The Power of Personalization

By SiteSpect Marketing

October 27, 2015

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One of SiteSpect’s strongest features is its ability to target users and personalize their experience. It allows you to target content using a wide range of criteria, which provides a sharper focus when it comes time to delivering personalized content. Recent product enhancements have made SiteSpect’s personalization features even better.

To help understand these enhancements, I spoke with our Product Manager, Paul Bernier. Paul led the development effort for the recent release and as a former website optimization consultant at SiteSpect, he has great insight into how you can get the most out of the improved power of our personalization.

LF: Can you provide a quick overview of how SiteSpect supports our customers’ personalization and targeting efforts?

PB: Our personalization and targeting capabilities leverage SiteSpect’s powerful analytics to collect a wide range of data on users and their behavior. You can create groups of users and target them based on any combination of user attributes: geolocation, mobile features, past customers, new or returning users, visit recency and frequency, browser type or operating system, just to name a few.

In addition, SiteSpect can target users based on any data that you may already be collecting, such as: customer type, lifetime value, lead type, membership status, account preferences, and so on.

You can use any user action, whether it’s in the present or a past visit, for behavioral targeting. For example, SiteSpect allows you to personalize the experience based on: purchase or signup, product purchased, checkout flow abandonment, add to cart, search for specific terms, logged-in status, categories of product viewed, entry page, referral traffic, and so on.

Of course, no personalization effort would be complete without proper reporting tools. Otherwise, how can you accurately measure the impact of your optimization program? We have a full reporting suite that supports segment creation on the fly and comparison across multiple segments. The icing on the cake? All of SiteSpect’s personalization and targeting data is readily available in the analytics part of the product at no additional cost.

LF: We’ve supported personalization and targeting in SiteSpect for a long time. What are some of the recent enhancements just released?

PB: SiteSpect’s core A/B testing capabilities have been built from the ground up to support personalization and targeting. We encourage our customers to leverage those capabilities for regular A/B tests or multivariate tests as well.

Custom Variables is a recent addition to our portfolio. It allows you to capture any dimension about your users or their behavior in a simple way, and leverage the data for personalization, targeting, and analytics.

Top Segments is a new report that allows our customers to define key critical segments of users across all their A/B testing efforts. The Top Segments report is currently in Beta testing with several of our customers.

LF: Can you provide some more insight into the Custom Variables feature? What makes it a game changer for optimization teams?

PB: Custom Variables reduce the burden of defining all user behavior upfront for reporting and personalization purposes and helps keep track of the entire user experience.

Creating custom Metrics that keep track of the entire user experience is not only time consuming, it’s also not very reliable as it tends to miss out on unforeseen behaviors. Nothing is more frustrating than analyzing user behavior and realizing that you are missing key user interactions.

Custom Variables help automate that process and allow you to leverage all that valuable data for targeting specific users and personalizing their experience.

LF: If you were still a website optimization consultant working with our customers, how would you advise them to use this powerful feature?

PB: I would think about the various dimensions that define my user’s experience and start capturing those: product category views, travel destinations, search terms, product purchased, membership types. These are just a few examples.

Analyzing how user behavior affects conversion leads to interesting A/B testing opportunities, ones that tend to be high value.

Tailoring content based on products previously purchased, A/B testing different layouts per travel destination, or recommending specific saving plans based on content consumed are just a few ways you can offer your visitors a personalized and targeted experience.

LF: Are there any additional updates planned that address the personalization and targeting needs of our customers?

PB: Believe me, our backlog is full great ideas to even further expand our personalization and targeting features!

We are looking at ways to simplify and automate the creation of personalized experiences that span a large number of user groups. We want to enrich Custom Variables with more data attributes.

Allowing our customers to make informed decisions by leveraging Custom Variables is another big focus. We are looking at different angles for analyzing this new type of data and making it easier to consume it all.

And on top of that, we are always striving to simplify the user experience in our own product to make it easier to build personalization and targeting experiences.

Personalization and targeting campaigns are an important component of our customers’ optimization programs. In recent weeks, our blog posts have discussed recent industry trends and highlighted the importance of personalization.

Are you interested in learning more about how SiteSpect can help you with your personalization and targeting needs? We encourage you to request a SiteSpect demo or contact the Help Desk with any questions.

To learn more about SiteSpect, visit our website.

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SiteSpect Marketing

SiteSpect Marketing

SiteSpect Marketing focuses on authoring content for the web and social media.

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