Machine Learning Personalization: In Action

Evergage can be used to recommend many different kinds of assets. The biggest distinction is product versus content. We’re fully able to understand and give personalized experiences across product and content. But much more than that, we can personalize at every level of the hierarchy of your site. So, think about a product site. You’re going to have products, you’re going to have brands, you’re going to have all sorts of classifications of those products: price ranges, attributes of them, categories. All of this we can understand and personalize at that level so we can recommend products to you. We can recommend categories, brands, etc. Similarly with content, that content’s going to be classified with different descriptors, keywords, different authors, different categories that it’s in. Same thing, Evergage can recommend the content, but we can also say, “Here’s relevant categories that you might be interested in, or keywords, or authors that you should read.”

The significance of being able to do this – being able to recommend a category or a brand or a keyword – is that you can personalize more of the experience. If the only thing that you can recommend is at the product level, then you can only show people products. But I might not necessarily be interested in a product. I’m not sure what product I’m interested in. But I am interested in that category of products, so bring that to my attention. Let me navigate there; put that on my homepage to capture my attention. Don’t show me just one product, show me that category. Likewise, on a content kind of experience, or a B2B website, if all I can show you is an article, am I going to cover my homepage in articles? That’s not very helpful to me. But if on my homepage I can talk about industries or show logos of different customers that the company has, or talk about keywords that might be of interest to me, you can drive me to the experience at the level that’s right to me, not dropping all the way down to an article that I may or may not be interested in.

Let’s talk about the convergence of content in commerce. One example would be if you’re a large retailer, and you have a lot of content, for instance, on how to remodel your home. And people are coming from Google, being driven in and reading about that. I’m remodeling my kitchen, let’s say, and they start reading about that. But you also have products you want to sell them to help them in remodeling their home, to actually use. You want to have an understanding, across the products and the content, to say, “All of this is related to remodeling the home, remodeling the kitchen, particular aspects of remodeling the kitchen.” So, as they’re reading about that content, you can know which products to serve them, and serve them up. And vice versa. As they’re in products that relate to remodeling the kitchen, you can bring helpful content to drive value and service to that customer. So, you want to bring those two together, and Evergage can do that: understanding across what’s happening the commerce and content, and then leveraging that understanding to give the right personalized experience that combines showing them content and commerce.

And so as a person comes to a finance site or a B2B site, essentially they’re on a content journey, trying to find the content that’s relevant to them. The articles, even the product descriptions, all of that is content. And so, with Evergage’s personalization, we first understand all of that content and all of its context, we understand each person’s interaction with it (or each company’s), and we combine those two together and say, “Here’s the right piece of content for you in this moment, wherever you are on that journey.”