2. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 2 of 30
TableofContents
Table of Contents............................................................................................................................................................2
Document Tables................................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Document Figures ................................................................................................................................................................................. 3
1. Introduction...............................................................................................................................................................4
Summary ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 4
2. How does Sitecore Analytics Compare?......................................................................................................................6
The ‘What and How’ of Analytics........................................................................................................................................................... 6
A Quick Comparison.............................................................................................................................................................................. 6
Selecting the Best-fit Solutions ........................................................................................................................................................... 10
3. What if I am on an Older Version of Sitecore? ...........................................................................................................11
Sitecore Versions................................................................................................................................................................................. 11
Finding the Biggest Opportunities ....................................................................................................................................................... 14
Choosing a Time to Upgrade............................................................................................................................................................... 14
4. What is Experience Analytics?..................................................................................................................................16
Why does Experience Analytics Matter to Marketers? ........................................................................................................................ 16
What Do We Measure with Experience Analytics?............................................................................................................................... 16
How does Sitecore Support Experience Analytics? ............................................................................................................................. 18
5. Where do I Start My Journey?...................................................................................................................................19
Using an Analytics Maturity Model...................................................................................................................................................... 19
Finding Out Who We Are...................................................................................................................................................................... 21
The Ambitious Organization ................................................................................................................................................................ 21
The Top-heavy Organization................................................................................................................................................................ 21
The Thoughtful Organization............................................................................................................................................................... 21
Finding out Where You Start................................................................................................................................................................ 22
6. What Does an ‘Analytics Roadmap’ Look Like?..........................................................................................................23
A Basic Analytics Roadmap................................................................................................................................................................. 23
Key Activities for Each Roadmap......................................................................................................................................................... 23
7. Where Can I Get Help to Build My Road Map? ...........................................................................................................25
8. Appendix .................................................................................................................................................................26
Sitecore and Google Analytics Comparison Detail .............................................................................................................................. 26
Document Tables
Table 1 - Comparison of Sitecore and Google Analytics Functionality ...............................................................................6
Table 2 - Comparison of Analytics Improvements across Multiple Sitecore Versions.......................................................11
Table 3 - Digital Analytics Maturity Model (DAMM) Parameters and their Effect on Organizations ...................................20
3. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 3 of 30
Table 4 - Sitecore and Google Analytics Comparison Detail ............................................................................................26
Document Figures
Figure 1 - Three Primary Activities of Analytic Software....................................................................................................6
Figure 2 - The Three Relevant Sitecore Version Families.................................................................................................11
Figure 3 - Improving the Customer Experience Improves the Sales Performance of an Organization................................16
Figure 4 - Tracking Visitors across Channels and Time with Sitecore 8 ...........................................................................18
Figure 5 - The Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model..........................................................................................19
Figure 6 - An Example of Maturity of an Ambitious Organization.....................................................................................21
Figure 7 - An Example of Maturity of a Top-heavy Organization.......................................................................................21
Figure 8 - An Example of Maturity of a Thoughtful Organization Early in their Analytics Journey ......................................21
Figure 9 - An Example of a Thoughtful Organization at a Mature State in their Analytics Journey.....................................22
Figure 10 - An Analytics Roadmap that Would Lead an Organization to their Initial State of Maturity................................23
Figure 11 - We Recommend Executing Several Short Roadmaps that Lead to Greater Maturity ........................................24
Figure 12 - Each Analytics Roadmap that an Organization Executes Should Move them to Closer to Maturity ..................24
4. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 4 of 30
1.Introduction
This document is the first of five guides in GSPANN’s Sitecore Marketing Optimization Series. The series
is targeted at marketers that are considering or are using Sitecore for their marketing and customer
experience activities. The series reviews in-depth the Sitecore capabilities around these five areas:
1. Analytics
2. Personalization
3. Experience Optimization
4. Sales Enablement
5. Campaign Management
The series parallel Sitecore Business Optimization Services (SBOS) that we offer our clients to help them
maximize the value they get from their Sitecore investment. These offerings focus on strategy, analysis,
and planning activities required in delivering new, or optimizing existing, Sitecore-built websites to more
effectively deliver against customer acquisition and engagement goals defined by marketing and other
stakeholders within an organization.
The consulting approach is adapted from the SBOS approach defined by Sitecore, with the addition of
insights and opportunities taken from GSPANN’s own experiences in delivering sophisticated cross-
channel customer engagement solutions that include Sitecore with other platforms commonly found
within the digital marketing ecosystem (e.g. Marketing Automation, CRM and Social platforms).
Summary
This document is focused on the analytics capabilities of Sitecore. The document is intended as guide for
marketers who are considering Sitecore for their analytics as an alternative to an incumbent platform like
Google Analytics. Within this guide, we will cover the following topics:
How does Sitecore Analytics Compare?
Most organizations who have implemented Sitecore are or have used platforms like Google Analytics,
Omniture or others. If your organization is still using an incumbent analytics platform, then you may have
questions such as “How does Sitecore analytics compare with my current analytics platform?” The guide
outlines the differences in functionality and your approach when using Sitecore experience analytics
when compared with others.
