Now that the personalized website is live....how does personalization work?????

In my last article you can read about and learn how to setup a fully personalized website with Uniform Optimize and Contentful on a Jamstack architecture deployed on and supported by Netlify.

You can get started with your website for free, test and try out the products, before starting to spend money on licenses.

Remember that all the functionality is completely decoupled from the backend, and personalization, navigation, tracking etc. all happen without postbacks to the origin, which means blazing fast personalization at scale. Actually, in this demo - most happen directly in the client browser, including the personalization.

If you did not read the last article - fear not, as it is available here

In this article I will walk you through how the user journeys on the website works and explain which personalization scenarios you can find where on the website. In the next article, I will take you through the backend and show how Uniform Optimize enable you to work with personalization on Contentful for Free!!

Remember - this was the website we setup in the last article.

The website is a simple conference site that present content relevant for Developers or Marketers. Note that the content presented is generic content, not targeted towards any specific interest. Also note that the list of conference talks are mixed between Marketers and Developers as we do not yet understand the intent of this specific visit to the website.

The philosophy behind Uniform Optimize is based on this simple paradigm:

Visitors to your site have an intent - something they want to accomplish. A reason for their visit.

We identify a visitor's intent is by signals that they send.

Signals cause a change of the visitor's score in a specific intent, for example:

• Behavior (being shown specific content.)
• Values from cookies
• Marketing campaigns that brings the visitor to your site

In the next article I will dive into more details and configurations examples of this.

In the example website the following types of intents are configured and used:

• An intent for Developers
• An intent for Marketers
• An intent for a Call for Papers campaign
• An intent for Conference registrations

Let's look at how each of them look in action on the website.

Developer and Marketer Intent

As I start to navigate the content on the website, I send signals that will change the underlying "score" and based on these "scores", drive me towards different intents.

Clicking on "For developers" will bring me to the page with developer content which send a "Behavior" signal that drive me towards the Developer Intent.

After visiting the "For Developers" page this particular visit now show an intent towards being more interested in Developer content than Marketer or generic content.

As users navigate the website and trigger personalization events these events will, because we added a Google Analytics ID in the setup as explained in article 1, be tracked directly in Google and the data are readily available.

In this simple example, fairly trivial, but still valuable data are delivered in Google Analytics. What is delivered to Google Analytics can be customised in Uniform Optimize' tracker.

Navigating back to the frontpage of the website, we are now presented with a different message then what we originally saw, coming to the website.

Because we send a behavior signal about being interested in Developer content, we are now presented content specific to the Developer audience.

It is fairly obvious to see that the hero banner has changed to something that is targeted specifically to the Developer audience on the conference. What is less obvious is that the list of talks are also personalized now. It is also showing the developer relevant talks.

Am I now stuck and forever targeted as a Developer?

Absolutely not....There are multiple ways in which this can change.

Firstly, if I start to show a different intent Uniform Optimize will notice that and you will gradually display a different intent. The speed at which this might change, is dependant on what you do in the website, and the weight different signals configured in the system has towards one another.

Let's take a look at that in practice.

To start the journey towards the Marketer intent, I have to behave differently. I start by navigating to the "For Marketers" page on the website.

In the background Uniform Optimize notice that something happens. I now trigger a signal towards the Marketer Intent, and immediately after landing on the Marketer page I navigate back to front page and notice that......WHAT - nothing has changed???

Or has it - look again!!

The list of talks has changed! Uniform Optimize has noticed that there are traces of both the Developer intent AND the Marketer intent. Which is why the talk list is now mixed between what is believed to be relevant for both audiences, but also has content for the individual audiences as well.

The hero has NOT changed, as the strength of the new Marketer intent, is not yet strong enough to trigger a change in the hero banner.

Let's be more expressive and navigate to the "For Marketers" page again and immediately back to the front page again to see what happens then.

Now, we see that the hero banner has been changed to display content relevant to the Markter audience and the list of talks has also been made more relevant for Marketers. Because the visit previously indicated a Developer interest, the talk that is deemed relevant for both audiences are still kept at the front of the list. A different path through the journey could trigger a different view of the list of talks.

That concludes the behavioural part of the personalization journey on the demo website.

In the next article we will dive into details of how we work with behaviour and configuration of intents and signals in Uniform Optimize to enable what we have just gone through.

The 2 other scenarios for personalization enabled on the demo site are respectively based on cookie and query string personalization. They are activated by clicking through "Registration" and/or "Campaign".

Between each scenario or, at any time you deem relevant, press "Forget me" in the top right corner to reset all scenarios and clear the tracker to start over again!

The "Registration" journey shows how personalization can be based on a cookie and will trigger this hero banner.

In the next article we will dive into details of how cookie based personalization works and how to configure intents and signals in Uniform Optimize to enable this type of personalization.

The last scenario are triggered by visiting the front page with a UTM code. It can be done by pressing "Campaign". The hero will change to this.

If, in between scenarios, you have not pressed "Forget me" you will not always see the personalized content as signals has different strengths and does not necessarily overwrite each other.

This is a topic we will look at as well in the next article, in which we also dive into details of how UTM based personalization works and how to configure intents and signals in Uniform Optimize to enable this type of personalization.

For all the shown types of personalization, we will also in the next article look at how it is setup in Contentful and applied to content on the platform.

All you have seen in these articles are part of the free version of Uniform Optimize and the free Community edition of Contentful and the free version of Netlify.

Until next article, thank you for reading.

Any questions, comments etc. are welcome on bennich@uniform.dev