Sitecore introduced outcomes in version 8.  While creating and implementing outcomes, I came across an error that I thought was worth noting.

What is an Outcome

According to “Practical Sitecore 8 Configuration and Strategy”:

Outcomes are used to track the lifelong value of a particular customer to your business over time.  An outcome in its most basic form is just a tag on the customer’s profile.  That tag name can be whatever you want it to be and it can represent whatever you want it to represent.  Typically, outcomes represent some combination of events, goals, and/or campaign interactions.

How to Create an Outcome

Sitecore documents how to create an outcome.  It’s pretty simple and the steps can be found in the Sitecore Experience Platform documentation.

Outcome Groups

Here is what is not documented or at least not documented well.  If you create an outcome, and do not add it to an outcome group, the outcome will not work.  The outcome will not only fail to register programmatically, but the exception raised will also cause any goals raised in the same tracking session, to fail to register as well.  When you create a new outcome, the outcome group is defaulted to none.

Registering an Outcome

Outcomes can only be registered programmatically.  I’m going to cover how I implemented programmatically registering goals and outcomes in a separate post.