Introducing new developer-friendly pricing
Hey there, developers! At Algolia, we believe everyone should have the opportunity to bring a best-in-class search experience ...
VP of Product Growth
Hey there, developers! At Algolia, we believe everyone should have the opportunity to bring a best-in-class search experience ...
VP of Product Growth
Eye-catching mannequins. Bright, colorful signage. Soothing interior design. Exquisite product displays. In short, amazing store merchandising. For shoppers in ...
Search and Discovery writer
Ingesting data should be easy, but all too often, it can be anything but. Data can come in many different ...
Staff Product Manager, Data Connectivity
Everyday there are new messages in the market about what technology to buy, how to position your company against the ...
Chief Strategic Business Development Officer
Done any shopping on an ecommerce website lately? If so, you know a smooth online shopper experience is not optional ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
It’s hard to imagine having to think about Black Friday less than 4 months out from the previous one ...
Chief Strategic Business Development Officer
What happens if an online shopper arrives on your ecommerce site and: Your navigation provides no obvious or helpful direction ...
Search and Discovery writer
In part 1 of this blog-post series, we looked at app interface design obstacles in the mobile search experience ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
In part 1 of this series on mobile UX design, we talked about how designing a successful search user experience ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Welcome to our three-part series on creating winning search UX design for your mobile app! This post identifies developer ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
National No Code Day falls on March 11th in the United States to encourage more people to build things online ...
Consulting powerhouse McKinsey is bullish on AI. Their forecasting estimates that AI could add around 16 percent to global GDP ...
Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia
How do you sell a product when your customers can’t assess it in person: pick it up, feel what ...
Search and Discovery writer
It is clear that for online businesses and especially for Marketplaces, content discovery can be especially challenging due to the ...
Chief Product Officer
This 2-part feature dives into the transformational journey made by digital merchandising to drive positive ecommerce experiences. Part 1 ...
Director of Product Marketing, Ecommerce
A social media user is shown snapshots of people he may know based on face-recognition technology and asked if ...
Search and Discovery writer
How’s your company’s organizational knowledge holding up? In other words, if an employee were to leave, would they ...
Search and Discovery writer
Recommendations can make or break an online shopping experience. In a world full of endless choices and infinite scrolling, recommendations ...
Oct 1st 2019 ux
Today, everybody agrees on the positive impact of personalization, for consumers and businesses alike. From simple demographic based website personalization to comprehensive behavioral based multichannel personalization, every step towards a more personalized experience is a step in the good direction.
Having said that, how do you do personalization right? Which strategy is the right one for your audience and your business? What is the line between a creepy personalization and a personalization that really enhances the experience — and serves your bottomline?
This past July, we announced Algolia Summer ‘19 feature launch, enabling businesses of all sizes to deliver fast, tailored and personalized experiences across any channel.
Today, as we unveil the General Availability of our Personalization Simulator, we’d like to double down on the importance of total visibility and control of your personalization strategy.
Personalization done wrong is worse than no personalization at all. Poor implementation has the potential to annul every uplift brought by personalization. Or even worse, damage the experience and drive your users and shoppers away from your brand. Here are key pitfalls to watch out for.
Unfortunately, the complexity doesn’t stop here.
As Jay Baer puts it, “[…] we cannot ever forget that our audiences—not us—are those that decide what is satisfying and what is creepy. They decide what is clever and what is stupid. They decide what is in bounds and what is out of bounds.”
You won’t be able to quickly assess the behavior of your personalization, nor optimize it, if you have no visibility on the logic behind it. Of course you will probably A/B test a personalized vs. non-personalized experience before rolling out your personalization to all your digital properties and all your traffic. But you’ll still be exposing a potentially broken experience to part of your traffic for several business cycles, and losing those users, as well as wasting this time before iterating.
Giving the keys of a core element of your user experience to a black box has its downsides even when it works well. You won’t be able to know why your personalization strategy is performing well, and to apply those learnings to other parts of your experience, or your business altogether. Visibility of the personalization logic is therefore critical.
Visibility unlocks even more value when you can act upon your learning, and define this personalization logic. Like in any conversation, context matters. Instead of blindly applying a personalization algorithm built for any business, control on the personalization logic allows you to adapt it to your business and your audience. If you know that a visit to a product page is less important than an “add to cart”, or that an interest in a brand is more meaningful than an interest in a color, you should be able to apply it to your personalization.
Personalization is key in every part of the user experience, and we believe it is especially true for search and discovery. Search and discovery are where consumers will most clearly state their intent. Answering them with irrelevant, non-personalized content is not an option.
At Algolia, we believe that our customers should have full visibility and control over the search and discovery experience they build for their business, and their audience. We enable our customers to combine their knowledge, the data we surface to them, and our algorithms in order to achieve best results. And it is with this mindset that we’ve built our personalization.
Algolia Personalization Simulator is the human-facing side of our personalization engine.
Control:
Visibility:
Transparency:
Let’s look at a real life use case of this new tool. A large luxury fashion marketplace in Europe is using Algolia to power their search and discovery experience.
Given the breadth of their catalog (~1M items), it’s reasonable to think that all their shoppers aren’t looking for the same items. So,they decided to offer their shoppers a personalized experience — one that made sense for their audience, business and catalog.
Their business is unique which is why the ability to control the personalization logic matters hugely. For instance, people clicking on very high-end handbags might just want to have a look at them and not actually buy them. Therefore, the ability to tell Algolia that an add to cart or add to wishlist is a way more important event to consider than a simple click on an item is critical.
In addition, they’ve seen that shoppers tend to buy items from the same brand, while the color for instance isn’t that important. That’s why they decided to optimize the personalization logic to show their shoppers items of the brands they interact with the most in priority. A black box personalization tool that optimized for criteria that didn’t make sense for them wouldn’t have been productive.
Personalization is only the cherry on the cake of a great experience. We have more tips and best practices for your multi-channel experiences. Watch our Algolia Summer ‘19 webinar on demand to learn how to create amazing, personalized experiences across platforms.
And if you prefer a personal tour, we’ll gladly connect you to a search specialist. If you’d like to speak to a search specialist. Meanwhile, we’d love to hear your personalization tips. Leave a comment or tweet to us.
Tips and checklist tactics you still have time to implement.
Powered by Algolia Recommend