What if I am on an Older Version of Sitecore?
Organizations often are one, two, or even three versions behind the current version of Sitecore. With each
major release of Sitecore, new analytics capabilities are added, while existing capabilities are enhanced.
The guide examines what capabilities are available to you in your current version, while understanding
5. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 5 of 30
the value capabilities in newer versions. We will review how businesses can justify upgrading to these
newer Sitecore versions.
What is ‘Experience Analytics’?
Vendors, along with the industry at large, are good at using ‘loaded’ terminology. As ‘web content
management’ has evolved into ‘experience management’, we now also have ‘experience analytics’—but
what does it mean for Sitecore? The guide examines how you can measure ‘the experience’ using a variety
of different tools that Sitecore offers.
Where do I Start My Journey?
As with most things you do for the first time, knowing where to start with Sitecore analytics can also be
challenging. The guide will review key considerations and questions that lead you to the correct start,
while setting the correct direction for the following steps. We provide you with a decision tree that guides
you to one of the several starting points for your analytics effort.
What does an ‘Analytics Roadmap’ Look Like?
Getting started correctly is important, but continuing in the correct path will finally help you achieve your
analytics goals. As with many tasks marketers undertake these days, having a ‘cookbook’ to guide your
efforts reduces your learning curve and increases your success rate. The guide provides you with a
framework to use each time you want to employ analytics—perhaps for a new campaign, recent product
launch, or just to gain a deeper insight into your existing customers. This framework guides you through
the key steps in defining and planning Sitecore experience analytics.
Where can I Get Help to Get My Roadmap Built?
Our Sitecore Business Optimization Services (SBOS) help both existing and new Sitecore customers take
advantage of their investment. These SBOS workshops are held onsite at your facilities, where we work
with you and your team to create an analytics roadmap. In addition to helping you create your first
roadmap, we will provide you with the necessary tools while educating you around how to create road
maps that guide future experience analytics initiatives.
6. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 6 of 30
2.HowdoesSitecoreAnalyticsCompare?
Understand How Sitecore Compares To Google Analytics
If you are using Sitecore now and have been
maintaining websites for a while, then you
probably have experience using different
analytics applications other than Sitecore.
You could still be using those other analytics
applications, as a ‘carry over’ from a pre-Sitecore
website, while only using the most basic
analytics capabilities built into Sitecore. If this
describes your current situation, then the
following section should help you understand
what you are missing out on and when it may
make sense for you to adopt Sitecore analytics.
The ‘What and How’ of Analytics
To better understand how to compare them, we
need to understand what and how modern web
and experience analytics tools work. If we
breakdown the ‘what and how’, we find three
primary activities:
Figure 1 - Three Primary Activities of Analytic Software
A Quick Comparison
The following table compares Sitecore and
Google Analytics in the context of the three
activities these products perform. The
comparison considers the functional differences
of data capture, analysis and reporting between
these two analytics tools.
Table 1 - Comparison of Sitecore and Google Analytics Functionality
Sitecore Google Analytics Perspective
Data Capture
Proximity 4 1 With analytics tightly integrated with
Sitecore, all actions on the website are
captured in real-time.
Granularity 4 2 Sitecore captures highly granular,
visitor specific information ‘out of the
box’. This level of granularity with
Google Analytics can only occur if
you provide a unique visitor identifier
when Google captures data.
Data
Capture
Analysis Reporting
7. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 7 of 30
Sitecore Google Analytics Perspective
Session Unification 4 3 Sitecore can track users across
sessions (as stated above)
automatically, while Google Analytics
requires you to provide a unique
visitor identifier to unify session
information for a visitor.
Channels 3 3 Sitecore and Google Analytics both
have the capability to capture
analytics across channels, each with
a varying degree of ‘out of the box’
functionality for specific channel
types.
Promotional Data 2 3 Google Analytics is tightly integrated
with its AdWords and AdSense
siblings, which are ubiquitous means
of promotion on the web. Sitecore
can capture this and other
promotional analytics data with the
effort integration with those systems.
Analysis
Visitors 4 3 Sitecore provides marketers with a
detailed view of visitor activities
through its visitor profile card. Google
Analytics only provides an
obfuscated view of visitor activities—
never revealing the visitor.
Conversion 3 3 Both Sitecore and Google Analytics
provide conversion analysis, with the
ability to instrument website goals
and campaigns.
8. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 8 of 30
Sitecore Google Analytics Perspective
Attribution 3 3 Sitecore supports attribution, but
requires the marketer to determine
how they want to attribute various
channels, campaigns and web events.
Google Analytics’ attribution is
skewed to AdWords and AdSense, but
can be configured to support outside
campaigns and activities also.
A/B Testing 4 3 A/B (and multivariate) Testing within
Sitecore is tightly integrated with the
overall system, and can enable
automated testing and selection of
‘winning’ elements on a web page.
