How to choose your personalization solution
ACADEMY / Personalization training blog
Many tools exist to personalize the visitor experience and marketers may well struggle to choose the best solution for achieving their business goals.
In a recent report, the Gartner research firm identified the stumbling blocks encountered by its customers when choosing their personalization solution. Among other things, the report highlighted difficulties in identifying the value proposition of the various solutions available on the market and the key functionalities that they really should be offering.
In this article, we aim to provide some useful information to help you choose your future technological partner for personalization.
1 What are the essential criteria to take into account when evaluating your future personalization solution?
Web users want personalized experiences that are adapted to their needs. In response to this general trend, many industry players are seeking to develop their own personalization platform.
To give marketers a clearer picture, Gartner has published a report entitled Critical Capabilities for Personalization Engines in which its analysts highlight 5 strategic capabilities you should evaluate before choosing your personalization solution:
- Your platform should afford you a unified vision of your customers .
- It should be capable of large-scale tests and experiments.
- It should offer the right balance between automation on the one hand and transparency and control on the other.
- It should be oriented towards decision making and execution.
- Finally, your solution should comply with increasingly advanced security and data protection regulations.
You should carefully evaluate these transversal strategic capabilities when choosing your personalization solution.
In addition, your checklist should include the following critical features and capabilities, as established in the Magic Quadrant dedicated to personalization solutions:
> Identity: User authentication, profile matching, preference management, segmentation and personalization to anonymous and known users based on deterministic and statistical methods.
> Data and Analytics: Data types and sources; bidirectional data flow; data modeling and flexibility to import data models; and sophistication and transparency of data engine and modeling.
> Execution: Rule engine enabling native or third-party personalization via the web, email marketing and at least two other channels, including call centers, chat, digital advertising, IoT, mobile, retargeting and search.
> Use Cases: Functionality including custom content, offers, messaging, product recommendations, search and site navigation, webpage optimization, targeting, and campaign optimization to support marketing, digital commerce and CX use cases.
> Testing and Optimization: Availability of basic testing and optimization, such as A/B and multivariate; and advanced testing and optimization, like real-time decision management and goal-based optimization.
> Notifications and Reporting: User notifications and recommendations of next-best action or offer; standard and customizable reporting templates; measurement, analysis and reporting of conversion, attribution, and/or ROI analysis; and access to a reporting dashboard and/or data visualization capabilities.
2 How does the Kameleoon platform meet these criteria
If you are currently looking for the best personalization solution for your needs, we thought it important to show you how Kameleoon’s AI-driven personalization platform is positioned in terms of the criteria we just listed.
It should be noted that our platform began as an A/B testing solution; however, since 2014, we have also offered the creation of personalization experiences and, more recently, personalization based on artificial intelligence.
User authentication:
Deterministic and statistical methods
With the Kameleoon platform, two types of personalization are possible:- “rule-based” personalization, governed by manual segmentation rules set in advance by the marketer. For example, to encourage purchases, a website will show new visitors a pop-in with a discount code as soon as they land on the site.
- personalization based on machine learning algorithms, enabling visitor segmentation according to real-time evolution of purchase intention. Imagine, for example, that you want to offer new visitors a promotion - but only those who are undecided; the algorithm will analyze the visitors’ behavior and identify their conversion probability, then trigger the offer if they are deemed to be undecided.
Data matching
On the Kameleoon platform, data matching can be performed for connected visitors, using data collected from different channels. This is invaluable if you want to reconstruct the journey of a visitor who is using several devices (mobile, computer, etc.).
For this specific functionality, in 2014, our R&D team developed unique technology called “cross-domain Local Storage” that can track, analyze and personalize the journey of visitors regardless of the domain name they’re browsing on, as long as the Kameleoon script is installed on each of them.
Advanced segmentation
The Kameleoon platform can segment your (anonymous and known) visitors using over forty criteria: source of acquisition (direct, organic, paid-for, etc.), digital journey (type of device, geolocation, cookies, etc.), browser history (whether the visitor is known or not, time elapsed since first visit, etc.), and external information (date, weather, etc.).
The platform also offers advanced targeting criteria such as the capacity to segment according to product characteristics collected natively by Kameleoon. For example, targeting can be restricted to visitors who consult the products among the catalogue’s top 10% most expensive or target visitors who, during previous visits, consulted products whose prices have since dropped by 20%. It is also possible to enrich the list by adding personalized data with the aim of capturing a piece of data that is specific to your website.
Our platform also allows you to use predictive targeting to target (anonymous and known) visitors according to their conversion probability and real-time evolution. Using this approach, you can replicate on your website the personalized support provided by a sales adviser in a store.
Data and Analytics
Data variety (types and sources)
The Kameleoon platform aggregates all your data, regardless of their sources- all intent data (also called “hot data”) falling within the context of the ongoing visit is natively captured by our platform. For example, this could be the click path, the time spent on a page, geolocation, the terminal used, etc.
