Online Content Personalization as a Function of Digital Marketing

 

This is the Stuff of Legend 

 

Personalization has long been an objective for anyone trying to communicate a message with a receptive audience. In the online world, because every web site a visitor goes to, every second they spend on line, and every choice they make about viewing something, enlisting in something or buying something online is on demand and based on their own personal choices, personalized content delivery is a natural extension of an already personal browsing experience. 

Now, for the first time, through the use of online analytics solutions and complex algorithms that capture and crunch huge volumes of a visitor's digital attribution - their unique visitor fingerprint - digital marketers finally have access to one-to-one connections with online visitors. This enables digital marketers, publishers, and virtually any other online messenger the wherewithal to provide a visitor with unique, personally targeted content, regional or local promotions, familiar and efficient information and site structure, and an optimized visitor experience. All of these, ideally, result in increased time on site, return visits and loyalty, an establishment of trust, and increased lifetime value and revenue from individual visitors. 

 

Why Online Personalization? 

 

Whereas mom and pop shops were the only retail services that could provide intimate seller-to-consumer relationships in previous days, today, analytics, algorithms, automated systems and analytics professionals can offer a similar level of intimacy and trust through online experiences. For many years, retailers suggested that the intimacy shoppers can enjoy in their stores created a more pleasing shopping experience than any impersonal online shopping site could provide. However, in recent years, this paradigm has been turned on its' head. 

 

There are online retailers that excel at establishing intimate shopper relationships, including Amazon.com. Amazon.com has, over many years, developed a level of intimacy with its customers that is the envy of the online retail world. It constantly feeds new behavioral data into its algorithms, builds recommendation engines, and engages in limited retargeting across other web sites, all in an effort to create a comfortable shopping environment for its customers. And it has paid off: Amazon.com customers are often willing to pay a higher price for an item on Amazon.com than on other competitor web sites or at brick-and-mortar retail shops due to the sense of trust and intimacy Amazon.com provides them. 

 

Amazon.com excels because it offers its shoppers with a marginally personalized shopping experience. For the most part, content items, their photos and descriptions, pricing, and promotions are alike for any visitor. But the personalized recommendations, the understanding of what a shopper has purchased previously and what might conceivably complement that purchase based on visitor profiles, and expedited checkout processes can be unique to each visitor. Today, however, personalization technologies can expand that set of services into more unique, visitor focused experiences. 

 

When a web site visitor arrives at a page, whether on a PC, mobile device, or tablet, certain attributes about that visitor can be captured, deciphered, and integrated into an algorithm that delivers an adapted web site. Digital attribution can include - even on the first visit - information about what device is being used, its screen size, the network provider, how that visitor arrived at the page - search engines, search engine key words used, social site referral, bookmark or hand-typed URL - the general location of that visitor, and other demographic likelihoods and probabilities. With this kind of information, a digital marketing algorithm can ensure the delivery of some level of personalized content. 

 

If a visitor is on a tablet PC in California, the algorithm may deliver a web page with full screen images of a beach.  Alternatively, if the visitor is in New Hampshire in the Winter, the same site may deliver images of a skier on a slope. These images may be resized or repositioned according to the kind of device accessing the page. These real-time, algorithm-driven content swaps may seem simple, but as establishing initial engagement is essential to building customer relationships, any imagery that compels a visitor to linger on a page or click through a page toward a transaction possibility is a win. 

 

Similarly, if a digital marketer knows through imbedded cookies that a site visitor has visited the same page three times in the last week, they can assume that a little bit of enticement may drive the visitor toward a transaction. Thus, not only may image or interactive feature content be adapted to the third time visitor, but pricing and promotions may also be reconfigured to encourage the shopper. Also, online news publishers may depend on the positioning of articles on their pages to engage with and retain site visitors, and drive advertising revenue. If a loyal visitor is known to scan certain types of articles in a consistent pattern, the publisher may elect to reposition content on the page to help that visitor find their information, find related information, stay on the site longer, and have a positive and efficient visitor experience. 

 

In the end, effective personalization delivers visitor loyalty, increased engagement, and often, improved site revenue. Not only does personalization retain visitors for longer periods, increasing the likelihood of transactions and their related revenue, but visitor retention metrics are essential to pricing advertising value and generating advertising-related revenue. 

