Definitive guide-to-web-personalization-marketo

THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO
WEB PERSONALIZATION
Everyone is one in a million

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Table of Contents
Introduction
What is Web Personalization and Why Is It important?
How Does Web Personalization Help Marketers?
Create Your Web Personalization Strategy
Integrating Cross Channel Marketing into Your Web Personalization Strategy
Create A Personalized Web Experience with Content
Testing and Optimization
Measurement
Building Your Web Personalization Team
Building Your Web Personalization Toolbox
Conclusion
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
WHY SHOULD I READ THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE
TO WEB PERSONALIZATION?
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Today, web personalization is a mission-critical
marketing activity that creates a more meaningful
experience for your customers and also generates
better business results. How? This guide will explore
that question and more.
First, let’s start with an example that
illustrates why web personalization
is a critical component of your
marketing activities:
As a marketer, chances are you are not
sending the same exact email to your
entire database, even if it is well tested
and delivers results. Your database is
comprised of multiple segments and
different types of customers. Some
people may be very new to your
product or service, while others are
long-standing customers, so sending
the same communication, offer, or
content piece to all of these folks is
not effective.
But most marketers are doing just that,
daily, on their website. They offer the
exact same experience to every visitor,
every time, regardless of their behavior
or attributes. And each month, they
do it tens of thousands of times
(sometimes much more)—as active
prospects and customers visit their site.
So, while marketers understand how
detrimental a cookie-cutter, repetitive
experience is on email—often that
thinking doesn’t extend to their
websites. And that’s a mistake when
you think about how much of their
interested audience they alienate every
day by skipping the chance to speak to
them as individuals on their website.
For a marketer whose marketing
activities drive toward key metrics—
conversion, engagement, and
increased lead generation or order
value—failing to utilize your website
in the most effective way possible
has a measurable impact. This is
because your website is the hub of
your marketing activities and web
personalization is proven to make that
hub (and all your investments that drive
your audience to it and keep them
there—from paid ads to content, etc.)
much more effective. In fact, a recent
report by VB Insight found that 87%
of companies see a lift in key metrics
(such as conversion rates, engagement
rates, and lead generation or average
order value) when they employ
personalization. Within that group, 40%
see an uplift of more than 20% in their
key metrics. Missing the opportunity to
truly connect with your buyer ultimately
means lost revenue, yet fewer than 20%
take advantage of web personalization
to improve their results.

Introduction
WHY SHOULD I READ THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE
TO WEB PERSONALIZATION?
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This fact is compounded by today’s
consumer expectation of instant
gratification and a wherever/whenever
dimension to every aspect of their
online experience. Now, more than
ever, they are better informed, more
selective, and quicker to say no. Each
day, they are bombarded with new
marketing messages, so only the most
targeted and relevant messages earn
their attention. If your website doesn’t
immediately address a buyer’s needs,
they will bounce and seek products or
information from somewhere else.
So how do you create a website that
accelerates engagement, conversion,
and retention for your prospects
and customers, and creates a more
relevant experience for your buyer?
Just like you would not send the same
email to your entire database, you
do not want one, generic message
on your website. To be effective
and relevant for every individual or
segment in your audience, you need
multiple, personalized messages.
Web personalization is a critical
component of your marketing—from
creating a great customer experience
to driving better conversions.
The goal of The Definitive Guide to
Web Personalization is to provide
a thorough overview of the web
personalization landscape for
marketers at all levels. It is meant to
be an actionable guide, so you can
learn how to create a personalization
framework for engaging your
audience more effectively—
specifically on your website.
This guide was created for
all marketers who use, or are
considering using, personalization
on their website and across their
web channels (which should be all
of you!) It is split into nine sections
created to help you understand the
ins and outs of web personalization.

Introduction
IN BRIEF
In this guide, you will learn:
1. What Web Personalization Is:
This section defines web
personalization and how you can
use it to create a dynamic, relevant
web experience for your buyers.
2. How Web Personalization
Helps Marketers:
Web personalization helps marketers
move the needle by enabling them
to deliver a continuous, personal
experience to individual visitors at
scale. Personalized experiences result
in increased brand preference and
loyalty, improved conversion rates,
and ultimately an uplift in sales.
3. How to Create a Web
Personalization Strategy:
This section will walk you through
how web personalization fits with
your overall marketing goals, your
customers’ journey, how to define
web personalization goals, examines
use cases, and helps you identify
early metrics to track.
4. How Web Personalization Fits
with Your Cross-Channel Marketing:
Marketing channels don’t operate
in silos. This section examines how
web personalization complements
your existing campaigns across
other marketing channels to create a
seamless user experience.
5. How to Select the Right Message:
Content is the key to communicating
with your audience, and it’s a critical
component of web personalization.
This section examines how to choose
and create the right content for your
web personalization activities and
where to serve it on your site.
6. Testing & Optimization:
In order to improve your web
personalization activities over time,
you need to run tests and iterate. This
section explores how to structure
your testing and highlights areas for
improvement over time.
7. How to Measure Your Web
Personalization Activities:
Metrics provide the feedback you need
to understand the success of your
web personalization activities. This
section examines the different metrics
you can use to measure success from
engagement to conversion.
8. What People You Need to
Run Web Personalization:
Like any marketing channel, web
personalization requires resources to
run it. This section explores how to
structure your resources to run web
personalization effectively, regardless
of your team size.
9. About Web Personalization Tools:
Technology makes running web
personalization possible. This
section highlights technology that
supports and integrates with web
personalization tools to make it
more effective.
Use this guide to help you get started, take your web
personalization to the next level, and drive revenue.
Mark it up, share it, and let us know what you think.

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WHAT IS WEB PERSONALIZATION
AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

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DEFINING WEB PERSONALIZATION
What Is Web Personalization and Why Is It Important?
The term “web personalization,” which we’ll use
throughout this guide, refers to creating a dynamically
personalized, highly relevant website experience
for your prospects and customers based on their
behavior, location, profile, and other attributes. Web
personalization means understanding and meeting your
buyers’ interests, tailoring your website to fit their profile,
and ultimately providing the best message, content, or
offer—one that is specifically relevant to them.
Web personalization delivers a personal
and relevant experience to your visitors
based on who they are and what
they do—whether that visitor is an
anonymous visitor, a known contact,
or a loyal customer. It focuses primarily
on your company’s website because it
serves as the activity hub and “home
base” for all web channel activities
and is the main interaction channel
between your company and your
customers, especially when it comes
to driving conversion. In fact, according
to a DemandGen report, 70% of buyers
have indicated that a vendor’s website
was the most influential channel in
making a purchase decision.
As a consumer yourself, you
have probably encountered web
personalization before. Have you ever
clicked through recommendations
on Netflix or Amazon based on your
previous selections and reviews?
These are both common examples
of personalization. Think about the
convenience of having the product or
information you need shown to you
immediately upon visiting a website.
Now, on the contrary, think about
a website that forces you to comb
through menus and pages to find
what you need. Which experience do
you prefer? Which gets your business?

