Sitecore Analytics Setup

The motivation for this post is to help digital marketers quickly and easily understand how to setup Sitecore analytics to record customer behaviour. I found in a recent client engagement, people struggling to comprehend the process of setting up profiles in Sitecore. For the most part, the constraint was not the skillsets but the new language used and how to piece it all together. There is are enormous incentives for marketers to introduce behaviour tracking in Sitecore. It is fundamentally, the stepping stone to behavioural personalisation and customer experience optimisation.

Start by Planning - Sitecore Analytics

A simple way to begin planning the configuration for customer analytics is by Customer Segment and Content Type. Here is an example based on a Sporting Association’s website.

Customer Segment

Coach/ Official

Content Types

Volunteer
Paid
Junior
On boarding

Easy so far right? Where it starts to get tricky is translating this into Sitecore terminology. So here’s my translation of Sitecore terminology.

Sitecore Term	Term
Profile	Categorisation
Profile Cards	Customer Segment
Profile Keys	Content Types
Pattern Cards	Match a Customer Segment to a Browsing Pattern

10-step Guide for Sitecore Analytics

Step 1 - Open the Sitecore Marketing Centre and create a new Profile.

Step 2 - Create a Profile Key which represents the Content Type.

Step 3 - Create 2-4 Profile Keys which are associated with that Customer Segment. Save.

Important: Add Max Value (10) and Min Value (0) for each Profile Key.

Step 4 - Create a Profile Card.

Step 5 - In the newly created Profile Card, go to Profile Value and move the scale for all profile keys to max (10).
Important: Profile Card Values can be customised for different content when added to a Content item.