Persona scoring rules

To relate visitors with usage data and to transform this information into meaningful insight, you set scoring rules that define a visitor’s score, personas, and activities. Thus, a persona represents a subset of visitors that share similar behavioral or demographic patterns. These patterns are detected by Sitefinity Insight in accordance with scoring rules that you define. 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 for visitors to score points is based on their contact details, that is, contact profile properties, thus capturing visitors' personal characteristics and demographics. Say a visitor entered Germany as their country of residence. Thus, they may from now on be associated with the European prospects persona, for example.

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 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 as well not pass the Marketer threshold points anymore and stop being associated with this persona from this point on.

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

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.

A visitor may be attributed to more than one persona in case they pass the threshold of these personas. There is always a persona to which a visitor matches the most, which 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 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. Rules are not bound to one persona and can be scored against any persona with different values (anything different from zero is considered), depending on your requirements.