How to Personalize Your Ecommerce Website for Anonymous Visitors

According to a study of 1000+ companies conducted by Braze, 57% of new users for the brands surveyed were anonymous. While these anonymous users are certainly a bit trickier to cater to, they represent a massive opportunity in ecommerce and digital marketing. So how do you personalize for these types of visitors, especially with the impending end of third-party cookies?

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, there are some tried-and-true steps you can take to make the process of doing so easier on yourself and your team.

Keep reading for three tips you can implement to personalize your ecommerce website for anonymous visitors.

Double Down on Zero-party Data

With the end of third-party cookies in sight, it’s time for ecommerce brands to think of new and creative ways to gather data about new site visitors. One way to do this is by thinking critically about how to gather more zero-party data, aka information that visitors proactively share with your brand. Think phone numbers and email addresses as well as information collected in customer surveys. 

Of course, when asking visitors to provide this kind of information you’ll need to avoid being creepy. Don’t ask for someone’s email address straightaway—instead, encourage them to join your newsletter that’s filled with exclusive offers! Don’t beg for an anonymous visitor’s phone number—instead, add a field to product description pages of sold-out items that visitors can use to input their phone numbers to get a text once the item is back in stock!

During a panel at eTail Palm Springs 2023, Mike DiMiele, Director of Digital Marketing at Chamberlain Group recommended incorporating technology that allows visitors to find their perfect fit on your site. Companies like Truefit and Style.me enable visitors to enter self-reported data about their height, body type, size, and much more. In addition to customizing the website experience, this zero-party data can also be useful when making other marketing and production decisions.

Apply Contextual Data

Contextual data can help you answer the following questions:

• Where is the visitor located?
• What time of the day are they visiting my brand’s site?
• What day of the week are they visiting my brand’s site?
• What kind of device are they using?

Although these questions aren’t highly personal, the answers to them can help you begin to personalize for anonymous visitors giving you a leg up on your competitors. Let’s just say via contextual data you identify that a visitor is coming to your site at noon on a Wednesday, now, what if that same visitor instead visited your site on a Sunday evening? Would their mindset and propensity to buy be the same? Simply put, no.  

People’s purchasing habits can change based on the context through which they’re viewing your site, which means when a new visitor comes to your site they should see a version that reflects their unique situation based on contextual data. Incorporate these small but promising pieces of data into your personalization strategy to begin giving anonymous users a differentiated experience.

Invest in Personalization Technology that Doesn’t Rely on Third-party Cookies

As the cookie continues to crumble, it’s imperative that you begin the process of vetting new personalization tools. The first question in your RFP should be, does your solution rely on third-party cookies? And, if the answer to this question is yes, you can easily eliminate that technology from your pool of options.

Fortunately, we know of a website personalization platform that can personalize for anonymous visitors that doesn't rely on third-party cookies! 😉


Whether you’re trying to perfect your customer experience or are just getting your ecommerce company’s website off the ground, you should be thinking about how to personalize your site for anonymous visitors. If you’re interested in learning more about how Intellimize can help you do that, book a demo.

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