Search Personalization - Powerful Way to Harness Your 1st Party Data

Personalization remains one of the most talked about topics among marketing, CRO and CXO leaders. But it’s also true that consumer preferences and martech evolve at a lightning speed, making it hard for one to say ‘we’ve got personalization down to science’ and also received the ROI we expected.

On the other hand, while consumers say they want personalized and relevant offers, recent research suggests that they are also getting tired of too much of the good thing. After all, personalization based on basic demographics or on behavioral signals the consumer is not happy about sharing may feel intrusive and disingenuous. Marketers’ attempts to access, store and use consumer data have long ago been noticed by regulators and key market players, and now many dub the consequences ‘the death of 3rd party data’ and, rightfully so, attribute that to GDPR, CCPA, and ITP.

However, the lack of 3rd party data coupled with the rise of the Modern Data Stack (with Data Warehouse at its center), represent a new opportunity for marketers. The opportunity lies in being able to use 1st party data to the fullest. Personalized Search is one of the ways to leverage this data - namely, search terms. Search personalization technology allows meeting the consumer right where they may actually want personalized advice - when they are looking for something.

What is Search Personalization

Search personalization technology allows marketers to be in control of what is displayed to visitors in search results. This is accomplished by configuring a variety of rules, based on search terms and other relevant attributes, that will determine what the visitor sees while searching and on the results page itself. Both the marketer (or, the brand - online retailer, media source, etc.) and the visitor benefit from these fine-tuning options. Here are just some of the key benefits our clients talk about.

Benefits for visitors:

Relevant product suggestions: the visitor will see similar products they would not have seen otherwise.
Faster and easier search: a good personalized search solution will offer a variety of configurable features such as typo tolerance, synonym and variation recognition, search relevance and query suggestions, stop words and more.
Discovering new products: in addition to the search bar, the visitor can use filters to discover additional products while searching.

Benefits for brands:

Real-time data on intent: search query and behavior are perfect examples of 1st party data and the freshest data there may be - real-time. Marketers with meaningful access to this data can use it in a variety of ways.
Ability to promote specific products: options such as product ranking business logic, search boosts, scheduled configurations, and search redirect to a specific product listing / campaign landing page, give marketers additional tools to reach product sales goals.
Search keyword insights: by storing and helping understand search keywords used by visitors, personalized search solutions provide additional data points for product listing optimization and targeting.
Focus on ROI: when configured well, business logic rules for product ranking can help focus on promoting the most profitable or the most sellable products and maximize margin and revenue.

Kameleoon’s Personalized Search is a powerful and flexible add-on to our Product Recommendations module. We have included all options a marketer may need to get started with search personalization, all built on top of Kameleoon’s lightning-fast search engine and with fully customizable design to match our clients’ brand.

We won’t go into detail and will only mention the basics of how the Kameleoon Search Personalization module works. It enables two ways of offering personalized search experience to visitors.