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Stéphane Recouvreur 09 Jun 2023
Web personalization is on everyone's agenda. In reality, it rarely gets delivered as intended.
Why? The lack of practical guidance makes it feel too daunting to navigate. ROI on personalization is also difficult to quantify, especially when it takes months to deliver. As a consequence, marketing and content teams divert focus to easier, short-term projects instead.
It doesn't have to be this way. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or a novice content professional, you don't have to start from scratch.
Buck the trend and get your web personalization program started or optimized quickly. Forget theoretical advice. This step-by-step guide aims to break down actionable steps and arm you with ready-to-use templates developed from real examples in the wild.
Let’s see each step in further detail below.
The process of segmentation is basically grouping your users into distinct segments that have common attributes that define their behaviors or needs.
The first trap teams fall into is spending too much time creating traditional user personas.
Consider the following similar personas. Notice anything?
While both personas share the same demographic traits, you would simply not market to them the same way.
Enter ‘jobs-to-be-done’, the single most important criterion to start your segmentation exercise with. It’s based on the concept that every user has a job to do on your site. For example, a customer doesn’t want to buy a drill, they want a tool to put a hole in their wall to hang a picture.
Common ‘jobs-to-be-done’ categories include:
‘Jobs-to-be-done’ aims at grouping users by focusing on shared user needs and intent. You can conduct interviews with customers or prospects with the following questions:
Those questions should offer you greater clarity about why your users visit your site, and what content helps them to get their job done.
‘Start small’ tip: Run just 10 interviews to get going. You might see some trends quickly, or areas you want to drill down into with your next 10 interviews.
Armed with an understanding of your users' goals, you want to look for common criteria that allow you to use something tangible to segment those users with. This translates 'jobs-to-be-done' goals into specific segments of users you can identify using data.
Criteria can include:
Armed with this data, you should start seeing trends emerge and segments where content personalization makes sense.
Start small tip: Not every user is worth the same to your organization. It’s rarely realistic to create a personalized experience for every type of user segment on your site. So, focusing on 2-3 that make the biggest impact is a sensible way to start; be it revenue, usage of services, risk of complaint/churn etc.
Now that you’ve defined what each user segment wants to achieve on your website, you can start mapping these to organizational outcomes linked to users’ jobs.
Here are a few common ones you can take inspiration from:
Putting the two together can help you to match user jobs to measurable metrics linked to your organizational goals.
‘Start small’ tip: Here are two examples of a simple mapping exercise.
Personalization item | Details
In Google Analytics 4, you can track these metrics as a Conversion under the Admin panel.
To set up conversion goals in Google Analytics, you can follow these steps:
12. Add the page you want to measure in the “Goal details” section (see image below).
13. Click “Save” and you’ve successfully tracked a goal!
For a full walkthrough, visit Google’s Help site here.
Now that you’ve defined the goal that’s aligned to each user segment’s job-to-be-done, it’s time to work backwards. You want to understand how your user got there in the first place - from their first visit to the end job achieved on your website.
Think of it as a breadcrumb trail.
The goal of personalization is to maximize the important steps along the way to make sure users get to achieve their job as easily and quickly as possible.
First, let’s take a look at how your current users behave on your website by creating a path exploration report in Google Analytics 4.
In GA4, navigate to Explore > Path exploration.
Click on Start again to start with a blank slate.
Select an Ending point (a “Thank you” page or a particular event for example).
Add as many previous steps as you wish, selecting Page title and screen name to uncover pages visited.
You can then explore the most common customer journeys that brought your users to achieve the goal you have set for them.
Analyzing the GA4 path exploration report is a good start point. This maps out the existing path taken by your users.
From here, you have two choices:
If you choose No. 2, follow the same approach as above to map out the better pathway a user should take. Clearly state where friction exists at each step, and how content or site search personalization could help address it.
Here’s a simple customer journey template you can replicate to help you do this.
If you're looking for a visual design tool to use, check out this free Mural template.
So what’s a trigger? A personalization trigger is a point or action taken in the user journey where you can start to control what content that user should see. When the conditions of a trigger are met, an action occurs that personalizes the site’s content for that user at that point.