 

How Online Personalization Works 

 

To make personalization work, digital marketers must employ sophisticated online analytics solutions, complex algorithms, and often, integrated content management systems (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), and other productivity solutions. The combination of these solutions allows digital marketers to not only understand their site visitors better, but also how to provide them with optimized content and experiences. 

Online analytics solutions help digital marketers understand who visits their web sites and how they behave on them. They capture the attributes cited above, as well as total numbers of visitors, time on site, actions taken on a site, and clickthroughs, among other data, all of which allows marketers insight into a visitor's engagement and the ability of a site to perform as designed. All of these digital attributions help marketers better understand intent, interests, and predictable actions. This data is then fed to algorithms and analytics professionals that work to figure out how to better engage with visitors and drive them toward a desired outcome. 

 

Online analytics tools allow purveyors to not only better understand how their sites are performing, but also enables them to effectively segment their visitor market, understand visitor sources, and connect search terms, content items, positioning and other design features with engagement and activity - and ultimately, with direct transactions and revenue. This helps analytics professionals assign value to search terms, content items, page design, and advertising. Along with near constant testing, these value added analytics services also help marketers design and deploy variable web sites and content targeted to particular market segments - the foundation for personalization. 

 

Integrated CRM systems help companies manage and better understand their customers. Particularly when it comes to social media sites, companies have been working to tie in online consumer behavior with their brand and product performance in relation to their CRM databases. The better a company understands its customers and their interests, the better they can align their services, products and web site information to those needs. As consumers are ever more connected to the Internet on mobile devices, tablets, and PCs, and spend ever more time online, particularly on social sites, companies have found that there is always more information about customers and visitors to examine. 

 

Content management systems are essential to optimized personalization programs. An integrated CMS with thorough content tagging correlated with a particular visitor segment and engagement protocol allows the dynamic delivery of attribute defined content, be it text, images, video content or other interactive or rich media content. A company with a catalogue of variable content can assign content to segments, assign value to content according to its effectiveness to drive a segment toward an outcome, and reuse that content across many multiple global and cross-platform sites. 

 

When working in unison, the combination of a strong analytics engine, an algorithm that aligns attributes with segments and intricate content delivery models can provide a powerful personalized online experience. And the beauty of such a system is as additional data is captured, the precision of the model can be continually enhanced over time.

 

Technology Limitations Hinder Deployment 

 

Single Sign-Ons 

As a very fluid system, online personalization depends on all systems working together, including technologies, data, and algorithms. In practice, personalization is not yet at the point at which it can consistently provide positive personal experiences. There are movements in the right direction, but technology limitations, including single sign-on (SSO) authentication limitations, digital attribution accuracy and data quality remain stubborn challenges to overcome. 

 

Online analytics programs are session based, which means they typically only gather information about a visitor's behavior during the time the visitor is on the site. Though cookies enable sites to recognize repeat visitors, reconfigure content according to known preferences, and integrate authentication protocols, they do not automatically retain data across multiple sessions, nor do they link visitors across devices and platforms. Thus, if a visitor enjoys a personalized site visit on their PC, unless they log in as the same individual on an alternative device, the personalization on the alternative device would be different, based on attributions and actions taken on that alternative device. 

 

This disparity of personalization across devices is an issue that the analytics and digital marketing industries are working to resolve. Ideally, site managers could entice visitors to register on a site and log in every time they revisit, independent of device. But even on existing sites where registration and log in are required, less than half of visitors typically do so. Thus, analytics and digital marketing companies have been seeking out other methodology to uniquely identify visitors as they move across channels.

 

Nearly a dozen years ago, Microsoft created an SSO product, Microsoft Passport. Though this product didn't capture the imagination of the public and has since been reconfigured and rebranded, the concept of online SSOs and one-time-passwords (OTP) hasn't dissipated. Today, it is not uncommon for a Facebook visitor to sign on to Facebook on their PC, mobile device, and tablet - often simultaneously. This seemingly innocuous action allows Facebook to gain valuable information about how their visitors use their site and link to third-party web sites throughout a day. 

