What is web personalization?
Web personalization is a strategy, a marketing tool, and an art. Personalization requires implicitly or explicitly collecting visitor information and leveraging that knowledge in your content delivery framework to manipulate what information you present to your users and how you present it. Correctly executed, personalization of the visitor’s experience makes his time on your site, or in your application, more productive and engaging. Personalization can also be valuable to you and your organization, because it drives desired business results such as increasing visitor response or promoting customer retention. Unfortunately, personalization for its own sake has the potential to increase the complexity of your site interface and drive inefficiency into your architecture. It might even compromise the effectiveness of your marketing message or, worse, impair the user’s experience. Few businesses are willing to sacrifice their core message for the sake of a few trick web pages. Contrary to