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3 primary types of data used in website personalization

Aug 07, 2018

Audience data allows us to create more personalized experiences for our audiences which leads to higher engagement, loyalty, and conversion. This video outlines the 3 primary types of data used in website personalization and provides some common use cases for each.

There are three kinds of data you can use to personalize your website: contextual, demographic and firmographic, and behavioral.

Contextual data tells you everything around the visitor that’s coming to your site: where are they, what time of day/day of week, what kind of device they’re on. Where were they before they visited your website?

Demographic and firmographic data is very different for B2C and B2B marketers. Demographic data is things like: age, gender, income, what kind of car somebody owns. Firmographic data, on the other hand, is about a company. What’s the company? What industry are they in? How much revenue do they have? How many employees do they have? Each of these help you better personalize your site.

The last category, behavioral, tells you about what somebody’s been doing before, which can help you better personalize later. For example, they might have visited a certain section of your site multiple times, telling you about something they’re interested in or what segment of your customer base they are.

They may have also purchased things before, which might make it easy for you to suggest to them cross-sell or upsell on complimentary products.

Another dimension to consider as you think about these three types of data is whether you have them yourself, which is often called first-party data, or you’re gonna go buy them from somebody else, often called third-party data.

Our hope is that using contextual, demographic and firmographic, and behavioral data help you better personalize your site and drive more revenue today.