 

Recently, Google revamped their privacy policy and enabled an SSO capability across its platforms. Though Google does not indicate nor confirm that the reason for its realigned privacy policy is to allow for more accurate visitor tracking and targeting, Frost & Sullivan imagines that it is at least a convenient aftereffect of allowing for SSO and OTP connectivity. We further expect that the capacity of advanced browsers to retain information and search engines to remember preferences will further escalate the search engine and browser battles while delivering increasing digital marketing value. 

 

For now, however, the inability of cookies to leap from one browser and one device to another, and thus, the inability to provide consistent personalization across devices leaves the market depending on SSO and OTP strategies in the meantime.  Though last click analysis and weighting recent behavior ahead of earlier behavior allows site managers some level of adaptation and personalization on the fly, the level at which personalization delivers real value is difficult to reach without better linkage across platforms. 

 

Data Quality Inconsistencies Make Personalization Challenging 

 

When looking at the quality of online data, low pay per click (PPC) rates and other marketing conversion rates, compared to the amount of personal data on social sites and the constant connectivity of consumers, digital marketers expect increasing levels of data accuracy and cardinality. Though algorithms continuously improve crunching data, connecting insights, and analyzing contextual information, digital marketers expect these analytics programs to provide them with competitive advantage. Yet analytics programs and data capture tactics are only as good as they're designed. 

 

Though the digital channels allow for much greater and specific data capture, not all visitors allow for tracking, retain cookies, or behave in predictable fashions. Analytics programs can report that a visitor is on Facebook on their PC for eight hours a day, for example, but they don't report that the visitor was at work and was disengaged from the page for virtually the entire day. And though click-throughs and advertising impressions are judged to indicate some level of value, they do not necessarily indicate engagement. Further, some analytics vendors use panel based data collection and fill in gaps in data through extrapolation. These data inconsistencies are a challenge to personalization algorithms and their resulting value. 

 

Privacy Issues Constrain Market Uptake 

 

Analytics in general cause some web visitors some consternation. Though vendors indicate that their products create so much value without needing to actually track visitors across third-party sites, and thus they don't do it, some concerned citizen and legislative bodies have targeted online analytics as being overly invasive of privacy. Though most anti-tracking laws do not affect analytics solutions - which are session based, for the most part - some laws are so vaguely written that they could impact the market and the ability of digital marketers to offer personalized services. 

 

Several analytics vendors and digital marketing firms have worked to create elective solutions for on site visitors. Such programs invite visitors to enable on site and in-session monitoring, observation and data collection, and typically explicitly explain the intention of the program and the benefits visitors can expect from accepting. In the long run, these invitations can be shown to be beneficial to visitors, consensual targeting can delivery advertising that is directly applicable to visitor interests, and over time, visitors can experience optimized and personalized site visits. Where these programs also allow for SSOs or OTPs, two challenges can be tackled at the same time. 

 

The Long Term Impact of Personalization 

 

Personalization is an overarching trend within different industries and technologies. As advanced data management systems allow companies and individuals to better understand their customers, market trends, and predictive modeling, personalization plays a key engagement and retention role. Today, user data is collected by mobile device networks, cable and IPTV providers, Internet service providers, and as discussed herein, on online properties. Though these data sets are not yet aggregated into single digital repositories, we expect that at some point, anonymized data will be aggregated and analyzed to produce important information about markets, trends, and consumer behavior. 

 

Though we may never reach a point as portrayed in the movie Minority Report, where each individual is identified by retina readers and subsequently delivered incessant personalized advertising, market indications point toward a more balanced and mutually beneficial personalization landscape. As consumers acquire ever more connected devices, spend more time online and browsing Internet, it is likely inevitable. And in the end, if done correctly, targeted advertising won't feel invasive, but will provide information a visitor was seeking anyway. 

 

As of today, there remains a creepiness factor when personalization delivers content that is eerily close to a visitor's objective - some of the same creepiness factor is already present today when site visitors are retargeted with advertising related to retail products viewed during a previous and unrelated session.   The trick for the industry is to ease visitors into the new reality, allow them to see and understand how the man behind the curtain works, and allow them the opportunity to opt out of personalization and targeting when it makes them uneasy. If this can be accomplished, because the technologies that enable personalization supersede the demands of the market today, the future promises amazingly intricate and powerful personalization capabilities - the stuff of dreams and legends