How to deliver personalized content when you don’t know your user

Business leaders have long viewed personalization as the ultimate way to optimize customer experience. By capturing customer data and mining it for insights into the customer’s interests, organizations can deliver more relevant digital experiences. At least in theory. Practice, however, has revealed that it’s not always easy to identify who is visiting your website and hone the experience for them. Customers don’t usually log in when they’re web browsing, especially not in retail. The loss of third-party cookies now makes it hard to recognize repeat visitors when they return.

Despite those challenges, there are still ways to make web experiences more relevant, if not personal, with the Persado Contextual Adaptive Algorithm.

What is Persado’s Contextual Adaptive Algorithm?

This is the next evolution of our Adaptive Algorithm capability, Persado’s version of a “multi-arm bandit”. This capability ensures that when we test variants of the same message, we can accurately capture the one combination that will produce the highest performance. Our Adaptive Algorithm does that by pushing higher-performing variants preferentially to users based on what the technology predicts will perform, and adjusting the traffic flow if another variant starts to creep up the ranks. In that way, our technology ensures that the highest performers are winning on their own merits and not due to some external factor unrelated to the message itself.

Persado launched its Adaptive Algorithm in 2019. Building on that technology, our latest release improves on the original by adding contextual elements. Specifically, we can now capture anonymized data about visitors, such as geographic location, device type and browser type, and track patterns about who tends to respond to which message variant. Persado can then preferentially serve variants that perform better for people with given contextual attributes. Though it’s not as precise as more robust personalization, the contextual algorithm allows Persado to deliver a more relevant experience – without having to leverage first-party data that traditionally powers personalization.

Persado has been testing and adapting the new conceptual adaptive algorithm using our own website as the test case. The capability is also available for any customers who would like to be among the first users. Reach out to us today to learn more.