What is content personalization?
Content personalization (or simply âpersonalizationâ) is an approach wherein a publisher tailors its content to the preferences of a specific audience. This makes content more relevant to a visitor, and matches a visitorâs personal interests, needs and behavior. The purpose of personalization is to help visitors find the desired content faster and provide companies a better chance at understanding their audience and converting visitors into loyal customers. With personalization itâs likely that your engagement score will increase, and the time visitors spend on your website will increase as well.
For instance, US publisher Business Insider was able to increase its websiteâs clickthrough rate by 60% based on personalization. The publisher used behavioral data to develop user profiles, based on visitorâs previous interactions with the site. The New York Times personalized content by using the visitorâs past behavior to make the most relevant content recommendations, including a highly relevant âRecommendations Pageâ link that contained even more personalized content for specific audiences.
Types of personalization
When implementing a personalization strategy, itâs wise to first learn more about your possibilities. In content personalization, we distinguish three types of personalization: content targeting, recommendations, and notifications.
Content targeting
Content targeting means adjusting the content on your website to meet the preferences of your (segmented) audiences. You can tailor headers, banners, CTAs, overlays: everything that we can label as content is suitable for targeting. As a publisher, content targeting includes tailoring your websiteâs header to the interest of your reader. For example, a reader that is interested in politics will see a landing page header that shows the most relevant political news. Whereas a reader that is interested in economics, sees the latest financial updates. Personalizing content such as headers, banners and CTAs increases engagement on your platform: this minor effort can already lead to a 5-10% increase in response rates.