Business challenge
Content personalization. Nowadays it’s almost unthinkable to not provide to website visitors a tailored and personalized content. It’s something that greatly saves time and effort. It is something that improves sales and user experience. Usually all the commonly available data is used (location, referral, query etc.).
Our customer wanted to go much deeper of the commonly used approach. The challenge was to provide highly personalized content on real-time bases: with this approach personalization goes beyond custom tailored content to the timely served highly personalized content.
Engineered solution
Our team of experienced engineers create a highly efficient solution which consisted of three core parts:
- Front-End API JavaScript component inserted into customers web site and responsible for user profiling as well as for refined filtering of content served to a specific user;
- Back-End application Java application deployed at Google App Engine, responsible for storing and updating users’ profiles and preferences at different moments. Also this application makes the first personalization attempt which is refined by front-end api application;
- Publisher’s administrative panel The intermediate application, designed to allow publishers to modify settings of the personalization. Specifically new widgets and new content can be added here. System is designed in the way allowing to experiment with different personalization settings because it’s featured with extremely flexible reporting module with advanced reporting capabilities.
Value delivered
By deploying content personalization system Publishers get a number of benefits:
- Higher readership engagement With the versatility of the system, the engagement increase effect can be applied to multiple elements per page and throughout the site.
- Eliminate low yielding manual curation work Publishers using the system had more than 250 manually and continually curated mini teasers in the secondary column of sectional front pages. These generated less than 1% of all page views. All of them could be dynamically managed by personalization system.
- Improved user experience The increased engagement is a consequence of improved user experience. With personalization system readers will not see excessive teasers for uninteresting categories and their narrow interest preferences can be prominently featured on prime locations throughout the site.
Expertise and team
We provided tech lead, product owner back-up, front-and back-end developers.
The product team Enreach was strengthened by product owner, ux-, front-, and back-end developers from Datamart. We took a significant responsibility for functions and deadlines and we had regular contacts with the end-users to understand and improve the product. Datamart was involved in new client integrations and also provided assistance for first- and second line support.
About Enreach and our relationship
Enreach (initial brand name Adaptlogic) was founded in 2001 as a spin-off from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, with focus on large scale machine-learning profiling and prediction.
The value proposition is to give the editors a tool to control personalization of editorial and commercial content based on a balance between end-user experience and business needs. The product is delivered as a SaaS to customers such as Bonnier (dn.se, expressen.se), Schibsted (aftonbladet.se, svd.se), Sanoma (hs.fi, iltasanomat.fi), El Universal (eluniversal.com.mx) etc. Enreach grew during our collaboration from 2 to 20 employees, recognized as one of the global leading providers of personalization platforms.
We started to work together in 2008. The CTO Dr Erik Wallin had evaluated different technology partners around the globe to build the new cloud-based version of the platform. Enreach was looking for an agile and proactive partner with great skills in Java, real-time online analytics, cloud computing experience to meet the high expectations from leading publishers like Schibsted and Sanoma.
Over the years, the cooperation intensified and we became an integrated part of the development team.