Google Analytics provides testing
with a more manual effort and is
limited to testing whole web pages,
rather than individual elements.
Reporting
Basics 3 4 Both platforms provide standard, ‘out
of the box’ reporting, with Google
Analytics having a broad range of
immediately useful reports, along
with a repository of community-
defined dashboards that marketers
can choose from.
Customization 4 3 Sitecore provides deeper
customization capabilities through
the user interface, but also provides
marketers to customize capabilities
by integrating custom-developed
capabilities into the dashboards.
9. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 9 of 30
Sitecore Google Analytics Perspective
Drill Down 4 2 Both platforms provide ‘drill down’
capabilities with Sitecore enabling
marketers to ‘slice and dice’ with
more granularity and control over the
mix of data types you may want to
analyze.
Additional
Considerations
Time to Value 3 4 Google Analytics provides ‘immediate
gratification’ with little effort. Sitecore
will require more initial planning and
configuration to derive value, but can
in the end, provide insights more
aligned with the marketer’s needs.
Implementation
Effort
2 4 Google Analytics is a ‘plug and play’
solution with a short time to value.
Gaining the full value from Sitecore
will require more planning,
configuration and even
customization, than even available
with Google Analytics.
Resource
Availability
2 4 Finding practitioners who are
‘experts’ at Google Analytics is
relatively easy, whereas Sitecore
resources are more difficult to find,
even within many established
Sitecore certified partners.
Marketing Solution 4 2 Though Sitecore analytics can be
treated as a standalone capability, its
power and ability to deliver value
comes when it is used in combination
with other digital marketing
10. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 10 of 30
Sitecore Google Analytics Perspective
capabilities (e.g. experience
optimization, personalization,
campaigns, etc.) built into Sitecore.
Selecting the Best-fit Solutions
In the table above, we reviewed both functional
and business aspects of Sitecore and Google
Analytics.
When making a choice to stay with Google
Analytics or to move to Sitecore, we need to take
into account several considerations:
How advanced are your immediate
analytics requirements? If personalization
or experience optimization is not within
your immediate plans, then Sitecore
analytics is not required. If on the other
hand, your plans do include more
sophisticated capabilities, you will need
Sitecore analytics to support them.
What resources are available to you? If you
do not have Sitecore resources available,
then it is challenging to configure advanced
Sitecore analytics capabilities.
Do you want to see and use visitor details?
If you want to capture and use the details of
individuals visiting your website, or
opening your emails, then you will need
Sitecore. Google Analytics does not provide
this capability out-of-the-box, and would
require a significant custom development
effort to provide what Sitecore does. This
capability is the basis for personalization
within Sitecore.
In the next section, we will discuss what
analytics capabilities are available in the various
Sitecore versions. This should also be a
consideration in deciding when to invest in
Sitecore analytics, as the most recent versions
are more competitive with Google Analytics.
Please read the ‘Sitecore and Google Analytics
Comparison Detail’ located in the appendix for a
detailed comparison of the functional aspects of
both applications.
11. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 11 of 30
3.WhatifIamonanOlderVersionofSitecore?
Understand What to Expect When Upgrading
As most organizations do not run the most
current version of Sitecore, marketers may find
themselves asking the questions “What am I
missing by not upgrading?” and “Do the new
capabilities justify upgrading?”
In this section, we examine the improvements
made to Sitecore analytics across the advancing
versions to help inform your decision to upgrade
Sitecore based on the business value it can
create.
Sitecore Versions
Though there may be some organizations that
are still using Sitecore 5.x, most have migrated to
6.x and later.
Figure 2 - The Three Relevant Sitecore Version Families
For this review, we will focus on the Sitecore
versions 6.x through 8.
Table 2 - Comparison of Analytics Improvements across Multiple Sitecore Versions
Sitecore Version Version Improvements Value to the Marketer
Sitecore 6.x
CMS 6.5 / DMS 2.0.1 Improved Analytics Reporting:
New daily and periodic reports
provide more granular visibility
into data.
More Reporting Control: Marketers are
able to see reports on a daily or self-
defined period.
CMS and DMS 6.6 User Experience Upgrade: The
Executive Insight Dashboard has an
improved design, layout and
controls.
Easier to Perform Analysis: The new
dashboard improves how marketers
analyze time series data and filter for
individual campaigns, while working
within an improved experience.
Sitecore 7.x
Experience Platform 7.5 Sitecore Experience Database (xDB):
How visitor event data is captured
and stored changed significantly by
No Size Limits: The xDB is designed
as a ‘big data’ solution, meaning there
are no limits to the amount of
Sitecore
6.x
Sitecore
7.x
Sitecore
8
12. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 12 of 30
Sitecore Version Version Improvements Value to the Marketer
having the data stored in MongoDB
instead of SQL Server.
information you are allowed to
capture. This is particularly
important for marketers with high
traffic, multiple engagement
channels and the desire to capture
detailed data.
Capture Anything: The xDB is now
very flexible, with the ability to
capture data from any channel,
device or system that marketers want
to associate with a person.
