Sitecore is one of the leading CMS systems that provide the ability to track user journey and get helpful insights into the customers. This is possible with the wide range of utilities available in the Sitecore platform. It is important to note that before you start using the Sitecore Experience Platform to its full capabilities, a solid strategy should be in place. Without strategy you would find yourself in user experience that not only backfires on customers but also provide false statistics in turn further guiding the team into the wrong direction.

In this blog, we will go talk about ‘Taxonomies’ in Sitecore and how we can use them to build a strong strategy.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is basically a process of classifying and naming object into groups. This classification is based on similarities and differences of the objects. A simple example of a type of Taxonomy would be the process of classifying plant-eating vs meat-eating animals as Herbivorous and Carnivorous.

Taxonomies in Sitecore

In Sitecore, taxonomies are used to classify the objects on the website into separate categories which will help to filter out the results in Experience Analytics. Sitecore provides several Taxonomies by default for Campaigns, Goals, Assets, and other components of the website.

Campaign Groups
These can be used to group campaign into different groups based on common characteristics like online/offline, spring/fall etc. Over time, data for all these groups can also be analysed in Experience Analytics to check each group’s performance. This data can then be used to focus on a group that are outperforming others.
An example would be a group of campaigns run on Twitter and a group of campaigns run on LinkedIn.

Outcome Group
An outcome is an end-goal that we want to achieve. These outcomes will vary based on the customer interactions with the website. Outcomes are steps in customer engagement to record each customer’s engagement level with our website. One customer can be a potential lead while another can be a verified customer. This data is available on the timeline in Experience Profile of each contact.

An example would be A person filling a form on our website would fulfil the Identification outcome while a perform who made a purchase would fulfil the Customer outcome.
Venue
Venue taxonomy can be used to classify different assets based on the geographical location of the assets. This taxonomy can help recognize the regions where the website is performing better.

An example would be a campaign being run in USA and the same campaign being run in Canada.
Channel
Channels are the paths the customers can use to interact with the website. These can be specified for Campaigns, Face-to-face and even web interactions. Sitecore already provides a wide variety of Online and Offline channels.

An example would be Users visiting the website through a Desktop vs Users browsing the website through an Android application.
Assets
An Asset is taxonomy for items in the media library. This taxonomy helps in determining the value of various media library items like Images, PDFs, Videos etc.

An example would be classifying all the images, videos etc for a single product into an asset taxonomy.
Campaign Facets
These are taxonomies that are used to classify campaigns into certain categories. Although these are not set by default in Sitecore, Marketers have complete control over configuring the names and children of various campaign facets. The facets are usually specific to business requirements.

An example would be having a custom campaign facet for different business types like Insurance, Investments, Loans etc as the options available.
Goal Facets
These taxonomies are specific to goals and used to classify goals. Like campaign facets, goal facets are also set by marketers according to the business requirements.

An example would be having a custom goal facet for different goal types like user identification, Download Initiated etc.

Using Marketing Taxonomies

Most of the marketing taxonomies are related to campaigns and can be associated during the time to Campaign creation.

All the Campaign Facets can be selected from the dropdowns listed in the campaign creator

Similarly, Channel, Campaign Group and Assets can be selected from the dropdowns in the campaign creator.

Assets and Goal Facets can be set on Goals from Content Editor directly.

Viewing Analytics

Analytics related to various marketing taxonomies can be viewed in experience analytics under launchpad.

The Acquisition and Behaviour tab in the left pane can be used to see analytics related to marketing taxonomies