future feature, we can tie directly to our Microsoft Dynamics CRM and make the sales person on the account aware of the progress.
4. All along the way, we have the opportunities to communicate internally (contact a Sales Engineer about the current situation, or to the prospect themselves (either explicitly by sending out an email or having an SE call, or more subtly by changing the prospect’s experience the next time they are on the site based on the current Engagement Plan state they are in).

As we continue to add features to this plan (including full usage of Email Campaign Manager and the Dynamics Connector), I will describe in more detail the strategy and mechanics of these connections.  In the meantime, we will have fun monitoring the progress of our prospects through this process and continue to ensure we are doing everything along the way to accomplish our Launch Sitecore organizational goals:

Previous post:  The Personas for Launch Sitecore  |  Next post:  An Analytics Session for Launch Sitecore

The Personas for Launch Sitecore

In showing Sitecore to prospect partner and clients, one of the things that inevitably starts some exciting discussions is Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform’s capabilities around customizing the Web experience based on marketing-defined Personas.  By the time we’re on the phone or sitting across the table, this is generally an exercise that has already been discussed.  Depending on the situation, you might be already incredibly deep into this process, with finely-tuned and clearly defined Personas, describing your target audiences in terms of all kinds of detailed attributes, demographics, buying patterns, etc.  In other situations, this might be exceptionally informal or barely defined at all.  You might have a general idea who hits your site, where they’re coming from, but you haven’t created these buckets of generalization to group those visitors into categories—categories that can drive experiential differences for them.

Sometimes this conversation can lead to, “why would I do that, and, more importantly, what happens if I do this WRONG?”.  Very fair question, and very smart to be cautious.  I think, generally, when this feature of the Customer Engagement Platform is first considered, creativity can get the best of us.  I hear this in meetings all the time, where the room starts to buzz with possibility—“what if we did that, or this, or moved this here because of that, or hid this because of that?”.  This is all good excitement and is the exact full-cycle brainstorming session that you should go through once the dust of initial giddiness has settled.  Even in a 1-2 hour first meeting around the Customer Engagement Platform, someone in the room with the right combination of fear, power and cynicism says, “STOP!”.

The air that left the room took with it a bit of excitement, but it also left room for a bit of rigor that any good human-based project needs.  We all tend to want to see and play with the IPhone 7 instead of enjoying the continual, measured improvement along the way.
So, with the giddiness out of the room, think.  Not about stage Z, but about stage B (you’re at A).  What are the simple, nuanced things that might change based on your having a general idea of who this visitor is?…not the logged in user who gave you his profile, but the visitor that came from a certain referrer, used a certain keyword, landed on a certain landing page, and is exhibiting a certain behavior?

The guy that said “STOP"!” is concerned that if you do this wrong, you’ll make sweeping generalizations and sweeping changes to the site based on incorrect assumptions.  Step back….too much for this stage.  Instead, based on an agreed upon confidence interval and threshold, you’ll change his experience through targeted marketing spots now shown, a multivariate test initiated (didn’t want to start the test for everyone), a navigation system that is just a little bit friendlier in its ordering, an image rotator that favors a particular image.  Or maybe NOTHING at all changes—you’re just gathering data for the good, old-fashioned analysis that will help you make better decisions in the future.

For Launch Sitecore, we decided on 4 buckets to put our potential visitors into:

1. Marketers (probably really interested in the Customer Engagement Platform)
2. Content Managers (usability and feature set of the CMS)
3. Developers (how do I get this installed and start playing with it?)
4. IT Professionals (what are the infrastructure and environment specs?)

Don’t go crazy with this yet.  I’ve seen troublesome attempts at creating 30 different buckets on Day 1.  Think to yourself—am I going to really be able to, as an author of content, discern between 30 different audiences when I write my content?  And, as a Web Experience Strategist, are you going to do anything different based on 30 possibilities?  Do you have targeted content written to support this?