Sitecore Experience Profile (xFile)
and the ‘Contact’: A new user
profile now tracks and aggregates
all channels into a single profile
view associated with a ‘contact’.
Through the xFile, the ‘contact’
information is maintained across
sessions, devices and channels.
Single View of the Customer: The xFile
succeeds in creating one view of the
people who engage with your
organization across all its channels and
available devices over time. This view
allows marketers to understand
behaviors and characteristics of specific
segments and people in detail.
Connectors: The Experience
Database now has connectors
available that enable data capture
from platforms like Salesforce.com,
Microsoft Dynamics and other
platforms within the marketing
ecosystem.
More Comprehensive Visitor View:
With the ability to associate data
collected within other system with a
‘contact’ in the xDB, marketers can
now get closer to the 360-degree view
of visitors they need.
Connect to Custom Solutions: With
the approach to developing
connectors now standardized,
developing connectors that integrate
existing custom applications
becomes easier and maintainable.
Reporting: While MongoDB
captures the ‘experience data’, SQL
Server is utilized for data
Improved Report Processing: For
organizations with significant
experience data to aggregate and
13. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 13 of 30
Sitecore Version Version Improvements Value to the Marketer
aggregation and reporting
purposes.
analyze, having the separate reporting
facility will improve performance.
User Experience: The user
experience is improved by
providing a more integrated
environment and updated styling.
Ease of Use: With the updated user
experience, marketers can get the
information they need more quickly,
while having it displayed in an easier to
consume manner.
Sitecore 8
Experience Platform 8 Federated Experience Manager
(FXM): The FXM enables marketers
to capture analytics data from
websites outside of Sitecore by just
placing ‘analytics tags’ on the page
(e.g. much like you would with
Google Analytics).
Capture Analytics Data from Non-
Sitecore Websites: Now get the ‘complete’
view of customer engagement by getting
analytics data from legacy websites, like
blogs, that are not running on Sitecore.
Predictive Analytics: Using
Microsoft’s Azure Machine
Learning (ML) platform, Sitecore
now provides an ability to predict a
person’s behavior based on past
behavior.
Improved Personalization: With
predictive analytics, personalization is
informed by ‘predicting’ what people
want from their digital experience, and
aligning what Sitecore delivers with what
people want. Ideally, this will take some
of the guess work out of personalization,
relying more heavily on data actual data,
rather than marketer intuition.
Shared Session State Support:
With shared session-state, all data
that can be shared across multiple
sessions, for example, the data
related to contacts and devices, is
collected and saved to the session
state database.
Customer Views Across Devices: This
technical capability, when taken
advantage of across different devices and
systems, will enable marketers to have a
view of customers as they switch devices
in middle of their digital activities (e.g.
add items to a shopping cart at the
desktop, but completing the transaction
while on a smartphone).
14. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 14 of 30
Sitecore Version Version Improvements Value to the Marketer
User Experience: Sitecore 8
includes a complete update of the
user experience across all
capabilities, including analytics.
Ease of Use: With the updated user
experience, marketers can get to the
information they need more quickly,
while having it displayed in an easier to
consume manner.
Finding the Biggest Opportunities
For marketers who are thinking about upgrading
from Sitecore 6.x to 7.x, there are many things to
consider beyond the analytics capabilities, but it
is clear that significant changes occurred with
the release of Sitecore 7.5.
The changes within Sitecore 7.5 are the
foundation for the Sitecore Experience Platform
and all its associated capabilities, including
analytics. Analytics, within this platform, does
not stand on its own, but is a tightly integrated
capability that not only provides marketers with
passive reporting, but also directly provides
information to drive personalization and
optimization activities within Sitecore.
Choosing a Time to Upgrade
For organizations that are still on Sitecore 5.x,
migrating to 6.x adds value in the serviceability
of the overall Sitecore platform, but leaves
marketers with a little more than an improved
‘window dressing’ for analytics.
To gain significant improvements in capabilities
and usability, we recommend that organizations
migrate to Sitecore 7.5 or a later version.
Considerations in upgrading are typically
justified by the business value provided. Here
are areas of business value you gain when
upgrading to Sitecore 7.5 (or later) analytics:
Large data sets: When collecting analytics
data across multiple related properties or a
high-volume website, like an e-commerce
property, Sitecore 7.5 is designed to scale
easily to very large data sets (‘big data’
magnitude).
Integrated customer intelligence: With the
Experience Profile in Sitecore 7.5, marketers
can now have a single view of customer
intelligence. The profile is easily extended
to include behavioral, transactional and
other information required for different
stakeholders within your organization.
Insights from the entire digital ecosystem:
The Experience Database (xDB) can be
integrated with systems outside of Sitecore.
This enables marketers to correlate and
analyze data from their CRM, marketing
automation and other systems, all within
Sitecore. There are many off-the-shelf
connectors available for common
platforms, or you can develop connectors
that integrate with proprietary applications.
