Why Connect Sitecore Personalization with Google Analytics?
Running your website’s personalization strategy in Sitecore is a powerful way to improve its user experience for your visitors. Sitecore’s analytics for personalization rules are very insightful, but connecting your Sitecore data to Google Analytics will open the door to even deeper analysis that lets you truly understand your personalization’s impact. By connecting your personalization data to Google Analytics, you can segment your personalization data in many ways. This is integral to optimizing your website and improving its user experience.
At Velir, this approach provides our clients with a better understanding of a user’s journey from start to finish so they can improve engagement and conversions on their websites. For example, we recently worked with Urban Land Institute (ULI) to send their Sitecore Personalization data into their Google Analytics. Since then, they have derived impactful insights from their personalization data that they’ve used to improve their website’s performance; ULI saw that personalized components lead to an increased click through rate of +900%.
Read more about our work with Urban Land Institute
If you want to take advantage of the enhanced data analysis capabilities you’ll receive by connecting Sitecore to Google Analytics, start by asking a few questions.
Questions to drive Sitecore Personalization and Google Analytics benefits:
- Are visitors from certain marketing channels reacting differently to the same personalization? Your marketing channels report is what tells you where your audiences are coming from when they visit your website. Visitors from different marketing channels often engage with your website differently. For example, a visitor coming from social media who also follows your account may be more engaged with your website than a visitor from organic search who could be discovering your website for the first time from a Google search. This is why it’s important to examine if the same personalization rules perform better with visitors from different marketing channels and sources. This will help you determine if you should diversify your Sitecore personalization strategy by marketing channel.
- Do certain personalization rules lead to higher engagement? Website engagement metrics such as average session duration, pages per session, and bounce rate, are important to analyze against your personalization rules because they help you go beyond the typical click-through rate metric available in Sitecore. You could see that your personalization has a high click-through rate in Sitecore, but if you also notice that it has a high bounce rate in Google Analytics, this shows that visitors immediately left your website after clicking the personalization. This behavior indicates that the page your personalization is sending visitors to should be optimized to entice them to stay on the website for longer. Performing this type of analysis can help you improve your personalization to create higher click-through rates and higher engagement on your website.
- Do certain personalization rules lead to higher conversions? Conversions such as email signups or content downloads that come from your personalizations are another area to analyze. You can use conversion tracking in Google Analytics to see if certain personalization rules lead to higher conversion rates on your website. You could then apply your learnings from these personalization rules to help boost conversions for other areas of your website. The information you receive from connecting Sitecore to Google Analytics helps you optimize overall conversions on your website and increase its visitor engagement and retention.
Read our deep dive into Sitecore Personalization effect tracking.
The more data you can use to connect the dots on how audiences are interacting with your website, the better. Personalization, particularly Sitecore Personalization, is a powerful tool. By connecting it to Google Analytics and analyzing your personalization efforts deeply, you can spark new ideas for ways to optimize your website, to improve its user journey, and to more effectively meet the needs of your visitors. Want to hear more of our thoughts on personalization and analytics reporting? Check out our personalization blog posts, learn more about our Sitecore enablement & optimization services, or reach out to discuss the design for your next digital marketing project.