Clickability Patents More Website Personalization Capabilities

Clickability has a personalization and targeting solution called Website Marketing Acceleration (WMA). It’s similar to other personalization offerings from other content management/customer experience vendors, in that allows marketers to offer a more personalized view of the website based on the visitor profile. Marketers can segment visitors, set up profiles and track those profiles through the buying stages, and do lead scoring. It also provides information related to who website visitors, where they came from, what they did on the site, etc..  Some of this is standard functionality for web content management vendors (although often implemented in different ways and at different levels).

This week Clickability has patented more of the capabilities within the WMA solution (I say more because it had already patented some of the functionality – see below). This new patent: 8,626,913 relates to WMA’s ability to test its personalization and targeting features without introducing test data into marketing analytics. Essentially you can set up and run your tests, and then mark the test accounts as “test” and the data related to these accounts will not be included in any marketing analytics reporting.

Here is what the patent says specifically:

A method of analyzing website nurturing data while compensating for test visitor profiles may include tracking interactions between visitors and the website including test visitors, and computing a score for each of the visitors based on the interactions. The method may also include storing the score for each of the visitors in visitor profiles, where test visitor profiles correspond to the test visitors. The method may additionally include assigning a discrete profile state to each of the plurality of visitor profiles from a hierarchy of profile states based at least in part on the corresponding score, and storing a test indicator in each of the test visitor profiles. The method may further include computing reporting data based on the plurality of visitor profiles, where the one or more test visitor profiles are excluded at least in part from the reporting data.

Patents Aside, the Feature is A Good Idea

The ability to test your personalization set up is pretty important. You think you have your segments defined properly, have your rules in place, but until you can test them properly in a live setting you can’t be completely sure. I’ve seen the ability to test personalization in a few content management solutions, so this itself is not the interesting part. What’s interesting is that your tests can have effect on your analytic reports, on searches made on your website and potentially on how other visitors are segmented and profiled, assuming the testing in done in the production environment, which is often the case.

The ability to mark test accounts as tests so they don’t show up in live production data is really good to see. Are there other solutions out there that offer the same capability? Let me know in the comments and we’ll see how the options compare.

Other Key Features of WMA

Another interesting feature in Clickability’s WMA solution is the progressive profiling tightly tied to the content being consumed. Many marketing automation solutions offer progressive profiling where they ask for more information from a visitor each time they visit and either attempt to get access to a secure resource or download a resource. With Clickability, the type of information requested at each successive visit is tied to the type of content the visitor has accessed before and is trying to reach.

WMA also supports the creation of a Resource Portfolio for a visitor to save content, which is good if the visitor is collecting a lot of information for research and wants a place to keep it other than their desktop. Marketers are also able to drop things into the portfolio they think might be of interest to the visitor.

WMA vs Marketing Automation

According to Clickability, its WMA solution and marketing automation solutions are complimentary offering some of the same capabilities, but not all. WMA offers the progressive profiling, the resource portfolio, lead scoring and the mapping of visitor interests and demographics to website content – all things you don’t see in a standalone marketing automation solution. As the data captured from WMA can be imported into a marketing automation solution for use as well.

Overall, the Website Marketing Acceleration offering is something most marketers will want to use if they have Clickability. A website that is not personalized to the visitor is a website that will become lonely.

Clickability’s Other Personlization Patents

This is not the first patent Clickability has for it’s WMA solution. It also has the following patents:

• Patents 8,478,868 and 8,307,081 – these are for analytics capabilities that track visitors through profile levels, backwards and forwards. They also include insights on new visitors that map to a profile level and track how many visitors seem “stuck” at the same profile level.
• Patent 8,326,964  – covers creating the profile levels used above and enables marketers to gate content at specific levels.

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