Improved productivity and use: The
updated user experience in Sitecore 7.5 will
improve peoples’ productivity and
15. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 15 of 30
effectiveness with the tool. The dashboard
can be tailored for the needs of specific
stakeholders, making it more relevant to
audiences outside of marketing.
Choosing when to upgrade to a newer version of
Sitecore is dependent on many factors, including
your budget, marketing requirements, existing
projects and resource availability. Though
analytics is foundational within Sitecore, there
are many other functional and technological
considerations when making an upgrade
decision, most are outside the scope of this
document.
16. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 16 of 30
4.WhatisExperienceAnalytics?
Understanding How Customers Experience Your Brand
Sitecore, along with many other vendors, claims
to provide ‘experience analytics’. Why does
experience analytics matter to the modern
marketer? Marketers working with websites
understand what is measured with ‘web
analytics’—but what do we measure with
experience analytics? In this section, we will
find the answers by investigating both of these
questions.
Why does Experience Analytics Matter to
Marketers?
Unlike web analytics, experience analytics
measures how well your organization engages
with people across its digital and physical
channels. The experience people have is the
sum of all their interactions with your
company's systems, products and people—and it
is becoming the primary differentiator for some
industries.
“Customer experience
is the new marketing”
Steve Cannon
Mercedes Benz USA President and CEOi
Though the notion of measuring ‘experience’ can
be quite broad, within the scope of this
discussion, we look to the digital experiences
that people have with your company. How
people ‘feel’ about your brand, based on the
experiences they have, are strong indicators
about how they will engage with you in the
future. In a 2014 study by a customer experience
firm Medallia, customers who had the best past
experiences spend 140% more money compared
to those who had a poor past experienceii
Figure 3 - Improving the Customer Experience Improves the
Sales Performance of an Organization
iii
A 2014 Gartner survey (Importance of Customer
Experience Is on the Rise) on the role of
marketing in customer experience found that, by
2016, 89% of companies expect to compete
mostly on the basis of customer experience,
versus 36% four years agoiv
. With ‘customer
experience’ becoming the mantra for many
marketing organizations—what do we measure
to keep us focused on delivering the best
experience?
What Do We Measure with Experience
Analytics?
Let us begin to answer this question by
understanding where we all started from with
‘web analytics’. It is highly likely that most
readers started with Google Analytics years ago,
17. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 17 of 30
which at the time, represented the state of a
nascent industry. With the capabilities found
now in platforms like Sitecore, we can now begin
i
Mercedes Benz CEO: Customer Experience is the
New Marketing, Loyalty360, Jim Tierney, October 2014
ii
The Value of the Quantified Customer, Harvard
Business Review, Peter Kris, August 2014
to ask ‘experience’ questions and get the
answers we need to understand how well we are
doing.
iii
The Value of the Quantified Customer, Harvard
Business Review, Peter Kris, August 2014
iv
Gartner Surveys Confirm Customer Experience Is
the New Battlefield, Jake Sorofman, October 2014
.
Web Analytics Experience Analytics
Business Goals Demonstrate website value
Increase digital presence
Increase digital touches
Increase revenue
Increase digital engagement
Increase customer lifetime value
Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs)
Page clicks
Page views
Videos watched
Emails sent
Loyalty
Recency
Rate of conversion to revenue
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Target Metrics 10 clicks / page
1000 pages viewed / day
100 videos watched / day
5000 emails sent / week
Number of re-purchases within the first
6 months of the initial purchase
Average numbers of days since the last
purchases
Average revenue generated per web
visit
Average value of customer purchases
over the first 5 years
Experience analytics starts with the marketer
considering the correct set of goals, KPIs and
target metrics that collectively define the
analytics. To arrive at the correct analytics
parameters, marketers must take into account
the following principles to guide them:
Strategy-driven: Useful analytics must
support, and align with your business
strategy. For instance, if your organization
has agreed upon a strategy to ‘grow your
customer base’ versus ‘growing a
customer’s share of wallet’, then each of
these strategic paths will shape and inform
18. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 18 of 30
your specific business goals differently,
which in turn will require different KPIs.
Customer-focused: In addition to thinking
about your strategies and goals, you must
consider the customers’ goals in the context
of yours. If you are growing your customer
base, then what is it that you satisfy within
the customer to lure them away from
competitors? We need to look for insights
to customer actions that indicate your
success in luring them away—are there
specific actions we can measure, like web
offers to replace competitive products.
Cross-channel: Today’s customers rarely
rely on a single channel to engage with
organizations—they are found moving
between mobile devices, email, social
networks and your desktop website—
possibly within a single session. With that
in mind, marketers must capture metrics
across all channels to avoid ‘blind spots’
that occur when customers engage with
channels that we do not measure.
Actionable: All analytics must be tied to
action. There is little use in capturing
information that does not lead to improving
the customer experience and meeting our
business goals. As marketers define the
analytics they want to capture, they must
identify how they will act on this
information—what will this information
inform? How can you optimize your
engagement with customers?
How does Sitecore Support Experience
Analytics?
