Coveo For Personalization

What Is Coveo?

We at Fishtank talk about Coveo a lot. So although you may have an understanding of what Coveo is or does, let’s highlight some of its functionality:

• Index content from multiple sources whether this is your CMS, a network file share, or other source of content.
• Provide users with recommendations for content utilizing artificial intelligence.
• Enhanced search experience providing relevant results.
• Provide personalized content - Tell me more ;)

What Is Personalization?

Before I tell you how we have implemented Coveo for personalization let’s outline what we mean by personalization. Personalization refers to tailoring a web experience to a specific defined group of users. Multiple studies have shown that personalized content leads to more time spent on site, more conversions and customer loyalty to name a few.

There are several platforms such as Sitecore that can provide personalization in a very automated way. Automated personalization is great, however can be difficult to achieve for some organizations. Automated personalization can require a great deal of strategy, analytics and focus to achieve. Some organizations don’t have the expertise, budget or bandwidth to jump into the deep end with personalization.

Some of the common organizational challenges with implementing personalization are:

• Identifying user persona’s.
• Ensuring there is content specific to each persona.
• Configuring the system so it is aware of which content applies to which personas.
• Constantly updating this configuration with new content.
• A/B testing along with analytics to determine the right content for the right persona.

Once it is set up you can automatically provide personalized content across the website and can provide valuable analytics. However there is another way using Coveo that approaches personalization in a different way.

Coveo For Personalization

Upon reading this post are you asking yourself questions such as:

• What if I don’t have the bandwidth to create and maintain personalized content?
• What if I don’t have a system that provides personalization capabilities but do have Coveo?
• What if I want to provide users with more control over their website experience than assuming content they want to see is relevant?

This is all where Coveo comes in. One of our customers in the tourism business was facing these challenges and we were able to address them by using Coveo.

Very simply we implemented a picklist that allowed a user to self select what they we’re interested in seeing.

This picklist essentially acts as if the user had gone to search for content with a query for one of these options. Upon selection of one of the options Coveo looks for all the content it has indexed to determine what content is relevant to this query and then within a defined web component showcases this content.

This selection by the user also persists throughout the website journey while allowing the user to change their selection at any time.

Additionally within Coveo analytics you can see how many times each selection has been selected to understand which ones may be more valuable than others to drive future content strategy.

Summary

In summary Coveo is a great tool to utilize for personalization. It’s scalable, automated and requires little upfront strategy to get started. Contact us today to learn how you can leverage Coveo to personalize your web experience.