Channels

Current version: 10.4

Channels are the paths that contacts use to interact with your brand through campaigns and face-to-face interactions. Contacts can interact with your brand through an app on a mobile phone, by clicking on an ad on a social network to visit your website, or to visit a physical store to purchase an item. With the Sitecore Experience Platform, you can track how your contacts interact with your campaigns across these multiple channels using the Marketing Control Panel.

You can examine how contacts interact with your brand by analyzing campaign traffic levels in the Experience Analytics application. This provides you with insight into how contacts interact with your brand, both online and offline, and which channels provide the highest levels of contact engagement.

You can also use channels to create personalization rules that implement conditional renderings of components based on a contact's channel. This helps you to provide contacts with targeted, relevant content based on the channels that they use to interact with your brand.

Channel types

There are two basic types of channels you use to interact with contacts:

  • Online channels – for example, PPC advertisements, a branded mobile application, social media references and organic searches.

  • Offline channels – for example, trade shows, direct marketing through the mail, meetings with customers, and conversations with customer service agents over the phone.

You track campaign traffic coming from online channels by associating a campaign with an attributing channel. This could be online activities such as a Twitter tweet, a banner ad, or an e-mail campaign.

Offline interactions can take place in a variety of venues - in specific stores and restaurants, as well as over the phone. You can track these interactions in Sitecore through integration with CRM software, through iBeacon technology, or by using referring URLs connected to your website.

The Marketing Control Panel includes many different types of online and offline channels to help you identify incoming traffic to your campaigns. You can also create your own channel groups and types, which can help you better address your organization's specific marketing needs.

Channels and Engagement Analytics

By comparing channel traffic, goal conversion rates and visitor engagement values across channels, you can examine how contacts interact with your website. You can view reports and dashboards which track channels and referring pages in Experience Analytics. This provides you with insight into how contacts interact with your brand. You can then use this information to optimize your marketing campaigns to provide your contacts with the most relevant content.

By comparing campaign goal conversion rates across channels, you can examine how contacts interact with your brand. You can view reports and dashboards that track channel traffic in the Experience Analytics application. This can give you more insight into how contacts interact with your brand, both online and offline, and which channels provide the highest levels of contact engagement.

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