Introduction to today's discussion
The Experience Profile is a new Sitecore view into analytics that provides incredible insight at a visitor (Contact) level. From pages viewed, to patterns / personas matched to campaigns triggered to goals achieved, the Experience Profile paints a full picture of your visitors' interactions with your brand.Today we'll take a bit of a deeper dive into this Experience Profile. For those of you on the tech side, this view shows the power of what SPEAK interfaces can become in Sitecore, and as we get to the end of this series we'll see the ability to customize these views, add tabs to the reporting interface and more. For this post I wanted make sure that some of the simple goals, campaigns and page events in our Launch Sitecore site are ready for the Experience Profile, and ready for those deeper conversations.
A reminder of what the Experience Profile looks like and what we'll be drilling into
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| Experience Profile with the Contact Timeline showing |
Marketing Control Panel Considerations for the timeline
Campaign
For this exercise, I set up a new Campaign in Sitecore's Marketing Control Panel (as everything now is, one click away in the Sitecore 8 Launch Pad). To those familiar with DMS, this is the same idea as the Marketing Center, the area of the content tree dedicated to setting up marketing initiatives. I set up a new Campaign to track called "Video Blog Campaign" (our team is working on demo and other instructional videos that we plan to have a home for soon).
Some things to note that have been added to Sitecore 8. The Campaign Group is a drop-down selector to allow us to start considering a richer taxonomies for our campaign organization. This will become important later as we start looking at Campaign reports. I added a new Campaign Group (Mike Campaigns) in this Taxonomies section, and it became available in the Campaign Group drop-list as I set up the Video Blog Campaign itself:
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| New Taxonomies Section for Campaign Management |
Goals and Page Events
We can keep the goals we already have in place for Launch Sitecore. These represent simple "transactions" that we are trying to encourage our visitors to take part in, like downloading the Launch Sitecore package, visiting certain targeted pages, adding articles to a logged in user's persistent profile:
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| List of Goals for LaunchSitecore.net |
One interesting addition to Goals is shown below:
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| A Goal item shown in the Content Editor |
Note that a new "Experience Profile Options" section with two checkbox field are now available for Goals (they are also available for Page Events). This gives us the option to make sure these goals / conversions are prominently displayed on our Contacts' Experience Profile Reports.
With these simple Campaigns and Goals in place (and making sure all of these items are Deployed and Published), we can now start to see Abraham Lincoln's visit history start to take shape.
Below is a section of the Timeline where we can start to chart various interaction points with our Contact:
The Timeline gives us visual cues representing Goals achieved and Campaigns triggered. It gives us a bar graph indication of value for the various visits from our Contact. Below the Timeline we are able to see specific Goals achieved, the nature of the Campaign that was triggered, Page Views, Value and more.
Since we had many of the Digital Marketing considerations in place with Launch Sitecore (which started on Sitecore 6.6), we were able to ready the site for new Sitecore 8 features very easily. The public site at launchsitecore.net is now on Sitecore 8 and tracking all this great Contact data so that we can enjoy the new insights that the Experience Profile and other analytics views provide.