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Now, let’s look at a couple of examples
of personalization from different types
of businesses. In the first example,
you can see the difference between
a Nordstrom homepage that’s
personalized based on a user’s past
purchases and searches, like tights and
headwarmers, versus the same area of
the page that is not personalized.
And then in the second example, you
can see how a B2B business uses
web personalization to target visitors
by location. In the image, you can
see the personalization that occurs
once a web personalization tool
instantly identifies the visitor’s location
and presents them with a relevant
message—in this case, to attend a
conference in their region.
Homepage without personalized recommendationsHomepage with personalized recommendations
Web personalization on the SchoolDude homepage

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WHO USES WEB
PERSONALIZATION?
Because of the complexity and
traffic volume of some websites,
marketers sometimes assume that
personalization is complicated or
time-consuming and therefore only
for organizations with big teams or
big budgets. But, with the right tools
in place, personalization can be a
simple process for all marketers that
can drastically increase the efficacy
of your website and cross-channel
marketing programs, regardless
of your organization’s size or
business type. In many cases, the
return on investment (ROI) for web
personalization, even with limited
resources, is higher than other, more
traditional, marketing programs.
WEB PERSONALIZATION IN REAL-TIME
Effective web personalization makes real-time changes to
your website based on the attributes of the visitor. These
changes that occur in milliseconds deliver a personal
experience to your visitor at the exact moment that they are
on your site.

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WHY IS WEB PERSONALIZATION IMPORTANT?
Marketers use web personalization primarily to make
their website more effective at engaging, converting,
and retaining prospects and customers. Whether or not
today’s buyer is aware of the personalization that occurs
on your website, a personalized experience can make a
significant difference in the “stickiness” and success
of your site.
According to research from MyBuys,
40% of consumers buy more from
retailers who personalize their
shopping experience across channels.
In fact, according to Marketo data,
visitors presented with personalized
content convert five times more than
the average visitor.
Additionally, buyers whether online or
offline, expect marketers to listen and
respond to them and their activities
with personal and relevant messages.
PERSONALIZATION: AN
EXPECTATION, NOT AN EXCEPTION
According to a study by eMarketer,
more than 85% of internet users
specifically expect and accept
personalization as a part of their
online retail experience. And 83% of
B2B buyers say company websites are
the most popular channel for their
online research.
In fact, as a marketer, implementing
web personalization is the single most
impactful activity that you can
start today.
While this personalized experience
stretches beyond the web, your
website serves as a hub for many
different kinds of web activity
because most online channels
ultimately lead your buyer back
to it. This is because your website is
purpose-built to engage buyers and
accelerate their movement through
their unique buyers’ journey.

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PERSONALIZATION: AN EXPECTATION, NOT AN EXCEPTION (continued)
For example, if a person visits your
website and you implemented web
personalization, you could:
1. Identify the visitor’s attributes (like
buying intent, behavior, persona,
geo-location, firmographics, etc.)
2. Based on those attributes, present
them with the most relevant copy,
imagery, offers, and calls-to-action,
which create a uniquely customized
experience for your visitor.
In the examples below from Turtle
Bay, you can see that they use web
personalization to present different
messages to their visitors based
on their previous activities—like
searches. Their homepage uses a web
personalization tool that enables it to
adapt to the interests and behavior
of their visitors based on the search
term they used when entering the
site, such as someone looking for a
golf resort versus someone looking
for a honeymoon trip (so that the first
page they visit on the site is instantly
tailored to their interests).
Homepage of standard Turtle Bay website Homepage personalized for a “honeymoon vacation” search Homepage personalized for a “golf vacation” search
WHAT ARE FIRMOGRAPHICS?
Firmographics are data points that give the marketer more insight
into the organization or company associated with a visitor. In B2B
organizations, this can be very helpful in understanding if your
target audience is visiting your website and can also help you
identify types of companies to go after. Firmographics include:
• Company name
• Industry
• Size (for example, number of employees)
• Revenue
• Date founded
• Market cap

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THE CONSEQUENCES OF
BEING IMPERSONAL
On the other hand, failing to
personalize your website can create
a disconnect between you and
your customer that results in missed
opportunities. According to Janrain
and Harris Interactive, nearly three-
fourths (75%) of online consumers get
frustrated with websites when content
(e.g. offers, ads, and promotions)
appears that has nothing to do
with their interests. If you translate
personalization into a real-world
scenario of a social interaction, it
highlights how important the ability to
listen and respond personally is.
For example, imagine that you are
having a deep conversation with
a new acquaintance at a cocktail
party. You share specific details with
each other, including where you live,
what you do for a living, how many
children you have, and your plans
for the rest of the weekend. Now,
if you see that person the next day,
and he reintroduces himself to you
as if you never met before—how
would that feel?
Being able to pick up a conversation
where you left off or incorporate
details you already know about a
person—whether it’s part of a social
interaction or an interaction with your
buyer—is an important part of building
a relationship. In fact, according
to a study by Magnetic and Retail
TouchPoints, the most important
element of a shopping journey is an
easy and relevant online experience.
Therefore, every interaction should
serve as a foundation that fuels and
informs your next communication—
and to do that, marketers should
consider web personalization.
of consumers believe that web
personalization is acceptable
as long as it is relevant and
from companies from which
they have recently purchased
66%
Source: Experian Marketing Services

HOW DOES WEB PERSONALIZATION
HELP MARKETERS?

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ENGAGING THE NEW DIGITAL BUYER
Web personalization helps marketers move the needle
by enabling them to deliver a continuous, personal
experience to individual visitors or target audiences
at scale. Personalized experiences result in higher
engagement rates, increased brand preference and
loyalty, improved conversion rates, and an uplift in sales.
In earlier sections, we covered why web
personalization is important for marketers seeking
to engage, convert, and retain their visitors and the
expectation of personalization from today’s digital
buyer—but to truly engage your buyers, you need to
capture their attention in a meaningful way and, if
possible, do it before anyone else.

