Knowing something about the web user is at the heart of online personalization…it’s about targeting the right content to the right person at the right time… and to do that you need to understand the user’s intent. Here at ATG, we’re passionate about personalization and treating online shoppers uniquely and individually based on who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish. Well, it looks like Google has joined our personalization party. Based on some articles and blog posts I’ve recently read, Google is clearly rallying around the use of personalization to better target both ads and search results.

I thought this Google quote from a recent Financial Times article stated the challenge in making an online experience more relevant and hence more useful:

“We cannot even answer the most basic questions because we don’t know enough about you. That is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.”

The article goes on to state… The race to accumulate the most comprehensive database of individual information has become the new battleground for search engines as it will allow the industry to offer far more personalised advertisements.

Wow… we have a race to know as much about me as possible. That’s a little eerie and big brotherish. But I’m not sure I mind if you make my life easier. What’s at stake? Plenty for the Google advertiser. After all, more relevant ads mean more effective adword campaigns and better ROI on marketing investments.

What’s in it for the consumer? That’s a little more controversial. The hope is that Google, by using past end users online behavior and preference data, will improve relevancy of the search results and content presented for consumers. In other words, we find what we’re looking for more often and more quickly. Some fear there’s a privacy issue in storing all the personal information to accomplish this. I’m less concerned about that… I’m comfortable that Google’s data will not be shared outside of Google and that it is secure. What I wonder is if Google can really “guess” at what I’m searching for and return content that makes more sense based on the past keywords I’ve typed. I can see frequent cases where past keywords might not even be relative to the search at hand and in some cases make the results worse. In fact, I would argue that the Google user, and users of search in general, have become very savvy at typing in the right combination of keywords and are more likely to get more relative responses if they’re totally in command. Time will tell.

Bottom line, there are limits to how far online personalization could go and should go… The answer may lie somewhere in the middle of using past behavior and current intent. Personalization technology is more powerful if it uses both implicit and explicit criteria to target content. But the key is balancing what the customer tells you to purposefully use vs. using some artificial intelligence to return the “right” content. If you’re implementing personalization on your eCommerce site, be careful to understand the user’s intent when you create rules to target your content. Past historical data can be a good indicator, but it’s not always relative to the search at hand, or in the eCommerce case, the purchase at hand.

Technorati Tags: Google, personalization, privacy