Persona scoring rules

To relate visitors with usage data and to transform this information to meaningful insights, you set scoring rules that define the visitor’s score, personas, and activities. This way, a persona represents a subset of visitors that share similar behavioral or demographic patterns. These patterns are detected by Sitefinity Insight following the scoring rules that you define.

If you use more than one rule, you can use three modes for defining scoring rules, as described below.

• Any rule
  The visitor is classified as belonging to the specified Persona when they hit at least one of the rules.
• All rules
  The visitor is classified as belonging to the specified Persona only when they hit all the rules.
• Points
  You use points-based rules to model complex and fine-grained rules for entering and exiting a persona.

Scores

Scores are measured as points that a visitor earns when completing a certain activity or interaction within the site. For example, when a visitor views a page, downloads a document, posts comments, or subscribes to an email campaign, the visitor earns a specific number of points for each of these activities. Another way visitors score points is based on their contact details, that is, contact profile properties, thus capturing visitors' personal characteristics and demographics.

EXAMPLE: If a visitor entered Germany as their country of residence. you can, from now on, associate this visitor with the European prospects persona.

Thresholds

For each persona, you define a threshold of points. Once a visitor scores enough points to pass this threshold, they are associated with this specific persona. You can also associate an interaction or demographic with negative points. Thus, if the visitor is identified as a Marketer persona but keeps on completing interactions that are more relevant for the Developer persona, they score negative points. They might stop passing the Marketer threshold points, and stop being associated with this persona from this point on.

Recurrence

Depending on how you define persona scoring rules, a visitor may score points for a rule once or every time they complete a specific interaction.

NOTE: When defining scoring rules, based on demographics, visitors score points just once when Sitefinity Insight tracks their contact properties' values.

For example, your scoring rule states that each time a visitor visits a page under the Developer Network section, they score points for a Developer persona. Thus, you can measure the frequency of visits by this visitor to developer information and, based on the visitor's score, associate this frequency with the behavior of a Developer persona.

NOTE: Both anonymous visitors and contacts get scores and get associated to personas. Thus, all visitors interacting with your site are part of the persona report.

A visitor may be attributed to more than one persona, if they match the rules of these personas. There is always a persona which a visitor matches best. If using the Points rule, this persona is reflected by the biggest percentage score above the specific persona's threshold.

As a result of persona scoring rules, you can differentiate between visitors who browse a few pages on the site and accumulate points by chance, and visitors who can indeed be classified under a specific persona. When you edit the persona threshold over time, this does not affect historical data, and visitors above the old threshold remain associated with the persona.

Scoring rules are based on user activities on your website.

EXAMPLE: When reading sports articles, visitors earn points for the Sport fan persona. On the other hand, while reading articles about art, visitors score points for the Art fan persona. Visitors reading sports news score 10 points for each sports article they read. If you set a Sport fan persona threshold of 100 points, visitors must read at least 10 sports articles (each article bringing a score of 10 points) to be associated to the Sport fan persona. If a visitor already associated with the Sports fan persona reads an art article, they score -10 points for the Sport fan persona.

A persona scoring rule can be:

• An interaction, or activity, that the visitor completes on your site.
  Such rules consist of an interaction that a visitor completes and an additional clarification - the object upon which the interaction occurs. Interactions may span across different channels that characterize the visitor’s experience on your website. This experience may include content that the visitor sees, clicks, downloads, searches for, and so on. You can choose whether visitors score points just once or every time they complete the interaction.
• A personal or demographic characteristic, based on a contact profile property.
  These rules consist of a contact profile property and its value.
  For more information, see Configure contact properties.

By defining a rule, you specify:

• The interaction and the object, or the contact property and its value
• Optionally, when using Points rules, the points that visitors score towards a persona, if they complete the interaction or provide the respective value. In this case, you can also define a scoring rule such that visitors score negative points toward a persona.

NOTE: The object of the persona rule is case-insensitive.

Visitors matching one or more of these rules accumulate scores towards the respective persona.

For more information about how editing rules affect Persona scorings calculations, see Retroactive scoring calculation.

Rule conditions

When defining the rules, you can choose from multiple conditions. For more information, see Define condition dialog.