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ENGAGE MORE PEOPLE
Every day, your website handles
a huge volume of visitors. These
visitors may arrive at your website
organically, but more likely they
arrive because you drove them there
through paid programs (pay-per-
click, social advertising, etc.). Almost
every company—from startups to
small-to-medium businesses (SMBs)
to enterprises—has thousands of
visitors on their site every month. In
many cases, this number is actually in
the tens or hundreds of thousands a
month (and sometimes in the millions).
This is a critical opportunity to engage
visitors and convert them in a more
efficient manner. But marketers are
missing out on this huge potential by
offering these visitors a website that
lacks personalization.
If you think of web personalization as
a way to capture the attention of more
people visiting your site and draw them
in, you can see that it makes perfect
business sense. According to data from
Rocket Fuel, the average bounce rate
for a website is 55%. That means more
than half of the people that visit your
site leave almost as soon as they enter.
Capturing even a few more percentage
points of your traffic with a personalized
message translates into real dollars.
Most businesses have different
audiences (or segments), and those
audiences expect to be spoken to in
a specific way, with an understanding
of who they are and what they want.
If you have ever worked on a website
redesign (or even initial design), you
know the pain of deciding what
to put on the homepage and that
creating messages that serve everyone
can end up serving no one. With
personalization, your website adapts
to the needs of these segments
automatically and helps you avoid this
problem. It also enables you to test
which message is the most effective
for a particular segment in a way that is
scalable and delivered in real-time.
Even companies that cater to only one
audience can benefit from treating
customers differently than new visitors
and engaging different parts of their
customer base differently.

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STAY AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION
WITH THE RIGHT MESSAGE
If you do not personalize your
website, your visitor will not see the
best message you have for them and
may not spend the time to find it.
You then risk the chance of another
company capturing the attention
of your buyer and actually showing
them what they were looking for.
According to a study by GE Capital
Retail Bank, over 80% of consumers
do their own research online
before buying and only the most
compelling message and offer will
win. You invest a great deal to drive
consumers to your website, so make
sure that once they get there you
offer them a relevant experience.
But your efforts shouldn’t be focused
on just the awareness-building stage
of the customer lifecycle. Marketers
need to be vigilant to engage
their customers in a personal way
throughout the entire customer
journey. After all, your prospects and
customers will continue to come
back to your website over and over
throughout their relationship with
you. So your messages need to
evolve as your relationship grows and
their needs change.
Whether you are marketing to
businesses or consumers, web
personalization enables you to create
meaningful, real-time interactions
with your audience by dynamically
engaging them with the most
relevant offer, content, and imagery
that you have.
Using tools like Marketo Web
Personalization, you can create
tailored website experiences in
real-time for each unique visitor that
adapt and change over time. You can
show your visitors what they want to
see, in the way they want to see it,
every time they visit your website.

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Web personalization helps marketers address their
customers in a personal and relevant way online
and throughout their lifetime, while also enabling
marketers to reach their goals faster.
There are seven key ways web personalization
helps marketers:
THE BENEFITS OF
WEB PERSONALIZATION
1. Build Brand Preference:
Your website is a critical component
in your cross-channel marketing
effort to build brand preference and
customer loyalty. You can use web
personalization to strengthen how
a visitor feels about you online and
offline. For instance, you can use
what you know about an individual
(gathered from their interaction with
your website) to tailor the messages
you send on other channels and
create content that resonates with
them—making your marketing
more personal and effective across
the board.
2. Understand Visitors:
Web personalization helps
marketers understand the
personas, demographics, and
behavioral and firmographic
data that represents your target
audience and is most likely
to result in conversion. This
understanding is critical because it
gives you an opportunity to
then identify the messages,
content, offers, and products
the buyer prefers. By giving
marketers insight into what types
of visitors and offers lead to higher
conversion, you are able to focus
your marketing resources on
implementing and testing activities
that generate real revenue.
Advertisement 0:12

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3. Convert Visitors:
While many of your marketing
efforts bring visitors to your site,
the majority of those visitors—a
whopping 98%—are anonymous
when they arrive and remain so
after they leave. For example, that
means if you have 300,000 visitors
on your site every month, 294,400
of them are anonymous. And that’s
a lot of missed potential! Web
personalization helps marketers
track demographic and behavioral
data, and unmask, engage, and
convert prospective customers as
they arrive on your site.
Personalization helps increase
conversions by offering visitors
personalized recommendations,
which, according to data from
Echidna, typically converts visitors
353% more frequently than visitors
who do not see or engage with
personalized recommendations.
In fact, personalization pioneer
Amazon’s analytical approach
to personalization has led them
to making $543 in revenue per
customer, the highest among
online retailers.
Web personalization also supports
account-based marketing (ABM).
ABM is a B2B marketing strategy
that targets a specific group of
accounts or customers based on
pre-defined attributes. This method
of targeting is aided significantly
by web personalization, which
identifies target accounts from
anonymous visitors based on IP
addresses, or known visitors, of
email domains and offers those
visitors a personalized experience
(at an account or even individual
decision-maker level), leading
to increased engagement and
conversion. This is especially
important for brands targeting
millennials (a generation that makes
up more than 25% of the U.S.
population and will have a spending
power of $200 billion annually by
2017), because millennials expect
personalization. In fact, more than
50% of them go out of their way to
buy from brands they care about,
according to research from Barkley.
THE BENEFITS OF WEB PERSONALIZATION
WHAT IS AN IP ADDRESS?
Internet Protocol address, also known as IP address, is a
numerical label or address assigned to each device (think iPad,
iPhone, laptop, and network printers) that participates in a
computer network. It serves as a means of identification for
each device, sharing its general location.
98%
of visitors are
anonymous and remain
so when they leave

A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN:
ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING
AND WEB PERSONALIZATION
ABM is a strategic approach to lead generation in
which your time and resources go into targeting
a key group of specific accounts. By employing
an ABM strategy, you can target and personalize
for specific companies or industries with the
assistance of your web personalization platform.
For instance, you could focus on a few of the large
target accounts you are trying to go after. Or you
could target based on types of companies that
you are trying to market to—such as insurance
companies with more than 10,000 employees.
To begin your ABM program, identify the
accounts you wish to target. You can
accomplish this by reviewing your CRM or
marketing automation history, or even working
with sales to identify key high-yield accounts.
You can then personalize content and calls-to-
action for your top “sales whale” accounts!

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4. Nurture and Engage:
Marketers know that engagement
beyond awareness and acquisition
is a critical component of any
business—whether that is through
fostering a repeat purchase, a
cross-sell, an upsell, or developing
a customer’s loyalty to your
brand. With web personalization,
marketers can personalize their
website to drive goals (and revenue)
across the entire customer lifecycle.
While you are probably familiar
with email nurturing, web
personalization allows you to
nurture customers on the web by
continuing the conversation with
them through targeted, relevant
offers, content, and calls-to-
action. Using web personalization,
your website becomes another
one of your cross-channel tools
to accelerate customers through
their unique buyer journey.
THE BENEFITS OF
WEB PERSONALIZATION
WHAT IS NURTURING?
Nurturing, whether it’s customer nurturing or lead nurturing, is the
process of building effective relationships with potential customers
throughout their entire buyers’ journey. It facilitates your potential
customer in getting to know your business; essentially, it’s the
courtship before marriage. With nurturing, you spend time
establishing a relationship with your potential customers and
building trust. And as a result, when you communicate with them,
you are welcomed instead of being regarded as intrusive. For a
more extensive dive into nurturing, check out our Definitive Guide
to Lead Nurturing and Definitive Guide to Customer Nurturing.

5. Cross-Sell and Upsell:
Marketing doesn’t end with a sale.
Understanding your customer
segments and the types of offers,
messages, and content that
motivate them is a huge advantage
that web personalization offers.
If you have customers that have
already purchased from you, you
can sell them more by recognizing
them as existing customers and
segmenting them to receive offers
on complementary products based
on their past purchases.
6. Optimize Your Campaigns:
As you run web personalization, you
can collect valuable information
from your visitors about who they
are and what offers, messages,
and content resonate with them.
These learnings can disseminate
across your programs and cross-
channel campaigns, making them
more effective—both in terms of
engagement with visitors and overall
cost. Advertisements generally send
visitors to a landing page or your
website, but the engagement rate
only goes up if your website delivers
a targeted message based on their
unique attributes or a continuation
of the story or message presented
in the advertisement they clicked
on. Additionally, with some tools—
that we will explore later in this
guide—web personalization and
advertising can work hand in hand
to deliver unique and personal
messages and ads across the web
and throughout the buyer journey.

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7. Increase Revenue:
All of the previously mentioned
benefits are closely tied to the
key benefit that almost every
marketer wants to see—generating
more revenue. When you better
understand your online visitors,
buyers, prospects, and decision-
makers—in other words, when you
nurture and educate them based
on who they are and what they
do, and then present the most
appropriate offer—you are improving
your ability to drive revenue. With
the right message or content,
you can convert anonymous
visitors to known, and drive the
conversion (a form fill, a sale, etc.)
that will improve your bottom
line. As we’ve demonstrated, this
doesn’t stop with acquisition;
personalization for existing
customers improves retention,
up-sell, and cross-sell—driving
revenue gain across the entire
customer lifecycle.
SUMMARY: THE BENEFITS
OF WEB PERSONALIZATION
1. Build Brand Preference
2. Understand Visitors
3. Convert Visitors
4. Nurture and Engage
5. Cross-Sell and Up-Sell
6. Optimize Your Campaigns
7. Increase Revenue

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CREATE YOUR WEB
PERSONALIZATION
STRATEGY

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Now that we have defined web personalization and
examined the benefits that it offers to marketers, let’s
explore how web personalization fits into your overall
marketing strategy as one of its key components.
You know your marketing goals,
and you likely already have existing
segments that you are marketing to
across channels. Web personalization
is another important channel for you
to incorporate into your marketing
mix. It supports your marketing goals
and uses and improves upon your
existing segmentation.
To start building a web personalization
strategy, first it’s critical to understand
your overall marketing objectives.
Then, define how web personalization
can support those objectives.
HOW WEB PERSONALIZATION FITS
INTO YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

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WEB PERSONALIZATION AND
THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Whatever your marketing goals, you
are likely mapping your supporting
campaigns to your customers’ journey
so that your marketing activities and
messages are more relevant. Effective
web personalization maps to the
customer journey, which might vary
greatly between B2B and consumer
companies, finance or healthcare, quick
e-commerce deals, or considered
purchases. Despite the variety, there
are a few core elements that are
constant, and it is essential to know and
understand them to determine which
message and content matters to your
buyer (at the various stages). For many
marketers, these messages and content
are present in material you already have.
Typically, marketing activities are
focused around five stages:
1. Acquisition
2. Engagement
3. Conversion
4. Retention and Cross-Sell/Up-sell
5. Advocacy
This section will cover how
web personalization fits into the
objectives, strategies, and tactics that
you may be using at each of these
stages. Let’s dig in:
Acquisition
Acquiring the right customers is a
struggle that most marketers face—it
is risky to spend valuable dollars and
still not attract the ideal customer
for your product or service. Web
personalization can help ensure you
are presenting the right message at
the right time for your ideal buyer,
increasing the likelihood of converting
the right customers (and being more
effective with your marketing spend).
It also helps you, as a marketer, know
what is working (or not), so you can
fine-tune your messages, content, or
offers over time.
HOW WEB PERSONALIZATION FITS INTO YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY
ACQUIRE
ENGAGE
CONVERT
RETAIN/
CROSS-SELL
ADVOCATE
Subscribe to email
newsletter, download your
app, click on targeted ads,
visit your website
Read personalized content
on your website, look at
other products
Write a review, share with
a friend, participate in a
rewards program, social
sharing
Read reviews, comparison
shopping
Promote and share on
social media (e.g. Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram,
Pinterest), engage with
targeted web CTAs

ENGAGE ANONYMOUS VISITORS
Particularly relevant for
the acquisition phase, web
personalization tools like Marketo
Web Personalization enable
marketers to engage and convert
anonymous website visitors based
on their attributes. To do this,
follow these two steps:
1. Identify Visitor Attributes
Web personalization helps you
identify valuable information
(you can specify what qualifies
as valuable) about your visitors,
such as:
Firmographics
• Company name
• Industry (by extension)
• Size (e.g. number of
employees or market cap)
• Revenue
Behavior
• Search term used
to arrive on your site
• Referral source
• Content consumption
• Number of visits
• Product interest and
viewed pages
Geo-location
• Location (country, state, city
and even zip code)
2. Act: Target and Engage
Then, using web personalization,
you can use this information to
target relevant audiences and
present a customized experience
to each visitor in real-time—
whether that’s through content,
messages, or offers. For example,
if a visitor from an insurance
company arrives on your site, you
can show them a case study from
a similar company, or if a visitor
arrives from a specific geography
to an online retailer, the return
policy or shipping terms can
change automatically. And with a
strong web personalization tool,
you can test and learn from the
results—ultimately allowing your
web personalization to become
smarter and more fine-tuned every
time a visitor interacts with it.

HOW WEB PERSONALIZATION FITS
INTO YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY
Engagement
Marketers drive visitors to engage with
them—whether that is by reading a
specific article, downloading a piece
of content, clicking on a targeted
paid ad, or downloading your mobile
app. Web personalization allows
you to harness the attention your
website receives and invest in fine-
tuning and optimizing it based on the
characteristics and attributes of your
visitors. In fact, with an engagement
marketing platform, the benefits of
your web personalization efforts
can extend across channels, driving
online and offline engagement that’s
personal, continuous, and relevant.
Web personalization allows you to
show your visitors that you know and
understand them, and offer them
real value to keep them informed
and engaged as they continue their
buyers’ journey.
Conversion
However you define a conversion,
whether it’s a purchase, subscription,
or other action—web personalization
accelerates the path to conversion by
offering visitors targeted messages,
content, and offers designed to
motivate them to take action. For
example, while early awareness-
building content is more appropriate
for the acquisition stage, for
conversion, you may want to deliver
a personalized offer with a discount
or a piece of content that offers social
proof, like a review, to nudge your
visitors toward making a purchase.
AN ENGAGEMENT MARKETING PLATFORM
An Engagement Marketing Platform provides marketers
with everything they need to succeed as they implement
engagement marketing, which is marketing that aims to
develop long-term relationships with customers–from
acquisition to advocacy. It addresses customers:
• As individuals
• Based on what they do
• Continuously over time
• Directed towards an outcome
• Everywhere they are

28
Retention and
Cross-Sell/Up-Sell
After converting a visitor to a
customer, the next step is to make
sure you keep them coming back
for more. With web personalization,
your ability to engage your customer
beyond an initial purchase can be
done at scale.
Marketers create programs and
campaigns aimed specifically at
retaining customers. These activities
can be supported or augmented by
web personalization—from recognizing
and acknowledging visitors as
customers when they land on your
site, to giving them exclusive access to
relevant content, to directing how they
engage with you and your product.
Web personalization can help
continue the momentum and
engagement and drive cross-sales.
With a web personalization solution,
marketers are able to take what they
know about their customer—from
listening to them across channels
and from past sales—and turn that
into personal and relevant offers, and
product or content recommendations
for products they haven’t bought from
you yet, or content they haven’t seen;
specifically those that match what
they already have and what they are
currently looking for.
Advocacy
Loyal customers are well positioned
to become brand advocates, helping
you create new business. Engaging
with customers throughout their
lifecycle isn’t just about individual
value—it’s also about the value of their
networks. Using web personalization,
you can effectively identify your loyal,
returning customers and speak to
them in a manner that is very different
from speaking to a new customer.
You can target them with incentives
to recommend your products or refer
you to their networks. For example, if a
customer returns to your website after
purchasing a product within the past
few months, you could offer them a
discount on their next purchase for
writing a review or recommending the
product to a friend.
HOW WEB PERSONALIZATION FITS INTO YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

WEB PERSONALIZATION AND YOUR MARKETING GOALS
Use this worksheet to outline your marketing goals and define how web personalization will
help you achieve them (if you need ideas on how, read on and come back to this section):
We started the worksheet with a couple of examples.
The first impression on your website is critical. It should be
relevant and delightful for visitors. Whether visitors are anonymous
or known, having a personalized message, offer, or content piece
will resonate more than something generic. If a visitor sees an
offer or message just for them, your brand will likely be more
appealing and stand out as opposed to a generic message.
Many paid, owned and earned channels will drive traffic to your
site. A call-to-action that is personalized, like a vertical-focused
case study, can engage a buyer throughout their journey and can
help convert more visits–whether they are visiting for their first
time or are in a long buying cycle. Web personalization can be a
powerful tool for nurture programs or account based marketing.
A personalized offer is known to convert at higher rates. Web
personalization is ideal for increasing conversions with target
segments, key verticals, or distinct geographies.
Web personalization is ideal to continue to speak to your
customers and stay relevant to them based on their buying
preferences. It is useful for cross-sell or up-sell, or informing
them of new products that they are likely to purchase.
EXAMPLE
BRAND PREFERENCE
MARKETING GOALS HOW WEB PERSONALIZATION CAN HELP
LEAD GENERATION
CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
CUSTOMER RETENTION/LOYALTY
EXAMPLEEXAMPLEEXAMPLE
AIRLINEAIRLINE

30
Now you understand how web personalization works, and how it can help you meet your marketing goals, across
different touchpoints in the customer journey; next you need to define your channel-specific goals and develop a
strategy to achieve them. To start, understand the business challenges that you are trying to address (your overall
marketing strategy will help dictate these), define some early metrics, and then outline a plan of action.
This section will walk you through how to determine a set of channel-specific web personalization goals that
make sense for your business and audience. Let’s get started:
THE 4 Ws—UNDERSTAND YOUR
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
As you saw in the previous section,
personalization applies to all aspects
of the buyer journey. To understand
your business challenges and where
web personalization can add value,
start with the 4 Ws of personalization,
which will help you and your team
brainstorm and uncover ideas about
how to use personalization to benefit
your organization:
Who
Understand: Who will you be
targeting? Who will you personalize
for? The “who” is your target
audience(s), which may differ slightly
depending on your customers. Group
your target audience into segments
with similar interests or attributes.
• B2B marketers often segment
on firmographics like company
size, vertical, and overall revenue,
or by specific roles within an
organization such as tech leaders
or IT teams, like the CIO, etc. With
long sales cycles, a prospect’s
stage in the buyer journey also
plays a critical role.
• Consumer marketers primarily
segment on a customer’s
demographics, geographic
location, interest in products, price
sensitivity, and purchase history.
Why
Like any marketing activity, a critical
element to understanding and
defining your goals is to understand
the “why” that’s driving the activities
around your web personalization.
The “why” of web personalization
can be divided into two parts:
1. Why is this audience important?
Is it because of easy sales, high
revenue, or new markets? This
reason is often defined in your
overall marketing strategy.
2. Why do you want to achieve x?
Are you driving toward more
engagement, more leads, or
higher conversions? What is
driving that (for example, your
overall marketing objectives)?
DEFINE YOUR WEB PERSONALIZATION GOALS

31
WHERE TO PERSONALIZE:
Social
Video
Website
Offline
Email
Mobile
What
Then, determine: What do you want to
say to them? What will you personalize
for them? The possibilities are nearly
endless, but there are good places to
start. Think about the first messages or
content each audience should see as
they visit your website for the first time.
Try a combination of calls-to-action,
images, offers, and content, which
can include promotions, offers, blog
posts, testimonials, videos, and more.
Marketers can personalize all of these
assets based on the audiences they
are targeting and their objectives. We’ll
go into more detail on “what” you can
personalize later in this guide.
Where
Finally, identify: Where can you
personalize? Think about where on
your website you can best connect
with each segment or where the most
value can be gained. The homepage is
a good place to start. For example, you
might want to show a financial services
case study to someone from that
industry who is visiting your site for the
first time, but alternatively show a 1-on-
1 live demo offer to someone who
has been to your site multiple times
and is highly engaged. Or if you know
your visitor is a return visitor, maybe
it’s time to offer them a coupon or
free shipping, versus a first-time visitor
where you may want to showcase
the best-rated items from your site. It’s
important to remember that your site
visitors don’t always visit the homepage
and may be directed by search engines
to various inner pages. A good web
personalization solution allows you
to define campaigns that run across
site pages and will engage the visitor
wherever they land or browse your site
without requiring any page specific
configuration or definition.
DEFINE YOUR WEB
PERSONALIZATION GOALS

32
After you understand your web personalization goals,
it’s important that you are familiar with the different
types of web personalization in order to identify the
best ways it can help you meet your goals.
UNDERSTAND THE TYPES OF
WEB PERSONALIZATION
This section will cover six main types
of personalization that you can use
to engage your target audience.
Let’s explore:
1. Geo-Location:
One of the most straightforward
ways that marketers use web
personalization to target their
visitors is by location. Depending
on the type of business you market
to and your offer, the way you
target based on location could
differ. For example, if your business
attends tradeshows and wants to
encourage visitors within a certain
geographic region (be it city, state,
or specific countries) to attend the
show, web personalization can
help by displaying a registration
discount code for visitors within
that region. It’s not something you
would promote to all visitors on
your homepage, but the ability
to be selective makes it feasible—
and very effective. Alternatively, if
you are an e-commerce retailer
operating across the globe, you
can use web personalization to
target visitors based on their current
location—showing summer clothing
to an Australian visitor and winter
clothing to a Canadian visitor or
display different shipping terms to
encourage more shoppers to buy.
Regardless of the specific use case,
creating specialized campaigns
that identify users based on their
location offers them an experience
that feels unique and personal, and
is more likely to resonate with them.
CHOOSE THE RIGHT WAYS TO PERSONALIZE
WAYS TO TARGET BY LOCATION:
99 Country, State, City
99 Language
99 Region Zip Codes
99 Regulatory/Jurisdictional
Regions

33
UNDERSTAND THE TYPES OF
WEB PERSONALIZATION
In this example, you can see how
NICE Systems, a provider of software
solutions specializing in telephone
voice recording, data security, and
surveillance, uses location-based web
personalization to target website visitors
coming from United States. In the first
image, you can see their standard
homepage and in the second image,
the personalized site—based on the U.S.
location—with a call-to-action to attend
their annual event in Las Vegas. NICE
Systems also holds large customer
events in EMEA and APAC, so visitors
from those territories are presented with
those shows while U.S. visitors see this
invite to the Las Vegas event.
CHOOSE THE RIGHT WAYS
TO PERSONALIZE
Default View
Personalized for US Visitors

2. Behavioral:
As you observe an anonymous
website visitor, your web
personalization tool can build a
behavioral profile for them based
on the way they navigate your
website, engage with material, and
take action. It can also leverage
behavioral aspects, such as the
referral site and the search term
the visitor used to find you. With a
web personalization tool that has
real-time capabilities, you are able
to act on these behavioral data
points immediately, even as soon
as they happen, and actively adapt
your website for that visitor. If you
already know the visitor and the
contact exists in your database,
behavioral targeting factors in
not only their behavior, but also
all the other data that you know
about them. This is considered
personalizing based on contact
data—a type of personalization
that we will cover next.
TO PERSONALIZE
TO PERSONALIZE
WAYS TO TARGET BY BEHAVIOR:
99 Pages per visit
99 Number of visits
99 Specific pages viewed
99 Search terms
99 Referrals
99 Browser
99 Device
99 Product interest
99 Purchase history
99 Customer journey

HOW DO CONSUMERS FEEL
ABOUT PERSONALIZATION?
We have talked about how customers expect their data to be used to send
them more personal and relevant experiences, but what about the most
personal data? Their movement.
According to data from eMarketer, more than 75% of people with self-
trackers (think Fitbits, health apps like MyFitnessPal, Apple Watches, etc.)
are comfortable with that data being used to personalize ads. And this
was measured early on in the adoption of wearable technology and its
interaction with marketing. By now, personalization based on personal
data has become even more conventional. Case in point: users of these
devices, as well as visitors to your website, generate lots of data about
themselves and expect marketers to use it wisely.
Level of Comfort with
Sharing Their Data to Receive
Personalized Ads According
to US Self-Trackers*
% of respondents
Extremely comfortable
16%
27%
32%
12%
13%
Very comfortable
Not very comfortable
Somewhat comfortable
Not at all comfortable
Note: n=699, ages 18-24
*Those who monitor their health via apps, smart watches,
wearable fitness trackers and/or websites
Source: Rocket Fuel “‘Quantified Self’ Digital Tools: A CPG
Marketing Opportunity,” January 15, 2015

2. Behavioral (continued):
Let’s look at an example of how
marketers can use behavioral
web personalization to target
visitors: If a consumer visited your
website previously and reviewed
or purchased specific products,
with web personalization, you
would be able to suggest similar
products or content the next time
they land on your homepage. You
can also target based on non-
traditional behavioral parameters,
like price sensitivity, and then use
web personalization to highlight
more cost-effective items. Even
very basic behavioral signals
can and should be used, such
as the number of visits to your
site. Surely, a new visitor to your
site should see one message but
someone returning for the fifth
time should see a different, more
advanced one.
Digital behavior can tell us a lot
about each visitor, for example:
how many and which pages
they view, how many times they
previously visited your site (a
new visitor should see different
content than a visitor that returns
frequently), the search terms they
used, and the referral site or link
that drove them to the site.

37
3. Contact Data:
In many cases, a buyer visiting a site
has had previous interactions with
the brand and is known to them.
To take behavioral personalization
one step further, marketers can
use a web personalization solution
that connects to their marketing
automation platform to listen and
respond to their contacts and
customers, over time and across
channels—so an activity on one
channel, say an email opened or a
call logged into the contact center,
helps inform the personalization
that occurs on their website. The
information you already have on
a specific buyer, such as previous
purchases or interests, score and
profile, business role or customer
type, can be used to further
customize and optimize their buying
experience on your website with
more relevant offers. For example, a
customer that has shown previous
interest in a brand-new SUV will be
presented with content and offers
on your SUV models, their features,
and lease terms, while a customer
that already bought a specific car
model can be offered a relevant
upgrade or service package.
WAYS TO TARGET BY CONTACT DATA:
99 Firmographic data
99 Demographic data
99 Buyer stage
99 Campaign group
99 Product interest
99 Lead or engagement
score
99 Title and business
role persona

