Numerous clients are currently eyeing their next upgrade with Sitecore, contemplating a shift to Sitecore XM Cloud. However, before transitioning to XM Cloud, a pivotal concern arises regarding its impact on their personalization strategies. Specifically, they question whether investing in Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Personalize is necessary or if the innate personalization and testing capabilities within XM Cloud suffice to initiate their journey on the new platform.
Let’s delve into XM Cloud’s Embedded Personalization:
Embedded Personalization within XM Cloud encompasses a suite of pre-built features facilitating marketers in tailoring content within Sitecore Pages and crafting variants based on real-time audience parameters.
- Flexibility: XM Cloud furnishes ready-to-use functionalities empowering marketers to personalize content. However, these capabilities are confined to the page level and lack granularity at the component level. For instance, personalizing an image across multiple pages based on user region necessitates configuring personalized variants individually on each page.
- Analytics: XM Cloud Embedded Personalization offers real-time analytics for both overall site performance and individual page analytics.
- Licensing: Embedded Personalization functionality is seamlessly integrated within the XM Cloud instance, eliminating additional licensing requirements.
- Data and Time Duration Limits: XM Cloud Embedded Personalization accommodates 30 days of view events data retention.
Under XM Cloud’s personalization framework:
- Pages: Denotes the page editor utilized within XM Cloud, akin to the Experience Editor in XP. It facilitates direct manipulation and customization of page layouts as perceived by users.
- Audiences: Pages encompass an ‘audience builder’ featuring an array of Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB) conditions, akin to rules in the XP environment. These conditions dictate which version of site content is presented to users under specific circumstances.
- These conditions include:
- Time: Specifies content visibility within defined timeframes such as dates, months, time zones, or recurring intervals.
- Device: Tailors content display based on users’ device types or operating systems.
- Location: Personalizes content according to user location, facilitating promotion of location-specific promotions.
- Page Views: Enables content personalization based on users’ website browsing history.
- User Interactions: Customizes content based on UTM parameters denoting the user’s referral source, like social media campaigns or email newsletters.
- Audience conditions are stackable and combinable using operators like AND and OR, enriching the complexity and sophistication of available personalization tactics.
- These conditions include: