A great personalized site experience is based on deep, actionable data. If you don’t fully understand a person, any personalized experience you display will miss the mark — and won’t end up being personal to that individual at all.
Many personalization solutions can only collect and act on click data alone, not actions that occur beyond a click. There are also a few vendors that can capture basic “pre-click” data, as they call it, like a mouse leaving a page, and offer a solution that enables a simple response to such behavior.
Pre-click behavior is just one aspect of what we refer to as “non-click” data. In this post, I want to explain what non-click behavioral data is, why you need it to deliver a truly personalized experience, and how Evergage as a full-featured personalization platform makes that happen.
What is non-click behavioral data?
Non-click behavioral data refers to all the data you can capture about a person’s actions on your site before and after an actual click takes place. Examples include scrolling down a web page, hovering over an image, mouse movement, the mouse leaving the page, other forms of exit intent, time on page, inactive time on page, etc. This data provides more insight into each person than clicks alone can, and it is the key to understanding two critical aspects to understanding your visitors: affinities and intent.
For example, to determine a person’s affinities, you need to know more than that he clicked on, say, three pages. You need to know that he clicked on one page and immediately clicked away, but spent several minutes actively engaging with two other pages in terms of scrolling and hovering. You need to know the context of each of those pages. If they’re product pages, you need to know what brands, colors, and price ranges those products represent. If they’re content pages you need to know what categories, keywords, and authors those pages represent. Then you need to leverage machine learning to infer what his non-click and click behaviors show about his preferences (that he likes brand X, the color blue and a low price point).
To determine a person’s intent, you need to analyze what his non-click behaviors indicate about what his next click or action will be. If he is actively engaging with one product over another, he may be intending to purchase it. Alternatively, if his mouse is quickly leaving the page, it may indicate that he is about to leave the site.
What can you do with non-click behavioral data?
The key with non-click data is not just to collect and analyze it, but to act on it in real time to capitalize on the moment.
As an example, this site provides personalized exit intent messages to its shoppers leveraging non-click data with Evergage. Not only does it recognize when an engaged visitor is about to leave the site in order to display a last-chance engagement a pop-up message, but it fills the pop-up with a relevant product that a visitor either left in her cart or was highly engaged with – based on non-click data. This site even takes this exit message a step further than other retailers. When it offers a special promotion to visitors, it carries that message throughout the site to remind shoppers of their additional purchase incentive and includes a timer to create urgency.
Although this is a retail-focused example, understanding non-click behavior has universal applications across industries. Evergage customers in the financial services, insurance, technology, travel and gaming industries are seeing great results by utilizing non-click data to deliver truly personalized experiences.
Final Thoughts
Only a robust personalization solution like Evergage can track both click and non-click data, combine it with other sources of data, analyze it to determine the most relevant experience for a visitor, and then display that experience all in under 20 milliseconds.
If you’re in the process of analyzing personalization vendors, make sure you evaluate all the behavioral data your prospective vendors can collect, analyze and act on — and what they really mean by real-time. And, if you are looking to act on non-click behavioral data, make sure you don’t buy a point solution that is a one-trick pony. Look for a full-featured personalization platform that incorporates non-click data and instant response together with testing, targeting, and algorithmic recommendations – and does so across channels. Remember, when it comes to delivering great customer experiences, it’s about affinities and intent, not clicks!
