Personalization with Coveo and Sitecore CDP/Personalize
With the composable world, there are many clients today that have Intelligent Search and Customer Data Platforms (eg: Coveo and Sitecore CDP/Personalize, respectively). There are overlaps in these platforms when it comes to serving personalized relevant content and products to your customers at the right time. And customers generally have a difficult time getting the ROI of either tool, let alone leveraging the combined power. In this article, we will specifically discuss the overlaps, the differences and power in each tool, and the ability to combine the tools and realize ROI at each step of maturity.
The Overlaps and Differences in Coveo and Sitecore CDP/Personalize
The obvious differentiation here is that Coveo is primarily a Search Engine. The Search capabilities in Coveo do not exist in Sitecore CDP/Personalize or any other CDP and/or Personalization tool. This inherent capability in Coveo also ensures that Coveo naturally has indexed content that is meant to be produced to the user at the right time, generally in context of a search.
Vice versa, Sitecore CDP is mainly used to have a clear view of your customer, their profile, their characteristics, their behavior, all the first party data that you can collect about the user. This information about your customer does not exist in Coveo or any other intelligent search tool. This inherent capability in Sitecore CDP can provide hyper relevant content and experiences to your customer using Sitecore Personalization, a Marketing Automation tool, or Coveo.
Coveo, however is more than a search engine. It is a relevance engine where content and products can be recommended to the user based on the user’s prior engagement with the search capabilities of Coveo. Coveo, additionally, can generate content from search results to intelligently answer user questions. Sitecore Personalization is also a personalization engine to provide personalized experiences and content to the user. So, if you are a customer of both these platforms, it is essential to know how to get the highest value from both combined.
The Crawl step and getting started
Many customers today still get stuck on step 1. In this case, I would suggest simply forgetting about combining the tools and get started using each one to the best of your ability. This means understanding and knowing which tool is best for each scenario. Below are some example scenarios and tools to use
For all search related content (eg: query suggestions, faceting, relevant search results, dynamic faceting): Use Coveo
For recommendations (content or product): Use Coveo
For generative answering or smart snippets: Use Coveo
For search, content, keyword related analytics: Use Coveo
This includes thinking about what to write about next
For A/B or multi-variate testing: Use Sitecore Personalize
For personalized experiences (outside of content recommendations): Use Sitecore CDP/Personalize
For next best actions: Use Sitecore CDP/Personalize
For analytics about your user, their engagement/experience, their journey, and behavior: Use Sitecore CDP
If you are able to understand and implement each of these separately but to the best of their capabilities, you are well on your way with each tool, and more than ready for the next step.
The walk step: combining analytics
Now that you have a great understanding of each tool and are able to use each tool to the best of its capability, the next problem will very quickly become the need to see your analytics as one comprehensive picture. At the end of the day that is the job for a CDP. So to ensure this occurs:
Make sure all your analytics events for your CDP are capturing those same analytics as Coveo
You can also export Coveo data via its robust API into a separate tool, which can be consumed by your CDP
Once Coveo analytics data is in Sitecore CDP, all Personalize decision models will respect the Coveo data as part of the full picture of the customer.
The run step: sending context to Coveo
At this point we are ready to create a comprehensive experience between the two platforms. As we know, the source of customer data is Sitecore CDP and the content resides being indexed in Coveo. Hence, now to create a comprehensive relevance engine with Coveo, the job of sending relevant queries can be handed over to the CDP, where customer context can be added to the query or query request in coveo as part of the decision model in Sitecore Personalize.
In Summary
Relevance engines and Customer Data Platforms have different purposes, even though there are overlap in features. In this article, we have tackled Coveo in conjunction with Sitecore CDP and Personalize. In order to use both effectively:
We have provided you guidance to figure out the benefits of each and when to use each one
How to combine the analytics data for both
How to create a comprehensive experience between the two
Happy Personalizing!