- what’s more, by adding personalized data to the Kameleoon platform, you can onboard all the cold data provided by the rest of your data ecosystem. So, all your CRM data and your aggregated DMP or CDP data are displayed on the platform.
Real-time data collection and storage
Intent data (hot data) is stored in the local storage of the visitor’s browser and sent in real time to Kameleoon’s servers to be analyzed and used for reporting purposes. To comply with the GDPR, only anonymized data is used.
With Local Storage, it is possible to store data locally in the user’s browser. Web storage is more secure than cookies and large volumes of data can be stored without affecting your website’s performance.
Execution
A native personalization platform
Execution, namely the activation of the segmentation created, is done natively on the Kameleoon platform. Once the segmentation criteria (whether these are deterministic or predictive) have been set, then personalized actions and elements are created directly through Kameleoon.
Personalization is omni-channel on the Kameleoon platform: you can personalize on your website (desktop or mobile), on your application, via e-mail or display.
For a 360-degree personalization approach, you can also unify the visitor journey across all existing channels and, for instance, show a visitor who has been exposed to a personalization on your website the same message as part of a retargeting or display campaign (Google Ads, Facebook…).
Our APIs and SDKs also enable personalizations to be rolled out on all types of channel: call centers in a WebtoCallback approach for example, chatbot, etc.
Through the Kameleoon platform you can create customized experiences thanks to a large number of segmentation criteria, as well as triggers that will display the personalization at the best time.
Activate your personalizations
Several tools are available for activating your personalizations directly from the Kameleoon platform:- the widget library, which lets you quickly select a personalization element and add it to your website (banner, form, etc.). A graphic editor allows you to add your specific widgets to this list.
- the graphic editor, which lets you modify the elements of your page.
- the simulation tool, which lets you test your personalizations before launching them online.
Activate your personalizations
Kameleoon lets you set display rules to orchestrate your visitors’ experience on your website.
Do you want to limit the display of your personalization so as to manage the marketing pressure exerted on your visitors? This is possible thanks to capping.
Do you want to choose to plan the display of your personalization over one or several date ranges according to a set schedule? (By default, your personalization will be displayed continuously from the point you put it online.) This is possible thanks to planning functionalities.
Do you want the personalization to display when the majority of conditions are met rather than when all conditions are met? This is possible thanks to micro-targeting.
Do you want to prioritize your experiences so that a visitor is not exposed to too many personalizations? This is possible with prioritization.
Do you want to determine whether or not a personalization will be activated based on the previously displayed personalizations? This is possible with storyboarding.
Use Cases
A platform that adapts to all use cases
At Kameleoon, we believe that the value of a technology lies in its applications and uses. From the outset, our platform and its entire architecture were designed to adapt to all of our customer’s use cases, irrespective of their industry and their business goals.
For this reason the personalization use cases that you can implement from our platform are highly varied:
- Content personalization: you can personalize the content, messages and offers on your website according to interests, geolocation or news. The visitor is thus exposed to content that they like, to messages that resonate with them, and to offers that are adapted to their preferences.
- Navigation personalization: you can personalize visitor’s journey on your website, based on their habits. For example, by changing the position of your menu tabs or highlighting the most popular categories on your homepage.
- Product & price targeting: you can personalize your visitors’ experience according to the products and price ranges that interest them, by highlighting products that have been viewed or those that match their purchasing power.
- E-mail personalization: you can personalize your e-mails based on your visitors’ interests and on-site browsing.
Testing and optimization:
Availability of A/B and multivariate tests
The A/B testing module was the first one created on our platform. So, for us, it is a historic functionality, inherent to the history of our platform, and one that is continuously improved by our product and R&D teams.
With the Kameleoon platform, you can natively perform A/B tests and multi-variate tests with advanced segmentation criteria in server-side or client-side mode – and all of this is guaranteed without flickering.
It is also possible to perform tests using dynamic traffic allocation, which modifies the distribution of traffic based on the first results observed during the test period.
Notifications and reporting :
Reporting dashboard (graph, overview, recommendations):
The Kameleoon platform offers a dedicated personalization reporting solution, to support decision-making.
Our data-visualization dashboards recommend the best actions to take according to your results.
Advanced graphics allow you to view results at a glance and easily interpret them. The Kameleoon reporting tool is also very precise, as the platform offers a large number of KPIs (goals) to keep track of your performance. Our platform’s reporting page can be personalized to show your priority KPIs.
You can also filter and break down the results to obtain a more detailed analysis, for example, to view the impact of a test on each goal (ROI, conversion, etc.) either at a specific point in time or historically.
Finally there is a system of alerts that sends you a notification when an experience is coming to an end or a sudden change is noted. This makes the reporting tool a useful level for making decisions in real time.
It is possible to connect your analytics tools to the Kameleoon platform to cross-reference your analyses.
You want to know more about our platform? Ask for a demo!
ACADEMY / Return to our Personalization training course by clicking here.
