Using Sitecore Engagement Plans as an Audience Segmentation Tool

Engagement Plan as Audience Segmenter

I've been kicking around the idea of, instead of strictly mapping out a customer journey with Sitecore Engagement Plans, to instead use them as a visual audience segmentation tool.  With the great analytics that Sitecore is collecting, this seems like a natural extension to be able to divide the visitors within that analytics data into well-defined categories of patterns.  I'll end this post with an idea that could be added to the current Sitecore concept of Pattern Cards (with your great development addition, of course).

An example audience segmentation Engagement Plan

The idea is this: use the States and Conditions of Sitecore’s Engagement Plan to get a visual indication of the distribution of your audience based on any segmentation criteria.  Since the Rules Engine is so nicely involved in the Engagement Plan Condition checks, this to me is an incredibly natural use of this tool.

The Idea in Launch Sitecore

Here’s how it falls out for Launch Sitecore.  Our audience segments are clearly defined by the groups we envision might visit us at www.launchsitecore.net.  However, this definition is strictly based on content consumption—using Sitecore’s Pattern Card matching, we simply watch for the thresholds between these content consumption patterns.  If someone is reading a lot of articles around Sitecore’s Digital Marketing System, we might conclude he appears to be a marketer.  While this is really cool and easy to do, I have always thought that these patterns need to be a bit more descriptive, inclusive of content consumption patterns and potentially a lot more.  In addition, the definition of this pattern should be flexible and open to change on an ongoing basis—without development.

Talking to a lot of smart partners and clients lately has verified my assumptions.  As we get into the real-world use cases, we talk about all the attributes that should come together to fully define a marketing persona—everything from campaigns to keyword use in search to “known” profile attributes in CRMs to landing pages to referral sources.

Enter the Rules Engine

Enter the Sitecore Rules Engine and the perfect modeling environment for this situation.  Back to Launch Sitecore and our example.  As a simple start, all I want to do is segment my visitor traffic between two opposing possibilities—the visitor appears to be a Marketer or the visitor appears to be a Technologist.  We know that a couple of our Patterns nibble at this persona, and through content consumption our visitor might look like Mark the Marketer, or Devon the Developer.  But what we’re shooting for here is a much richer definition of the age-old split between marketer and technologist.  (By the way, if you consider yourself the perfect marriage of both, give me a shout).

First, we begin with a State that everyone is going to start their journey in:

The initial Engagement Plan state that all our visitors start in

We also get to decide which visitors we want in this plan.  For example, we might only want to evaluate visitors from a certain campaign.  Maybe I'm writing lots of articles on digital marketing subjects, and I want to test if the readers of those articles exhibit what I've defined to be "marketer" behavior on the site.

For the visitors we decide to track in this Engagement Plan, the first assumption is that we don’t yet have enough information to define them as Marketer or Technologist.  But we can immediately rectify that by invoking the Rules Engine in our first condition check.  We could check for either, but we chose to to first see if we should deem this visitor as technical.

A set of conditions we can check for to see if some one is "a technologist"

Our Condition invokes the Rules Engine where we can build a very sophisticated grouping of attributes that, for us at Launch Sitecore, peg someone with the Technical label.  We’re going to use the Pattern Card matches as a possibility (now grouping a couple of them together that represent our two technical Patterns), as well as including an additional possibility that someone got to Launch Sitecore using the word “development” in their search phrase (i.e., “Sitecore development”).

While this is a simple example, hopefully you’re seeing the possibilities here.  Never mind how rich the out of the box condition set is in Sitecore (geography, site, where you are in the content hierarchy itself, etc., etc.), we also know that this condition could be absolutely anything you dream up that returns a true/false.

If the condition returns true, we’re done and place the visitor in the Technical bucket:

A state for those we've deemed to be Technologists

If the overall condition returns false, we drop down to the check for the Marketer:

A set of conditions we can check for to see if some one is "a marketer"

As before, we are able to reuse our initial logic around Pattern Cards, with Connie and Mark combining forces as a possible reason to label a visitor as a Marketer.  In addition, we look for a search keyword containing DMS (Digital Marketing System) as well as a check for my MarchBlogBlitz campaign.  Since many of my articles in this time period are covering Analytics, I’m making the assumption that we have some Marketers on our hands.  Keep in mind the ability to replace the “or”s for “and”s, giving us possibly more granular condition definition.  As above for the Technical case, if this multi-clause condition returns true, we dump the visitor in the Marketing bucket.

Nice little trick if both of these checks return false.  We simply put the visitor back into the Undecided state and let other things trigger another check (maybe the next check is done on a follow up Goal, Page Visit, Login Event or anything else we might wait for our visitor to accomplish).  We do this by one last Conditional check, which always returns True:

Send the visitor back until we're sure

Here’s another look at the overall plan:

The full audience segmentation Engagement Plan

Pretty simple, but sky’s the limit.  One really cool idea that fits nicely into this is a very simple geography breakdown.  I could have, for instance, three states representing West, Central, and Eastern United States and immediately drop visitors into those states as they enter the site based on our GEOIP resolution.  (Since I am in the world of ideas only here, be sure to appreciate performance implications of making such wholesale checks).

Manually test how a visitor maps to the plan

One last really cool thing.  Since I have lots of visitor information in our Launch Sitecore site, I can even run a visitor through my new Engagement Plan.  Using the Supervise features of Engagement Plans, I grabbed my user (the Visitor associated with my Facebook authentication).  I moved that User to my new plan and the Undecided State.  In Supervise, I can manually press the trigger:



Since my Conditions are checked at Session End (among other events), I chose to run the Session End Trigger.

Sitecore goes through the entire logic of my plan and determines that my user account should be placed in the Marketing bucket.

The results of manually sending someone through the plan

Way cool.

NOW GO DOWNLOAD LAUNCH SITECORE.  (Need to get that great data for my reporting experiment).  I’ll let you know how our audience trends between this new Marketing and Technologist segmentation.

Extra Credit

For the interested student and the great developer….

Where I think this would be even more interesting is to use this same logic in the Pattern Card feature of Sitecore.  My prototype took all of 2 seconds (since it doesn’t in any way work).  But for an enterprising developer that adds the Rules logic to the Pattern Card check, this seems like a killer feature:

This becomes especially interesting considering Pattern Cards are an automatic dimension of Sitecore’s Analytics reporting.