We talked about geolocation as one way to deliver personalized content. In a digital world, where time needs to travel in only one speed (fast) for users, real-time website personalization is also a very real feature used to deliver personalized, relevant web content based on a visitors actions or behaviors. If this concept is new to you or you need a refresher, we’ll go over what real-time website personalization actually is, what it does, and how it’s used.

What Real-Time Personalization Is
Real-time website personalization collects info from anonymous visitors’ IP addresses, which make up about 98 percent of your website visitor audience, and categorizes them based on demographics (industry, behavior, preferences) so that images, text and content can be properly adjusted to personally apply to them when they land on your website and return for multiple visits.

Think Amazon as the OG in ultra-satisfied personalized digital experiences. Thanks to this marketing giant, site users now have come to expect more.

More detailed real-time data variables for each particular user can include location, device, search keywords, customer history (date/time), sessions behavior (referring pages, click path) and more. Online traffic is heavy nowadays and competition is fierce, so real-time website personalization and presenting the most relevant content will give you that edge towards engaging your website users.

What Real-Time Personalization Does
Real-time personalization can potentially boost your sales pipeline. In fact, personalized recommendations, offers, and content based on a user’s past history is shown to increase conversion rates by 353%. If that’s not enough, businesses that take advantage of real-time data report a 49% higher revenue growth and 30% higher ROI than those who don’t.

How? As a user interacts with your site each time, his or her profile is updated with data based on their behaviors. With this predictive personalization technique, you can adjust and tweak rules to make each individual user’s experience uniquely relevant.

How We Use It
The power of time-based personalization is the ability to speak directly to your site users’ needs and wants. Here’s how:

Where are your users? Real-time personalization can change the language, currency and other location-specific content based on each visitor’s history.

What are they searching? Each time a visitor searches for something on your site, you can use that info to customize content they’ll find more interesting and useful on each return visit. You can even use keywords they enter into search engines to aid in more specific content, as related to the keyword.

What are their habits? Based on real-time preference data and visitor profiles, you can even guide users toward a specific homepage. First-time users could experience customized content, including a welcome banner and personalized introductory message, key points of engagement (pop-ups), while repeat users will feel special with a targeted offer for a related product, exclusive loyalty reward, unique call to action, and more, to prove you didn’t forget their past time spent on your site. Real-time personalization can transform your repeat visitors into a loyal brand advocate.

Acquia Lift is one personalization provider we utilize that works across any content management system and conveniently connects content with the collected customer data. Acquia easily integrates with technologies and infrastructure to scale with a wide variety of websites.

If you’d like to discuss how we can apply the benefits of real-time personalization to your website, contact us today.