With Sitecore 8, there is fundamentally nothing
that marketers cannot track about their
customers. In addition, the ability to bring all
this information together in a single database
(xDB), now provides a single view of the
customer.
Figure 4 - Tracking Visitors across Channels and Time with
Sitecore 8
‘Experience analytics’ is about capturing and
seeing every touch the customer has with your
organization—digital and physical.
Sitecore 8 can capture and analyze information
from website visits (even non-Sitecore), email
interactions, CRM records, e-commerce
transactions, and other systems that capture
customer details.
Providing the ability to capture and analyze this
information in a report or dashboard can provide
valuable insights to marketers; but the real value
is in having Sitecore use this information create
experiences for customers in real-time through
experience personalization and optimization.
19. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 19 of 30
5.WheredoIStartMyJourney?
Understanding where you are Informs Where You Start
Not unlike other competencies that marketing
organizations develop, most marketing
organizations will find that their analytics
competencies lie along a maturity curve. Not
only are some organizations more mature than
others, but it is also common to find different
levels of maturity within the same organization.
To understand the best place to start your
Sitecore analytics journey, we will begin by
identifying where, along an analytics maturity
curve, you already are.
Figure 5 - The Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model
v
Though Sitecore has established their Customer
Experience Maturity Modelvi
to work across all of
their platform’s capabilities, analytics requires a
more focused approach. This approach
v
Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model
vi
Sitecore Customer Experience Maturity Model
guarantees that that we are laying the correct
foundation upon which to build the other digital
marketing capabilities that Sitecore provides.
Using an Analytics Maturity Model
To identify where on the digital analytics
maturity curve an organization lies, we use a
model developed by Stéphane Hamelvii
, a digital
analytics thought leader, who developed his
Digital Analytics Maturity Model (DAMM) viii
to
help organizations identify their level of
maturity across several key parameters.
DAMM helps organizations understand how
mature they are along six different parameters:
1. Governance
2. Objectives
3. Scope
4. Team & Expertise
5. Improvement Process Methodology
6. Tools, Technology, Data Integration
Each parameter represents one component that
is required to successfully deliver digital
‘experience’ analytics for your organization. The
following table provides details about each of
these parameters and how they affect your
direction.
vii
Stéphane Hamel, Digital analytics thought leader
viii
Digital Analytics Maturity, Stéphane Hamel
20. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 20 of 30
Table 3 - Digital Analytics Maturity Model (DAMM) Parameters and their Effect on Organizations
Key Question Effect
Governance What is the highest job title within your
organization that is accountable for digital
performance measurement against
business objectives?
Without high-level visibility and
accountability for digital performance,
marketers may not be empowered to take
action based on the analytics data.
Objectives What is the objective of your analytics
program?
Without a clear objective that ties back to
the current business strategy, marketers
will not have the mandate from leadership
to successfully execute their digital
analytics initiative.
Scope How many components of your business,
channels and customer segments does
your digital analytics initiative include?
The scope sets the boundaries for your
initiative’s resource requirements,
implementation costs, schedule and depth
of involvement by business at large.
Team & Expertise How is your analytics team structured? The team structure determines the level of
attention that digital analytics is afforded,
while determining the depth of
involvement by the business.
Improvement Process
Methodology
How does your team identify problems and
opportunities, develop hypothesis, analyze
data and provide insights?
The methodology and approach
determines the quality, consistency and
insightfulness of the analytics initiative.
Tools, Technology &
Data Integration
How sophisticated is your use of digital
marketing technologies?
The level of sophistication will inform the
required scope, expertise and methodology
for your initiative.
The sophistication can vary, from using
analytics to monitor basic KPIs to using the
data to drive content personalization and
behavioral targeting.
21. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 21 of 30
Finding Out Who We Are
Each organization will have a different maturity
level that will be determined by answering the
questions associated with each of the
parameters of the maturity model outlined in the
table above.
To better understand and relate the model to
your own organization, we are providing you
with several common examples of maturity
levels within the following charts.
The Ambitious Organization
The ‘ambitious organization’ has invested
significantly in most modern technologies,
while having committed to significantly ‘moving
the needle’ through their digital initiatives.
Figure 6 - An Example of Maturity of an Ambitious
Organization
Though the ‘ambitious organization’ has ranked
high in many parameters, their lack of ‘buy in’
from leadership, investment in solid
methodologies, and insufficient staffing will lead
to underwhelming and disappointing results.
The Top-heavy Organization
The ‘top-heavy organization’ has leadership’s
attention and involvement, with a clear set of
objectives and scope for their initiative.
Figure 7 - An Example of Maturity of a Top-heavy
Organization
However, the ‘top-heavy organization’ has not
invested in the staffing and education of its
employees which is necessary to perform the
analysis, make recommendations, and act on
the data that is collected. Leadership will be
disappointed with the results of the initiative.
The Thoughtful Organization
The ‘thoughtful organization’ has taken the time
to understand the problem of digital analytics, to
gain the buy-in from leadership, but not to
overextend themselves with unreasonable
expectations.
