Opinion: Magic of personalised content

There are a staggering 1.12 billion websites worldwide but about 50% of the content on even the most popular sites remains unread

By Bhargav Reddy P

Here’s something that is all too familiar. You log in to your favourite site — say Instagram or a news site. You scroll through a few posts or read some articles. Then, almost instantaneously, you are presented with a steady stream of content that you cannot ignore. By the time you realise that you have spent more time on the site than you intended to, you will have walked along a carefully paved path strewn with links that piqued your interest. All of this is by design.

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Most sites today track your interests and serve you content that enables them to keep you on their platform for hours. There are a staggering 1.12 billion websites worldwide. But, about 50% of the content on even the most popular sites remains unread. Forget humans, managing and ingesting all this content is straining the resources of even the largest tech companies. With such overwhelming content, sites need to prioritise what they show to users in a way that maximises engagement and consequently revenue.

Jeff Hammerbacher, a tech entrepreneur, once lamented that “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads”. But, most sites are free and advertising is their only source of revenue. Showing people content they love to increase the odds of them clicking on ads is, therefore, an existential challenge. The ads themselves are targeted. Such personalisation is table stakes in today’s world, which is why every platform has an army of engineers and data scientists whose responsibility it is to make the most of our scarce attention. They do this by curating content experiences that resonate with our interests, ultimately making us want to come back for more.
If you ever wondered how they do it, here’s a glimpse of the magic behind the scenes.

Serving Content

For any platform, the chief problem of our times is to surface the most relevant information for users with an astonishing diversity of interests. So, digital platforms employ sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to analyse vast amounts of data about our preferences, behaviours and interactions. By tracking our clicks, likes, shares, and even the time we spend on different types of content, they gain valuable insights into our interests. Armed with this knowledge, they employ powerful recommendation systems to deliver personalised content that captures our attention and keeps us hooked. The platforms achieve this by focusing on three key areas:
* Personalisation: Delivering personalised content tailored to user preferences by leveraging user data, including browsing history, demographics, and engagement patterns.
* User Experience: Creating an enjoyable user experience with intuitive navigation and mobile optimisation to ensure users can easily access their preferred content across devices.
* Content Quality: Investing in well-researched articles, informative videos, riveting images, engaging storytelling — and regularly refreshing content based on user engagement.

To underpin this agility, companies rely on products that come equipped with this functionality. Adobe Experience Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are two popular products. For budget-strapped businesses, the Google Marketing Platform offers most of this functionality on a generous free tier.

In my experience as a Customer Experience Architect at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, I have seen how quickly engagement can be enhanced by such tools. The company wanted to convert more visitors into buyers. Recognising the importance of delivering tailored content, we partnered with Adobe’s content personalisation tool. We analysed user data to generate personalised recommendations based on engagement patterns. The impact was remarkable. Users who received such recommendations reported higher satisfaction, spent more time on our website, and showed increased click-through rates, longer session durations and more social media shares.

Interaction Influence

Our interactions determine not only what is shown to us, but also what is created in the first place. Data on our collective engagement is used by savvy content producers to make more of what’s selling. The new generation of content producers is adapting to user preferences at mind-reeling speed. Did you ever wonder why a certain web series was discontinued? Poor user reception could have been the most likely prospect. The ability of companies to mine user data and incentivise producers to create content that will find interested audiences eliminates much of the waste. In that sense, it is a win-win for everyone.

As a first-time home buyer in California some years ago, I have been a beneficiary of data-driven recommendations on real estate platforms. With my offline efforts to zero in on a property not going well, I wanted to check out some platforms. Over a long weekend, I scoured these platforms, fine-tuning my search by adding one variable after another — the price point, location, government incentives etc. Over time, I have seen the platform suggest properties outside the areas that I was looking for. Eventually, we decided on buying one of the recommended places. The process was unintrusive, convenient, and we could see with time how the platform got better at understanding our requirements.

Creating and distributing content is relatively easy these days. The true challenge lies in prioritising and creating tailored experiences that resonate with audiences. Fortunately, with the emergence of sophisticated tools, this process has become accessible to any platform. So, the next time you log in to your favourite site, take a moment to appreciate the magic behind it.