Written by: Rashmi
Gone are the days when publishers served one-size-fits-all content to their readers. If you are a publisher who is planning to shift to the digital space, you cannot afford to ignore content personalization. In this article, we are going to cover the basics of content personalization – what it is, what are its benefits, and how to select the apt tool.
Every internet user has encountered content recommendation and personalization in some shape or form. From e-commerce websites to news platforms, every website that delivers content uses it.
The most common use cases of content recommendation and personalization are seen as the “You may be interested in” or “Recommended for you” section.
This personalization and recommendation are done with the help of data collection and analysis. The more data you have, the better you can cater the content to your users.
The terms content recommendation and content personalization are often used interchangeably, but their meaning is different. You can choose either one or both of these forms of content catering.
Content personalization includes collecting the personal data of the individual user and then catering content according to it.
Content recommendation, on the other hand, is collecting the data of users as a whole and then recommending content. Content recommendation collects data anonymously and is hence considered data-privacy friendly.
Content Discovery:
Most of the time, a new reader will come on your website either through social media or a search engine. The reader who comes through these channels probably would not know what kind of content your website serves or what content they are interested in. Content recommendations come into the picture here and recommend the reader a list of articles that are trending.
Personalization:
After a reader has visited your website 3-4 times or she has visited 2-3 pages in a single visit, you will have enough data to personalize the content. For example, if a reader is engaged in long-form feature articles, the chances are high that she will buy your subscription. After collecting and analyzing the data, the recommendation machine will automatically generate the relevant content/CTA or even the navigational menu.
Boosted Revenue:
Publishers have found that recommended content has a higher CTR than generic content. As a business, you can mix the high CTR with advertisement to boost your revenue. As we mentioned earlier, you can also place subscription CTAs, and even donation buttons according to data analyzed by the recommendation machine.
Increased Reader Loyalty
Better engagement does not translate to just high revenues. It also increases the loyalty of your readers towards your brand. When readers get their preferred content every time they visit your website, it will boost the image of your brand, and hence increase loyalty.
Selecting The Best Tool:
The benefits of using content recommendations and personalization are many, but to reap them, you need to have the right tools at your service.
Here are some questions you need to keep in mind to decide which tool is the best for your business:
What type of data does the tool capture? Is it enough for my business needs?
What amount of manual work will I have to do for content personalization? Preferably, the tool should use the latest tech so that the manual work can be minimalized.
Can the tools handle large amounts of data? If your website sees a surge of visitors, the tool should still be able to do its work.
At Quintype, we offer a CMS with inbuilt features for content recommendation and personalization. Our CMS uses an AI-driven prediction engine called WRU.ai that is capable of scourging through large amounts of data to find the reading patterns of your website users. Its NLP algorithms analyze the captured user data and serve customized content according to it.