4. Vertical-Based:
Visitors arriving at your site come
from a variety of places, but some
may need more specific messaging
than others. One example of this
that many B2B marketers find
valuable is targeting your visitors
based on their industry vertical—
like healthcare, financial services,
or government. Each visitor from
those verticals has specific needs
and requirements that a generic
message may not address. Your
company might be selling different
products to serve each industry
or at least messaging the same
product differently to address the
needs of the different audiences.
Tailoring your website and its
messages and offers to a visitor’s
industry will make you more
attractive and trustworthy and help
you advance them further and
quicker through the sales cycle. In
these examples, you can see how
Marketo uses web personalization
to offer personalized messages and
offers to members of the education
and financial services verticals. We
even focus some of our content
creation activities around creating
content to support these verticals
and web personalization.
HOW CAN WEB PERSONALIZATION SOLUTIONS IDENTIFY
YOUR VISITOR’S INDUSTRY?
Your anonymous visitors can be identified through a very short scan of
their IP address and cross-checked against an IP database lookup that’s
correlated with data to categorize them by industry. This must happen
in milliseconds to allow you to deliver content, offers, and messages
that are tailored to the visitor’s industry in real-time. Advanced web
personalization solutions provide this capability out of the box.
FINANCIAL SERVICES CASE STUDY
Charles Schwab drives
engagement and growth with Marketo
LEARN HOW
FINANCIAL SERVICES CASE STUDY
Vanitiv attains a 75% close rate
with marketing automation.
LEARN HOW
EDUCATION CASE STUDY
UC Irvine increased enrollment via
mobile by 3X
FIND OUT HOW
EDUCATION CASE STUDY
Learn how Algonquin College
boosted admissions by 18%
READ NOW
Marketo Financial Services Vertical
Marketo Education Vertical

39
of visitors find content
made for their specific
industries more valuable
value content created
for their specific
positions
4. Vertical-Based (continued):
Another powerful technique
is to display the logos of your
top customers in a vertical right
on the homepage whenever
someone from that vertical visits
your site.
In fact, according to Marketing
Sherpa, 82% of visitors find
content made for their specific
industries more valuable and 67%
also value content created for
their specific positions. Using web
personalization, marketers can
make this a reality—presenting
content specific to a visitor’s
industry. And with the right
technology solution, they can do
this whether the visitor is known
or unknown.
TO PERSONALIZE Marketo Customer Testimonial: Mary Rosai, Charles Schwab YouTube

40
5. Account-Based:
Account-based web personalization
focuses the personalization of
your website around a targeted
and pre-defined list of accounts
and individuals. Account-based
web personalization enables a
marketer to identify a visitor’s
company, cross-checking them
against a named account list in
real-time. If your visitor is from a
set list of accounts, you are able
to show them a targeted and
specific message, offer, asset, or
call-to-action.
Target accounts can be those most
likely to generate revenue, existing
customers, key strategic accounts,
or any named list of accounts. With
web personalization technology
and marketing automation, you can
make this experience even more
granular and focused by targeting
the individuals within an account
with unique and specific messages.
In the examples on the right
you can see how SchoolDude,
an education operations
management suite, uses web
personalization to deploy their
ABM strategy.
WHAT IS ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING?
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy that focuses sales
and marketing activities around a select list of accounts with the goal of
either penetrating or up-selling to the account by delivering personalized
marketing messages to the account and its decision-makers.
Here is the SchoolDude website as everyone sees it:
Here is the SchoolDude website personalized for a visitor from a specific
higher education ABM list:
TO PERSONALIZE

41
5. Account-Based (continued):
In this visual, you can see the ways
a marketer can define their target
account lists.

42
6. Predictive:
While you can certainly target
your audience with rules based
on the different attributes that
we covered in previous sections,
predictive web personalization
takes a different approach and
complements the slightly more
traditional rule-based ones. It often
utilizes the real-time functionality
of a web personalization tool,
instantaneously adapting the
content, offers, and invitations on
a website or webpage; however,
it is based on machine-learning
algorithms that predict which
content or offer is the best for a
visitor and when to display it.
1. Automatic discovery of all the
content on your site: videos,
product offers, white papers,
case studies, blog posts, etc.
2. Machine-learning processes
analyze correlations between
types of visitors and the content
they consumed to formulate
content predictions.
3. Dynamic content delivery serves
content recommendations based
on ongoing performance analysis.
Machine learning typically utilizes
statistical processing models
to learn and then predict what
content or offers would be most
interesting to specific visitors based
on previous content consumption
or weighted visitor attributes and
their correlation with consuming
specific content pieces. This allows
predictive web personalization to
discover which combination of
attributes (location, firmographic,
behavior, etc.) is mostly likely to
lead to a positive click-through
or conversion for a given content
asset or offer. Unlike rule-based
web personalization—as covered
in the majority of this guide—
machine learning and predictive
analytics can dynamically cover
broader ranges of correlation
between visitor attributes and
content assets, allowing you to run
adaptive marketing campaigns.
Plus, for busy marketers,
predictive web personalization
gives you a “hands-free” solution
for reaching your website
conversion goals and maximizing
the value of the content and
assets you’ve already produced.

6. Predictive (continued):
In this example, you can see
how Elastic, a data insights
company, uses predictive content
recommendation to offer the
visitor a personal experience that
drives engagement based on
the current content they are
engaging with.
TO PERSONALIZE
PERSONALIZATION SPANS MANY INDUSTRIES
Personalization is also effective in
the considered purchase market
ranging from luxury goods to
travel, software, and healthcare.
Here are several ways that
personalization can be used in
these markets:
Luxury Goods: For jewelry
sellers, if a consumer with a
high-income profile performs a
Google search for “gemstones”
and clicks on a search result
that links to your website, the
homepage will be personalized,
based on their profile and search
term used, to a visual of a higher-
priced gemstone offer.
Travel and Leisure: A tourism
website can up-sell or cross-sell
returning visitors by featuring
banners with exclusive VIP
packages for existing customers.
Software: Software marketers
can identify web visitors by
company name and type,
allowing them to present relevant
case studies and success stories
from similar accounts.
Healthcare: Healthcare providers
can identify web visitors by
location to limit website info
strictly to available policies for
that specific location.

44
IDENTIFY YOUR USE CASES
In the previous section on the types
of web personalization, we covered
the different ways you can implement
web personalization campaigns.
In this section, we will drill down
into how different types of web
personalization can help you achieve
your goals. Use cases are different
examples of how web personalization
can work for an organization.
Because of the flexibility that web
personalization has to offer, there are
a large variety of use cases and more
than one may fit the objectives for
your business. Depending on how
you segment and the goals you are
trying to reach, different use cases
may make sense for you.
Because goals differ between B2B
and consumer-focused companies,
let’s take a look at some examples of
use cases for web personalization in
action for each:
B2B Use Cases
Location
For many marketers, one of the
key objectives is to support and
promote event-marketing initiatives,
which translates to the wide usage
of location-based event promotions.
Say you are hosting events in various
regions throughout the country: Why
not create specialized campaigns with
web personalization that recognize
visitors based on region and then
tell them about your local events?
This typically means that you can
promote smaller events in a “bigger
way” since people from a specific
group of states, for example, will see
a local event promotion on your main
homepage banner while others will
see different campaigns. Additional
location-based examples include
calls-to-action (CTAs) with the
relevant language, content relevant to
local requirements and regulations,
and more. In this example, Tufin—a
network security company
specializing in the automation
and acceleration of network
infrastructure—uses a location-based
web personalization campaign to
target all visitors from Europe to meet
at a local European event.