Figure 8 - An Example of Maturity of a Thoughtful
Organization Early in their Analytics Journey
This team is starting small, with a focus on their
process and methodology. With reasonable
expectations and commitments, the team can
gain expertise and confidence at a comfortable
22. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 22 of 30
pace, with the opportunity to grow each
parameter equally to reach a consistently high
level of maturity.
Figure 9 - An Example of a Thoughtful Organization at a
Mature State in their Analytics Journey
Finding out Where You Start
Where you start your journey depends on where
you are now. Many organizations are starting
with a ‘greenfield’ where they can start small and
grow their analytics practice thoughtfully.
Others may have moved dozens of existing
websites to Sitecore and have been using Google
Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, Unica or other
analytics software for years.
Regardless of where you currently are in your
journey, assessing your current state and
direction will assist in understanding how to
move forward. We recommend using the Digital
Analytics Maturity Model (DAMM) to highlight
opportunities for improvement and growth.
23. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 23 of 30
6.WhatDoesan‘AnalyticsRoadmap’LookLike?
Develop a Plan that Enables Your Success
Getting started correctly is important, but
continuing on the correct path will help you
achieve your analytics goals. As with many
tasks marketers undertake these days, having a
‘cookbook’ to guide your efforts reduces your
learning curve and increases your success rate.
We have defined a roadmap that will allow you
to enter at various points along the journey,
depending on your current level of maturity.
Assessing your current maturity level using
MADD will help you determine where the ideal
entry point is for your organization on the
roadmap for your organization’s current
maturity.
A Basic Analytics Roadmap
Our roadmap has several work streams (i.e.
swim lanes of effort) that execute in parallel.
This roadmap is a general guide that can be
adapted to the needs of each organization
depending on the availability of internal skills,
resources and processes.
Figure 10 - An Analytics Roadmap that Would Lead an Organization to their Initial State of Maturity
Strategyand
Planning
Practice
Development
Technology
Plan Implement Execute & Optimize
DocumentBusinessObjectives
InstrumentWebsite
DevelopReports
DevelopDashboards
Test
SocializeLeadership
Define‘CoreAnalytics’Charter
DefineGoals,KPIs,Segments,Targets RevisitGoals,KPIs,Segments,Targets
IdentifyTeam MethodologyTraining TechnologyTraining
GovernanceModel
ProcessDefinition ProcessRefinement
Refine
The basic roadmap may occur for several
iterations to move an organization up the
maturity curve. As the organization plans,
implements and executes their first roadmap,
they will soon be looking to increase the
sophistication of their goals, along with their
practice and technologies.
Key Activities for Each Roadmap
The roadmap contains key activities within each
work stream. These activities should be
revisited for roadmap iteration. For instance, as
an organization increases its analytics
sophistication, they will need to identify new
24. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 24 of 30
goals, KPIs and targets. As an outcome of this
process, they will likely instrument new parts of
the website, email templates or non-Sitecore
based systems which customers engage to
capture new data. Increasing sophistication will
demand a revisit of the skills, governance model,
process, reporting, and dashboards.
Figure 11 - We Recommend Executing Several Short
Roadmaps that Lead to Greater Maturity
Through multiple iterations of the roadmap,
organizations should find themselves increasing
in sophistication and more importantly, an
exponential increase in value gained from their
analytics initiatives.
Figure 12 - Each Analytics Roadmap that an Organization
Executes Should Move them to Closer to Maturity
Through these iterations, organizations should
see their maturity increase across the
parameters of the DAMM, moving them from the
inside to the outside of the graph.
Roadmap 1 Roadmap 2 Roadmap 3
25. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 25 of 30
7.WhereCanIGetHelptoBuildMyRoadMap?
Getting Help along Your Journey
The Sitecore Analytics Workshop is part of the
GSPANN Sitecore Business Optimization
Services (SBOS) to help both existing and new
Sitecore customers take advantage of their
investment.
This workshop is held onsite at your facilities,
where we work with you and your team to create
an analytics road map. In addition to helping you
create your first road map, we will provide you
with tools you need and educate you on how to
create road maps that guide your future
experience analytics initiatives.
To learn more about GSPANN’s Sitecore
Analytics Workshop, please contact us at
sales@gspann.com to discuss your needs and
questions. We tailor the workshop to your
specific needs, whether your require strategy to
implementation services, or some guidance to
an existing in-house initiative, we look forward
to discussing your needs.
26. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 26 of 30
8.Appendix
Sitecore and Google Analytics Comparison Detail
The following table compares analytics capabilities of Sitecore and Google across data capture, analysis
and reporting in detail. This supports the summary table provided in section one of this document.
Table 4 - Sitecore and Google Analytics Comparison Detail
Sitecore Google Analytics
Data Capture
Proximity Unlike cloud-based analytics
applications, Sitecore analytics are an
integrated part of the Sitecore system.
Every time a page is requested or an
event occurs on a page, Sitecore
captures it automatically.
Google Analytics, along with other
cloud-based applications, are remote
‘spectators’.
