High Score Labs News   •   March 10, 2016

The marketing/analytics system in Sitecore is very advanced. The advantages to using it instead of or together with Google analytics (or others) is that you now have your own dataset of great detail as to how site visitors are using your content and other interactions with the system. This data can be analyzed (data mining) by using tools such as Microsoft’s BI client, Excel (with data analytics tools turned on), R, Python and other tools. This can be used to make accurate forecasts of what will happen based on a analysis of historical information. It can also be used to research ‘what if’ scenarios like: what color button generates the most clicks, CTAs place here generate more traffic than if they are placed there, etc.

This section will focus on providing an overview only as this is discussed more in the unit Analytics.

Experience Analytics

This dashboard is used to show site traffic whether it is anonymous or registered users. The information can be filtered by date range: day, week, month, quarter and year. It can also filter by site.

Experience Profile

This tool is probably the best demonstration of why one would want to use Sitecore analytics tools in the first place. This tool displays a list of everyone that has visited the site, whether anonymous or registered. Then it allows you to drill down and see what content each person has been consuming.

Federated Experience Manager

The aim of this tool is to integrate other non Sitecore sites into its analytics and cms systems. This can be applied to any site that is not already in Sitecore and allows for basic content editing as well as analytics data collection from these sites. This is where all of the connection information would be maintained.

Experience Optimization

Another example of why one would want to use Sitecore as their analytic engine. This tool supports A/B and multi-variate testing. What this means is that a team of marketers/content authors can create tests on the site to test theories. For example, one test could be what style of CTA gets the most conversions? This tool displays the full history of all tests that have been run and allows a team to gradually grow their dataset so as to make more effective decisions based on fact/research versus guessing.

List Manager

Sitecore has its own ECM (Email Campaign Management) system that can be used to create newsletters, automated messages and so on. This tool allows a marketer to manage or add to their lists of registered users. All of the campaigns that are created and ran are tied into the analytics system, showing the full results of that campaign, from opening in a mail client to conversion by filling out a form.

Campaign Manager

This tool allows a marketing team to not only create campaigns, but generate reports using collected data. This tool can also be used to demonstrate effectiveness of the team to your management, assisting in acquisition of needed funds for future work. Sitecore also uses the concept of channels. What this is used for is to show where people are coming from; Facebook, twitter, offline ads, etc.

Path Analyzer

Probably one of the newer (and very useful) tools from Sitecore. This provides a birds eye view to how traffic is moving through the site by using the ball and stick method. Each node shows the order of how pages where visited, how long and what was done. With this tool, it is easy to see how people funnel through the site, which pages are hit the most and whether or not the desired effect is being reached. NOTE: currently requires Silverlight to work. However, as of Sitecore 8.2, the component has been redone using javascript (i.e., no more Silverlight).