Getting Started with Sitecore CDP and Personalise — Part 1

5 min readSep 11, 2022

“A Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.”

Customer Data platforms provide a 360-degree view of a customer by helping collect and collate customer information which includes each touchpoint and digital Interaction made by the customer in his journey on the website across multiple channels. It is a Persistent and unified customer database which is accessible by third-party systems for analysis and driving meaningful business outcomes

What is Sitecore CDP(Customer Data platform) & Personalise?

Sitecore CDP is a SaaS based platform that helps collect information and act as a centralised datastore for customer information , The platform is built to gather information both at micro level — Page views , events like add to cart , checkout etc and macro level — buy complete , offer goal triggers etc

With Sitecore personalise the information can further be used to create personalised experiences for customer , run multi variate tests (A/B tests) , create personalisation rules using decision models and so on

Sitecore CDP & Sitecore Personalize are two different products but part of the same platform, Login to one place to access both . Depending on the client’s requirements they can opt to have either product or both. Ideally both the products are used in conjunction with each other most of the time

Sitecore CDP — Data Ingestion from multiple sources

Sitecore Personalise — Create personalised Experiences and tests

Sitecore CDP & personalise (SmartHub CDP) — Collect information from different sources , with the information create meaningful personalised experiences for your customer

Major Components of Sitecore CDP & Personalise

Customer Data — Overview of customer data collected, Guests , Segments and Subscription lists
Experimentation — run AB Tests on your website. An experiment is essentially an A/B test of two or more variants.
Decisioning — Create decision models to recommend offers dynamically, deliver personalised content and offers through business rules
Experiences — enables you to add Experiences to your website and monitor performance
Library— Reusable Marketer-friendly Web Templates to give marketers a headstart
Connections — Create and manage connections to third-party systems. These can be used for sending emails or ingesting data

Where to Start ?

If your company is a partner send an email to PartnerEnablement@sitecore.com requesting access for a sitecore CDP sandbox , you should receive an email with access to https://app.boxever.com/

Similar to Google Analytics, Sitecore CDP uses a JavaScript library to integrate CDP features on a website, You will need to embed a javascript on your website using google tag manager(GTM) or server side scripting

ClientKey — Get your Client key from https://app.boxever.com/#/management/api-access

apiTargetEndPoint — This is the API target endpoint depends on your region.

https://api-us.boxever.com/v1.2 - North America

https://api.boxever.com/v1.2 - Europe

https://api-ap-southeast-2-production.boxever.com/v1.2 - Asia

CookieDomain — This will be the root domain for your site. If you’re operating on a sub-domain, e.g. subdomain.examples.com, the cookie domain will be .example.com.
ClientVersion — the JS Library Release Notes provides the available versions that can be used.

<script type="text/javascript">
    // Define the Boxever queue 
    var _boxeverq = _boxeverq || [];

    // Define the Boxever settings 
    var _boxever_settings = {
        client_key: '{{clientKey}}', // Replace with your client key
        target: '{{apiTargetEndpoint}}', // Replace with your API target endpoint specific to your data center region
        cookie_domain: '{{cookieDomain}}' // Replace with the top level cookie domain of the website that is being integrated e.g ".example.com" and not "www.example.com"
        pointOfSale: '{{pointOfSale}}', // Replace with the same point of sale configured in system settings"
        web_flow_target: '{{web_flow_target}}', // Replace with path for the Amazon CloudFront CDN for Sitecore Personalize"                 web_flow_config: { async: false, defer: false } // Customize the async and defer script loading attributes};
    // Import the Boxever library asynchronously 
    (function() {
         var s = document.createElement('script'); s.type = 'text/javascript'; s.async = true;  
         s.src = 'https://d1mj578wat5n4o.cloudfront.net/boxever-{{clientVersion}}.min.js';
         var x = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; x.parentNode.insertBefore(s, x);
    })();
</script>

PointOFSale — Point of Sale is a string value required to enable experiments to display data, and events of guests are displayed in the timeline.

You can set it, if you don’t have one already, under System Settings > Points of Sale as shown here. — https://app.boxever.com/#/management/points-of-sale

How to test if it is all working ?

check if the the embedded script is available on the target page or website

Check if there are no console errors , you might receive 401 (Forbidden) errors if your target is incorrect
if there are no console errors , on your browser console retrive your browserId by using Boxever.getID()

Copy this browserId and search for the user session on Sitecore CDP Instance but navigating to Customer Data —> Guests and searching for bid : {BrowserId}

You should be returned with a record with the BrowserId specified , Thats It !

Resources :

https://github.com/neilkillen/SitecoreCDPPostmanCollection —Excellent Postman collection to send API calls to Sitecore CDP by Neil Killen
https://www.mindomo.com/mindmap/sitecore-cdp-personalize-438021ff6de3433b81b4b458dc3ca675 — Useful mind map of all the features of Sitecore CDP & Personalise by Kiran Patil

Getting Started with Sitecore CDP and Personalise — Part 1

Written by SitecoreHandbook