Digital marketing glossary

Current version: 9.3

Campaign

A promotion or advertising initiative designed to encourage people to visit your website. Campaigns run for a defined period. You can use campaigns to raise brand awareness or to get contacts to perform certain actions on your website. See Campaigns.

Channel

The path (online or offline) through which contacts interact with a particular organization, for example, partner referrals, Facebook, or email notifications. See Channels.

Contact

An entity in the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB) that represents a person who interacts with your organization, for example, by visiting a website or using a mobile app. You can use contact data to form a detailed picture of your contacts, their behavior over time, and the contexts in which they interact with your organization. For more technical details, see Contacts.

Content profiling

You use content profiling to categorize your content items according to different areas of interest. Then you can track a contact’s behavior as they navigate through your website to see which types of content they interact with. This can help you gain a better understanding of the interests of your contacts. See Content profiling.

Device detection

The Device Detection service uses the browser user agent string to identify a contact's device and its properties. You can use this device information to personalize a contact's experience with your website, for example, by creating a mobile phone layout for the Apple iPhone. See Sitecore Device Detection Service.

Event

A visitor activity on a website, for example, a login, page view, download, or search. Tracking events helps build up a more complete picture of a visitor’s behavior as they navigate your website. You can use events to track how visitors come to your site, for example, from promotions or campaigns. You can also use events to trigger actions in a marketing automation campaign. See Events.

Goal

An action that a website visitor makes that brings the visitor closer to a marketing objective. See Goals.

Interaction

The way that a contact engages with your organization, for example, by visiting a webpage or opening an email. From the first anonymous visit, to a customer showing high levels of engagement and commitment, all interactions are stored in the xDB.

Outcome

A business-significant result of one or more interactions between a contact and your organization, for example, a sales lead or product purchase, that you can use to quantify your contacts based on the financial value they bring to your organization. See Outcomes.

Pattern card

A pattern card is a combination of profile values that you can use to describe a marketing audience. See Pattern cards.

Persona

A persona is a fictional character that represents a specific contact type within your target demographic. A persona describes the life, age, habits, background, interests, and profession of a fictional character that uses your site in a particular way.

Sitecore Experience Profile (xFile)

An application that presents the key information about a contact and that enables you to monitor the key areas of the customer experience, such as interactions, campaigns, goals, profiles, outcomes, automations, and keywords. See Experience Profile.

Taxonomy

A taxonomy is a classification system that you use to organize marketing activities by applying taxonomy tags to campaigns, goals, and events in the Marketing Control Panel. See Marketing taxonomies.

Venue

The physical locations, for example, a retail store or a QR code on a poster, where interactions occur. You can use this information to gain insight into where your main marketing activities are taking place and how effective they are. See Venues.

Visit

A visit is the series of actions performed by a contact from when they enter your website until they leave the website. A single contact may make multiple visits to your website.

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