Automated Recommendations — Not Just for Products Anymore

More and more publishers, lead gen sites, or for that matter any business striving to provide relevant and helpful content to its visitors, are turning to automated recommendations. Sites looking to achieve more “stickiness”, increase page views (and therefore ad revenue) or generate subscription conversions find that by showing visitors or readers the most popular, often read or even most shared articles (through email, social media sites, etc.) they get better results — compared to those with no recommendations or manually created ones.

A little while back we deployed Omniture Recommendations on our Web site based on most popular views and downloads. As a company focused on online marketing solutions, it shouldn’t be too surprising that we use our own products as marketing tools (alright, true - lots of companies don’t, as they say, “eat their own dog food”). Our Web team does a great job of optimizing content to ensure that we’re giving Omniture.com visitors the kind of information they’re looking for. The site now recommends content like on-demand webinars and case studies.

As you can see, we’ve placed recommendations on sidebars on a variety of pages. In some cases we’re testing automated recommendations against static default content. And the automated recommendations are winning out: since deploying recommendations on Omniture.com we’ve seen 25% to 45% increases in cross-site conversions! What does this mean? It means that we’re doing a better job of connecting the right people with the right content. And for any business, this kind of relevance is vital to delivering a positive customer experience.

Next post: I’ll share some thoughts with you on how our customers are getting pretty creative when it comes to leveraging SiteCatalyst metrics to influence recommendations and optmize relevance for their customers.

• Kevin Lindsay
• 0 responses
•  Marketing Integration, Site Search, Testing and Targeting, Web analytics

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