For many years, campaigns were an integral part of Sitefinity Insight and our customers utilized them for many use cases. But with time, as we introduced new and enhanced other options for audience targeting, campaigns gradually became used less often. The decreased usage led to our decision to deprecate the current implementation of campaigns and remove them from the Sitefinity Insight UI. We anticipate a new redesigned version of campaigns to be available in the future.
Let’s now look at the main scenarios that campaigns were used for and see how those can be supported by expanded segmentation and personalization options in Sitefinity CMS and Sitefinity Insight.
Conversion optimizations
The main purpose of campaigns in Insight was to measure how effective a particular action to boost a conversion on your website was. Typically, you’d start with an idea that you think would improve a particular conversion, implement it on your website, create a campaign based on it in Insight and track how much impact that change had on the conversion.
Using the new data-driven attribution models, you can see how all of the pages on your website contribute to all of the conversions you care about.
Audience targeting
Quite often campaigns were used to target a certain segment that have not gone through a specific conversion with one or more touchpoints that were estimated to positively impact that specific conversion. One of the clear benefits of using Insight campaigns was the ability to affect multiple pages on the website, as opposed to just one as frequently done with specific landing pages.
In order to implement this with alternative settings, a good option is to use Sitefinity CMS segments. With Sitefinity 14.1 new personalization options were added to use specific conversions and touchpoints as criteria for a segment. Thus a campaign could be structured by defining a segment of visitors who have not gone through a specific conversion AND have not interacted with impactful touchpoints and serving these touchpoints to this segment via page personalization.
Audience segmentation and personalization
Many Insight customers used campaigns to segment the audience of their website based on the personal data available for their visitors.
In this use case, you can replace campaigns with persona and lead scoring rules based on contact profile properties, especially combined with the ability to set negative points for those rules. The Insight contact properties have also became available as a user characteristic for Sitefinity CMS user personalization segments, making even more complex personalization cases possible.
Website and content optimization
Campaigns were also helpful when evaluating the usefulness and effectiveness of the changes you have implemented on your website, such as rearranging your home page or introducing a new navigational menu.
The A/B tests in both Sitefinity CMS and Sitefinity Insight presented many improvements, such as serving multiple variants of the proposed change alongside the current version of the website. You can use the A/B tests as a superb alternative to campaigns in this scenario.