These applications require that a
predefined set of fields are populated at
browser be sent back to them upon each
page visit.
Granularity Sitecore captures two data types for
page visits—the analytics profile and
page events. Sitecore uses the visitor’s
behavior on a page to build their profile.
In addition, the Sitecore captures
specific page events, including a visitor
reaching a goal, failing to reach a goal, or
engaging with a campaign.
The page administrator defines what
events they want track and how to
affect the visitor’s profile on a per page
basis.
Google Analytics captures page visits
and events, but obscures who the
specific visitor is, thereby maintaining
their privacy.
Events are captured at the code level, by
populating a JavaScript tag. Any page
event that can invoke JavaScript can
populate an event tag.
Session Unification Sitecore automatically manages a single
identifier for each website visitor. This
identifier is used across all user session
and works across different channels
(e.g. web, email and social) tracked by
Sitecore.
Google Analytics can track a site-
provided user identifier across sessions.
This identifier must be generated and
managed by site, and provided to Google
when tracking page visits and events
across sessions.
27. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 27 of 30
Sitecore Google Analytics
Channels Sitecore captures both web and email
campaigns data, providing a unified
view of events across Sitecore-managed
channels.
Now, with the release the Federated
Experience Manager (FXM), Sitecore can
also capture analytics data within non-
Sitecore managed websites and emails,
using a JavaScript tagging method, like
Google Analytics.
Google Analytics captures data
wherever you can embed its analytics
tags, which does include web pages and
emails.
Promotional Data Sitecore does not provide OOTB (Out of
the box) analytics for promotional
events, like Google AdWords.
Google Analytics provides deep
integration to support its AdWords and
AdSense capabilities. These enable
marketers to correlate the performance
of advertisements with visitor events.
Analysis
Visitors Sitecore is focused on understanding
the individual visitor’s behavior, and
building an evolving visitor profile over
time.
Sitecore enables marketers to ‘drill
down’ to view a specific visitor’s
journeys. This visitor transparency, both
during the session and over time, drives
the Sitecore personalization capabilities.
Google Analytics prevents you from
seeing individual visitors or their
identities, unless you make a decision to
provide Google with a unique user
identifier, that you create and manage.
By providing Google with that identifier,
you can associate all the events with
that person, and then report against it.
Conversion Through the use of goals, Sitecore can
provide conversion analytics around
goals, identifying which goals had the
highest conversions.
Google Analytics provides conversion
analytics around goals and AdWords.
Google provides both a funnel and path
view of conversions across visitors.
Attribution Attribution modeling within Sitecore
Analytics is very flexible, allowing
marketers to apply a ‘score value’ to any
Google Analytics provides some ‘off the
shelf’ attribution models where
28. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 28 of 30
Sitecore Google Analytics
touch point leading to a conversion
event.
In this approach you assign scoring
value to each event that later can be
reviewed by event types (e.g. page view,
white paper download, form completion,
etc.).
marketers insert the touch points that
lead to a conversion event.
These attribution models stem from
Google’s focus on AdWords and
remarketing campaigns, but support the
inclusion of web page touch points as
part of the model to provide a holistic
view.
A/B Testing Sitecore provides A/B testing that is
tightly integrated with its analytics
capabilities.
Sitecore measures the performance of
individual components on the page, and
can tell you which combination of
components will deliver the best
performance.
Google Analytics provides A/B testing
through its Google Analytics
Experiments, a way for you test 2 or
more pages, each with a unique URL.
As the experiment executes, Google will
send more traffic the ‘winning’ page,
thereby taking advantage of the results
as they happen.
Reporting
Basics Sitecore provides analytics provides
reporting through its integrated
dashboard. The dashboard can display
charts detailing metrics for both web
traffic and campaigns.
Google Analytics provides reporting
through its integrated dashboard that
may include either charts or tabular
reports.
Customization Sitecore dashboards enable extensive
customization through configuration,
but additional customizations can be
made programmatically, by using
Sitecore’s API, to add or change the
functionality available to marketers.
Google Analytics dashboards enable
customization by selecting from
available charts and tabular reports to
combine them into reusable
dashboards.
Drill Down Sitecore enables marketers to ‘drill
down’ to analytics details for individual
visitors. Sitecore 8 maintains a ‘profile
card’ for each person that engages with
Google Analytics enables ‘drill down’
into in all of its parameters (e.g.
Geography, Demographics, Technology,
Behavior, etc.), with varying levels of
29. Sitecore Analytics: Steps to Marketing Success 29 of 30
Sitecore Google Analytics
websites, emails and other systems that
are tracked by Sitecore analytics.
This profile card summarizes all the
details for a person, while enabling ‘drill
down’ into specific channels, campaigns
and time periods that this person
engaged.
granularity depending on the
parameter.
Along with the drilling into each
parameter to gain detail, a second
parameter may be added to group the
information by that parameter.
No details about individuals are ever
exposed within reports by Google,
unless you provide a unique identifier
for individuals at the browser when the
data is collected.