With the user journeys mapped, you can now set a trigger(s) that switch on content personalization. The triggers indicate when user segments start to get recognizable at specific points in their journey.
Anonymous
This type of trigger allows you to personalize by user interest, or interest inferred by behavior. It will trigger a personalized experience that tends to be channel-specific (i.e. website only) and will remain until users clear their cookies.
You can collect just enough information to segment your users with the following methods:
Authenticated
Authenticated triggers normally use user-specific data to personalize content. The benefits of this type of personalization can work across channels, are persistent vs. cookie-based, tend to combine data sources (i.e. CRM information) and can control access to restricted content.
You can exactly identify your users with the following opt-in methods:
Important tips: Data privacy
Let's break down the most common website content items you can personalize. There are different content items you can focus on. Starting with just 2-3 instead of all of them is a good idea - especially at the beginning of a project
Not all of your content should be personalized for each user segment. As mentioned earlier, after a specific personalization trigger point, define what content becomes relevant to your user segments to get their job done faster or easier.
For example, if a specific user segment’s job-to-be-done is to request support for a specific service or product they need help with, their anonymous personalized content journey could look like this:
Once you’ve highlighted what needs to be personalized, it’s time to create your content for each applicable user segment.
In order to not miss anything, we recommend being very visual like in the example below, and clearly indicating what will be content for each section or component you are personalizing.
Content planning tip: Audit existing content to avoid duplication of effort
Audit the content you already have. This audit is important so you know what you already have, what can be reused vs. unnecessarily creating something from scratch. The three main categories of content in this audit should include:
**Site Search Analytics - This tool helps you analyze your site search usage. Knowing what users are searching for on specific pages indicate content gaps or relevant information they seek to achieve their objective.
‘Start small’ tip: Pick no more than two or three of the content items listed to start your journey. It is better to pilot quickly and see results early. This will allow you to observe any changes in user behaviour, to understand what’s required of your team, and to prioritize what to work on next.
Now that your personalization is in place, it’s time to measure its effectiveness against the goals you’ve set for each user segment.
A common tool to measure personalization efforts across your website is Google Analytics 4.
First, define each of your user segments under Audiences within the admin panels.
Click on New Audience.
You can use pre-made GA4 audiences or select Create a custom audience.
For each segment, you will need to carefully select what criteria GA4 should use to identify its users, including source, page visited, event, etc
In the example below, we are creating a segment of users who live in the United States and visited a particular page on our blog.
Back in GA4 main panel Reports > Engagement, you can then measure each user segment against a set of selected metrics, such as Conversions, Engagement, etc, or whatever you decided to measure your personalization success against.
In the example below, we are looking at a particular audience segment selected on the right end side. You can see how this audience is converting compared to a previous period (before/after personalization).
At a more granular level, you can set up a Funnel exploration (Explore > Funnel exploration) report to measure that each step (page visited or event) within your funnel is indeed improving over time against a set of pre-defined metrics.
In the example below, our goal is to increase page views all along the funnel, until the last step that focuses on conversion.
Here’s a simple spreadsheet to put all the steps above together.
Make a copy of this web personalization strategy template to use for your plan.
With your personalization plan mapped out, the next step is to work out what tools you need to execute the strategy.
Whether you have the right tools in place already, or if you’re looking in the market for the perfect tech partner, keep these practical considerations in mind.
Increasing data complexity
Cross-channel interactions require specialized tools that connect fragmented data and workflows
The interactions that take place across channels are difficult to measure and optimize
But all is not lost.
To cope with this complexity, many technologies have emerged to the fore recently:
Most personalization projects fail because we try to take on too much, go into unnecessary levels of detail and increase the level of complexity that either takes too long to execute or fails because the effort is not sustainable.
This step-by-step guide will empower you with a practical roadmap with ready-to-use templates and actionable ideas.
Focus on:
By doing so, you make the personalized experience great for your highest priority users quickly. You get to clarify team responsibilities to ensure it’s sustainable. You can also establish manageable workflows that scale.
So, start with something small.
Do it quickly and learn.
Then iterate and show results that will enable you to expand to bigger initiatives.
Watch below our "Step-by-step" web personalization webinar below.
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