In our case, 4 is our good starting point and it is clear in our heads when we’re writing a new article.  If I’m putting together an article with infrastructure diagrams, I know which bucket of visitors I’m targeting.  If I’m diving into CEP Analytics--while it could be less black-and-white—I can picture my visitor type that will be interested.
This won’t be an exhaustive discussion of Sitecore’s Profiles, Profile Cards and Pattern Cards, but let’s take a look at the Launch Sitecore content tree in this area:

Going down the tree:

1. The overall Profiles section in the Sitecore content tree (part of the CEP installation by default).
2. Our Launch Sitecore Profile, called Job Function (the main driver behind our 4 buckets)
3. Individual, specific job functions (Analytics, Copywriting…).  These are called Profile Keys in Sitecore .
4. The Profile Cards folder.  These are in the Sitecore content tree by default, under any specific Profiles you create.  The individual Profile Cards described below are then a possible mixture of any Profile Keys you defined in this Profile.
5. Individual Profile Cards (Connie the Content Manager, Devon the Developer…).  Now we risk tripping over terminology a bit.  Don’t these seem like Personas?  Well, in fact they really are.  The Data Template these Cards are built from is called Profile Card – Persona.  The fields that make up these items will ring true to anyone that has gone through a persona definition marketing exercise to date:

 

In addition to the persona definition fields, description, a handy image to help communicate and visualize what this persona is all about, there is a field in these items that allows you to specify the right mix of specific job function attributes Connie is concerned with / interested in:

Connie is most concerned with Copywriting, but don’t necessarily leave her out of Personalization and Testing conversations.

So, with our Profile Cards / Personas defined, we have a concrete, visual representation of the 4 buckets we started with.  Now our Launch Sitecore article writers can consistently “tag” their work with an appropriate audience.

On a fundamental concept article called the Launch Sitecore Site, we are able to choose Connie’s Profile Card (and see the specific job function attribute mix that will apply to our content item).

If you actually go to this page on Launch Sitecore and hover over the “peelback” on the top left corner, you can see that you’re already trending towards Connie.  Click around to different articles and see if you hit a threshold where you’re trending like one of the other Personas.
Sky’s the limit now!  When someone visits Launch Sitecore and they start to exhibit behaviors like Connie (by reading some targeted content authoring articles), we sound mp3 file horns, we put up huge banners screaming “Hey Content Author!” and we remove all navigation to any articles not targeted towards content authors.  OK, no, we don’t do that.
What we can do is limitless, but let’s just cover 2 quick options.

1. Do absolutely nothing.  Maybe we’re just starting out with this Launch Sitecore thing (we are) and we’re not quite sure our Personas are just right for us.  We’re not sure the campaigns we set up and the MV tests we run will reconcile with the content tagging we have in place with these Profile Cards.  Maybe we just want to look at Sitecore Analytics for a while and see how our traffic is being distributed between these 4 buckets.  More importantly, let’s start to see how much Engagement Value visitors that trend towards these personas are providing for us on our site.  Much more on this later.
2. Apply a Rule to a control that changes content if someone starts to exhibit the traits of one of our Personas.  I won’t go into too many details on this as I and many others have written  plenty of articles covering this topic--but to finish our specific Launch Sitecore example, I might want to show a marketing spot on the home page that specifically talks about CMS as opposed to DMS/CEP if a visitor looks like Connie:

 

And here’s the specific default (out of the box) rule condition that will do this:

We have a targeted marketing spot focused on the CMS (as you can see, this has been selected in the Personalize Content field.  Sitecore will continue to watch for a change…if the threshold is hit where this visitor looks more like Devon the Developer, we might choose to personalize the content with something more developer-centric.

Lots more to come as we enjoy watching the Engagement Plan and Analytics on our Launch Sitecore site:  www.launchsitecore.net.

Previous Post:  The Goal Discussion for Launch Sitecore  |  Next Post:  The Engagement Plan for Launch Sitecore