Sitemap: The Heart of Marketing Could Personalization

Personalization (formerly known as Interaction Studio) is a tool that exists inside the Marketing Cloud tenant and is mostly used to help the customer improve the user experience with their business through web, mobile, and email. 

The sitemap is the heart of Personalization. A good sitemap code implementation can lead you to a successful understanding about how the user is interacting with your site, how much time they are spending on different pages and where they are going next. Let’s look at this in a more relatable way to see how this code works.

I like to make the resemblance with this scene from the movie Toy Story 3 in which the vigilant monkey is watching all the building through the Daycare’s CCTV waiting for a toy to show in a place and hour where they shouldn’t be; so he can warn Lotso the villain purple teddy bear.

We can use this scenario to create a comparison between the movie and how the sitemap and Personalization works inside the site. Like this:

• The Daycare building where they are is the website that the client wants us to work with, and each room on the building is a different page inside the site.
• The toys Buzz, Woody, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Rex and the others, are the users of the web site.
• The security cameras are the Sitemap registering where the toys (users) are, where they went after that, the location and time of the interaction.
• The tv screens and the vigilant monkey do the role of Personalization that tells Lotso (customer) where the toys (users) are.

Certainly, in this case we want to know where the user is for marketing and statistical purposes and not punish our user in the same way Lotso wants to hurt the toys (ironic because they are from plastic).

Back to business, this JavaScript code captures important elements across your website, such as products, forms, login pages, and action buttons, and makes them available within the Personalization tool. This gives your marketing team a complete view of how visitors engage with your site, helping them determine where, when, and how to deliver personalized experiences.

Of course, Personalization only gives you the data and statistics it collects through its reports. What you and your team do with that information is entirely up to you. Will it be a call to action? A banner on the homepage? A list of product recommendations? A message that appears before someone closes the tab? Maybe even an email. Honestly, the limit is your imagination. The real value comes from turning those insights into experiences that make sense for your audience.

What Do We Need to Take into Account When We Want to Create a Good Sitemap?

The most important rule here is that the client needs to know what they want to do here. We need to meet with them, so we understand the business context of the site to create the solution architecture that we are going to implement. This is a list of the thing that we MUST consider when we are about to start the sitemap, personalization, and implementation:

• Have a clear goal of what does the customer wants to achieve with this tool. If they know what they can do with the campaigns, it will be easier to move along with this process.
• Figure out the identity management and attribute setup. Understanding which user values (email, names, zip code, address, pet name, etc.), we plan to collect will help us to define the sitemap and configure Personalization.
  • This configuration is important to set because Personalization looks for the identity configuration to match existing users with unknown users that are trying to login.
• Create the Sitemap Blueprint by documenting every page on the website and assigning it to a page type within the sitemap. Think of this as the sitemap written on paper (or, more realistically, in an Excel spreadsheet).
  • Inside this document we are going to define how those pages will be grouped, because the purpose behind the pagetype is to create “groups of pages”, in a manner of speaking, so considering this information and having make the client create this list of the sites they have, we are going to set those groups in this way:
    • The home page will be in one pagetype called home_page, and here we will select, or ask for creation, a CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) selector, this element tells the browser which HTML elements should be selected to have the CSS property values inside the rule applied to them, or in our case a zone we are going to use to target for campaigns and it is called Content Zone.
    • The shirts, pants, shoes, and underwear are general sites that can be grouped into the category_page.
    • The 50+ products they have will fall into the product_page From these pages we are also going to grab the product information like product name, URL, value, stock amount, and description.
    • The login form will have its own pagetype called login_form and from here we are going to scrap the email. Personalization itself will take care of looking at what identity value you select to match existing users.
    • The registering form will have another pagetype called register_from, for users that register on the site for the first time (we can also combine this page and the promotion form, so we can reuse what we have). For that pagetype, we are going to get information like, first name, last name, email, location, if they will want to receive marketing information.
    • The shopping cart will also have a pagetype called shopping_cart. Here we will be able to implement the functionality for Personalization to save which products the user is selecting, deleting and buying.

After defining, validating, and approving the blueprint, it will be time for your developers to start the development of the sitemap. It is always recommended to start in a Development in a dataset, so you keep the Production dataset clean.

Hey, I Just Finished with the Sitemap Development, What Now?

Well honestly, you’ll never end with the sitemap. This is a code that is always evolving, always changing to be better and more accurate. You need to  pay attention about how the user behaves and if your pagetypes are matching the correct pages, how the information comes in so you can clean that data and makes it useful for campaigns purposes or to create Einstein Recipes (a very exciting functionality to makes recommendations based on AI algorithms).

The sitemap is only the starting point inside the Personalization work. With this tool, you can do many great things that will benefit customer engagement with the user. You will need to work hand in hand with the customer to create a successful implementation that will benefit both of you.