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Ashley Friedlein: 4Ps of personalisation

Ashley declares personalisation is to be split into two – anonymous customers, and known customers. Within anonymous personalisation, there’s customisation and behavioural targeting. For known customers, however, there’s explicit personalisation and implicit personalisation. “Customisation involves personalising the experience based on attributes like the user’s IP address (and thereby location), their referring search terms, the device being used to access the internet and so on.” Hmm – does that not use implicitly-acquired information? And, what is customised? Are product recommendations customised? Is text customised with a user’s name or location? “Behavioural (re)targeting, most often perceived as the ‘creepiest’ form of personalisation, means messaging can be targeted based on an individual’s online behaviour all around the internet.” Not really. Behavioural retargeting is where you place a tag on your website which drops a cookie on the user’s device. Then, when your choice of advertising platform spots a device with that cookie on, your ad then gets shown. Behavioural targeting does use an individual’s online behaviour on the internet. But not all of it. Most BT solutions are semi-dumb, looking at websites visited, any demographic information available through partnerships with social networks or similar, and location data. You cannot target an advert to only people who buy red, size ten D&G dresses who live in London and buy groceries at Tesco.com. And you can only target messaging? No. Behavioural (re)targeting allows you to target ads to either people who have been on your site, or people who *may* be in a certain demographic/segment. It’s a waste of technology to use a BT solution to power a personalised homepage banner. “For known customers, there is both explicit personalisation, based on areas such as user preferences and settings, typically via a login of some sort.” Really? Never heard of cookies? You know… invisible codes that relate to each internet-enabled device visitor? And finally, yes – explicit personalisation can use user preferences and settings. But there is much more valuable explicit information that can be used in personalisation – age, gender, favourite breed of dogs, any relevant detail that a user can define. “There is also implicit personalisation, based on a whole range of data, but most usually transaction history. In the former example, the personalisation is usually very evident to the customer; in the latter, it might be less obvious, like Amazon’s product recommendations.” Amazon’s product recommendations are the MOST obvious example of implicit personalisation anyone could ever think of. I've written about the 4 levels of personalisation here - http://www.attractinterestdesireaction.com/2012/12/14/4-levels-personalisation/ - take a look, you might find it useful.

Fri, 14 Dec 2012

2:28 pm