How easily do manage to keep your balance “surfing” on the huge wave of personalized content these days? The wave of delivering only user experiences personalized to the slightest details which, on many competitive websites, has even turned into hyper-personalization? Do you find it easy, as a Drupal developer, to play the role of a private eye “spying” on your website's visitors? Creating user personas based on their top interests, anticipated needs, preferences, demographics and... on a whole lot of other critical data that help you tailor your Drupal site's content?
Personalization this, personalization that... We can easily state that it's the “hyper-personalization era” of the digital world that we're living in these days.
Big “players” of the the online arena are all competing for delivering perfect-fit instead of one-size-fits-all type of customer experiences to their audiences. Therefore, the question of “Is it worth investing time and other resources in personalizing my Drupal website's content?” has turned into “How can I efficiently personalize content on my site?”
“What tools are there available for me to add to my “arsenal” in order to streamline my efforts for creating personalized content?”
All companies (excepting those still living in the past) are personalizing content on their websites. Yet, it's those that manage to do it time-efficiently that will manage to stand out. And being efficient in this “marathon” sure means collecting all the key user data quick and easy.
And here is where Drupal comes in to give you a major boost!
With its 6 modules (at least) aimed at helping you to quickly identify your website users' preferences and interests, it delivers you the right “fuel” to power your content personalization strategy with.
Here they are, these “star” modules of today's post, in no particular order:
1. Fivestar Recommender
The first Drupal module on my list is, in fact, a “multiple modules all in one” type of “tool”. This “cluster” of modules helps you deliver your personalized content in the form of personalized recommendations for your site visitors.
Fivestar Recommender incorporates modules such as Voting API, the Fivestar voting module etc. and what it does actually is providing your visitors with 2 types of views :
- “Recommendations for you”- or “personal recommendation” type of view, which recommends a new specific node to each user, adjusted to his/her own previous votes for different products
- “Users who liked this also liked”- provides a list of nodes/products having similar Fivestar rating results given by other users on your website
2. Commerce Recommender, A Key Tool for Creating Personalized Content
The Commerce recorder module is “kindred” with Fivestar Recommender. Just that it doesn't help you craft your customized recommendations based on voting results, but on users' purchasing histories.
Here's how it works: once a user selects a certain product on your website (needless to add that all these 6 modules “work at full power” in the context of e-commerce Drupal websites) he/she will automatically get one of the 2 following default views. Which, moreover, you can easily adjust to meet your company's specific marketing needs:
- “Users who ordered this product also ordered”: where, as you can easily “guess”, our hypothetical visitor on your site gets a list of product recommendations based on what products other users who bought this particular item, as well, have purchased
- “Recommendations for you”- which “tempts” our given visitor with a list of other products he might be interested in, based exclusively on his own particular purchasing history.
In a nutshell: this module not only that helps you deliver 100% personalized content for your visitors, it also helps you “enrich” (and therefore prolong) their shopping journeys on your website with “alternatives”.
It's also a clever means for you to ensure their future visits on your Drupal site, based on those specific recommendations/new temptations that you will have brought to their attention.
3. Browsing History Recommender
So, we've had content, in the format of recommendations, “tailored” by voting results and by purchasing history. Now it's only logical that we tackled a module helping you customize your site's content based on your visitors' browsing history, too, right?
Well, meet the Browsing History Recommender: your tool for crafting content recommendations based on your users' browsing histories. A fully customizable module, in fact.
It provides you with two types of recommendations that you could display on your website each time your visitors search for one of your products:
- “Users who browsed this node also browsed”: which will get displayed on every node's page and which, as you can easily tell, is the same for multiple users
- “Recommended for you”: displayed separately to each visitor and based on his/her own specific browsing history
4. Personalize
This module takes content personalization to a whole new level!
Powered by its machine learning algorithms, APIs and extendable plugins, it will help you deliver the perfect-fit personalized content to the right visitors (both known and anonymous) at the right time.
Basically, it collects and “exploits” all the relevant data creating the user's context and delivers content according to that context.
And such an accurate, multi-leveled process of personalization engages 5 key factors:
- decision agents: the ones determining which pieces of content will be displayed to which visitors. You're free to go for a third-party decision agent of your choice, for this module's built-in decision-making functionality itself or for Acquia Lift service
- option sets: collections of content pieces for decision agents to scan through and select from
- executors: they display options selected from the option set and which are initially hidden
- goals: the actions that users carry out on your Drupal website and which can easily get regarded as criteria for evaluating each option's performance; it's based on these goals/criteria that the machine learning services can determine visitors' preferences by in order to select the right content options from the option set
- visitor context: relevant user data that decision agents can use for making their decisions (“matching” each content fragment with its due visitor)
5. Context: Menu Block
And why shouldn't you let yourself “get carried away” by the wave of content hyper-personalization and get the content on your menus (and on other navigational structures, too) user-customized, as well?
This module here, teamed up with the Context module (which, as its name suggests it, provides it with the right contexts to adjust the content on your site with), enables you to personalize the content in your menus based on user roles, types and on any other given context.
6. Personalization
First of all, allow me to make this key specification: this module, although it can work wonders on small sites, too, unleashes its true potential on large-scale websites. On heavy-content Drupal sites.
This being said, let's find out how it can manage to personalize such heavy loads of content!
The answer is apparently simple: “based on visitors' interests, that get identified by their browsing histories, and based on geolocation”.
Here are the 3 main components involved in the process of content personalization in case of this module:
- geolocation: with the help of HTML5 location API or based on their IP addresses themselves, your website's visitors get easily located
- taxonomy: the module performs a keywords (either from Drupal, Google or Bing)- taxonomy terms matching
- search: once the longitude and latitude get determined, the module provides the nearest term from the vocabulary for locations based on your visitors' actions on your website
Putting together geolocation data with browsing history-related data, the Personalization module delivers you the “ultra” personalized content to meet your visitor's expectations with (since they do expect you to welcome them on your website with a perfectly tailored user experience, you know)
And it looks like this has been the last module on my list. Have you already used any of them for powering your digital marketing strategy with?