Tracking User Interaction with you Sitecore hosted Site.
Introduction
Sitecore's Experience Database is the name it gives the databases and supporting processes that track site usage.
Page visits and events are captured as a conversation and written to MongoDB.
'Map reduce' processes write aggregated information to a SQL Server reporting database allowing users to understand how people are using their site, how it is performing etc.
The SQL Server tables are organise in the typical star schema / data warehousing model - fact and dimension tables - allowing easy and flexible reporting.
Mongo DB was chosen due to its speed and ability to scale horizontally - see this page for more info....
SQL Server for it's ability to facilitate reporting, dashboard generation etc.
Tracking Usage Across Visits
Cookies are used to enable tracking of individual users browsing habits.
The cookie persists on the visitor's device during and between each visit they make to the site.
That means visits for a single user from that device can be linked together.
For example, if a student visits a University web site several times over a number of days on his laptop you might see that they:
- Browsed courses relating to Law
- Browsed student accommodation
- Browse a specific law course again
- Submitted an application for the course
So that user's usage of the web site is recorded across visits.
Tracking Usage Across Devices
Cookies will work for a single device but not if a user uses multiple devices to access the site e.g. laptop and then a mobile.
Sitecore get's round this problem by using other technologies to cover the gaps.
So like Google Analytics if the user is logged on you can track that user's visits across the devices.
Further to that if say the user uses a mobile to visit the site over a number of days and only logs on during the last visit in order to book a course we can retrospecitvely allocated previous visits on that device to the same user.
Result
The result being you can view the cross platform page/click history of individual users over whatever time span you specify (hours / weeks months).
Other reports might aggregate data to give the big picture e.g. most popular pages, slowest pages etc.
Here's a document giving Sitecore's own overview of their Experience Database (xDB):