45
Hortonworks standard homepage
B2B Use Cases (continued)
Vertical
Many B2B companies have specific
products, solutions, or messaging
targeted at different verticals and their
unique requirements. For example,
you may work at a company that only
wants to sell to healthcare and higher
education institutions. Campaigns
designed for verticals often leverage
industry-specific messaging and
showcase unique video testimonials,
use cases, and case studies. With web
personalization, you can extend the
benefit of those campaigns by
showcasing a specific message, use
case, or offer when a company from
a specific vertical visits your site. In
the example below, Hortonworks—a
software company that distributes
and supports open-source Apache
Hadoop data platform—changes the
collateral on its homepage based on
the visitor’s industry. Here you see
examples of the regular homepage,
finance, government, and healthcare:
CHOOSE THE RIGHT
WAYS TO PERSONALIZE
Hortonworks Government homepage
Hortonworks Finance homepage
Hortonworks Healthcare homepage
Hortonworks standard homepage

46
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
An organization that employs an
ABM strategy wants to target and
personalize content for specific
named accounts or companies
with the assistance of a web
personalization solution. With this
account-centric approach, you can
be more specific than just vertical
targeting and engage sub-groups
that may be unique to your business.
Advanced ABM practitioners can
also identify specific individuals and
decision-makers who belong to one
of your targeted accounts or verticals,
and engage them by targeting them
by IP address (then later by contact
data) to display the most relevant
content, messages, and visuals to
convert them, as well as alert relevant
sales teams of their interest. With
an advanced ABM solution, you
can also target specific offices of
target accounts to make sure you
are engaging prospects from the
headquarters as opposed to regional
branches. This is a critical approach
for ABM because it enables you to
deliver a hyper-focused experience
to an account. You can engage
anonymous and known individuals
within a target account in a more
scalable, cost-effective manner.
In the example below, you can
see that Marketo uses web
personalization to target named
accounts that are already customers
for a cross-sell opportunity. This
campaign targets specific customers
and offers them information on
Marketo solutions that they don’t
already use.
Marketo examples of ABM web personalization for customers

47
Persona
A marketer with the objective of
driving engagement and conversion
with millennials might identify a
persona-based use case for their
web personalization activities. Rather
than focusing on companies or
verticals as a whole, this approach
narrows down the playing field to
specific information like role, industry,
background—even demographic
data, allowing the marketer to
personalize landing pages with
images that resonate with millennials
or change the copy on their offers.
Typical examples of persona-based
use cases include targeting CFOs
from Fortune 100 companies on
the East Coast or IT practitioners
with deep technical knowledge.
In the example below from Turner
technologies, you can see how they
used web personalization-targeting
management executives and
technology executives personas.
Management executive targeting Technology executive targeting

48
Behavior
The behavior-based use case, also
referred to as behavioral targeting,
seeks to leverage digital body
language, which in many cases is the
most relevant signal for customer
intent. What someone is looking for,
what pages on your site they are
looking at, or how many times they
have previously visited your website
says a lot about them. Behavioral
data is especially important when
prospects are anonymous, since
you don’t have a complete picture
of who they are yet. Personalizing a
page based on the search term that
drove visitors to it makes perfect sense
since you are delivering a continuous
message and experience. Showing
different messages as a prospect
revisits your site is also extremely
effective as well as more informative
for the visitor.
In this example from SchoolDude, an
education operations management
suite, you see web personalization
that is based on the behavior of the
visitor and the page they are visiting.
Based on the site page, its content,
and how new a visitor is to the site,
SchoolDude uses web personalization
to offer a quick tutorial video to get
the visitor up to speed.
Combining Use Cases
While the use cases mentioned in
this section are presented as stand-
alone use cases, the reality is that
more than one will apply to you and
your business and most marketers
combine multiple use cases. In fact,
from observing Marketo customers,
we’ve found that the B2B use case
combinations that show the highest
conversion rates are:
• Industry and location
• Named accounts and persona
• Location and behavior

49
Use Cases for Consumer Marketers
Location
Similar to how the location-based
use case works for B2B marketers,
for consumers, it means targeting
visitors by their geographical location.
This approach is ideal if a company
is looking to increase profits in a
particular location, test a new product
concept, or show different offerings
because tastes vary per region. For
instance, a fast-food brand could
choose to highlight its regional
cuisine specialties for users visiting
from different countries.
You can also personalize displayed
language, shipping terms, or pricing.
Location-based targeting can also be
used to show weather-related special
offers or promote a physical store
location. In this example, you can see
that James Allen—an online high-end
retailer that offers diamond rings and
diamonds—uses web personalization
to change their shipping terms and
offer a promotion based on the
location of the visitor.

50
Use Cases for Consumer Marketers (continued)
Demographics
This approach is optimal when
you’re looking to build inroads with a
specific group of people. For instance,
clothing stores can increase the
relevance of customer experiences
by showing women’s clothing when a
woman visits the site or men’s clothing
when a man visits. Deeper information
from third-party cookie providers can
provide even more data to personalize
by, like marital status, previous
shopping interests, and more.
Behavior
If a consumer has visited your
website previously and viewed
specific products, suggest similar
products or content the next time
they land on your homepage. This is
a good technique to use when you’re
looking to shorten the time from
acquisition to conversion.
As we touched on previously, you can
also target based on price sensitivity
and highlight more cost-effective
items. Using the banking industry as
an example, a customer is likely to
consider an investment for a while
before making a decision and often
visits the bank’s site several times.
Leveraging their behavior to fine-tune
the site experience and provide more
specific investment options may result
in faster and higher conversion rates.
In this example from eMarketer—
an independent digital marketing
research company— you can see
eMarketer’s regular website for a
visitor, then based on their behavior,
if a visitor has been to the site more
than two times, they see the video
in the dialog box that appears in the
second example.
eMarketer’s standard website
eMarketer’s website with a web personalized dialog box for a visitor that has
visited the website more than twice
TO PERSONALIZE

51
Use Cases for Consumer
Marketers (continued)
Buyer Persona and History
In many cases, the buyer visiting your
site has had previous interactions with
your brand that has given you insights
about their intent. The data you
already have on a specific buyer, such
as previous purchases or interests and
profile or customer type, can be used
to further customize and optimize
the buying experience with more
relevant offers. For example, if your
organization is a travel site that sells
and resells everything from flights to
hotels to rental cars to tour packages,
you may use a buyer persona and
history use case to offer your visitor
more. If you know that someone
purchased a flight to Puerto Rico,
you can personalize your site to offer
your visitor hotel deals or tour group
packages. You can see that this is a
very powerful approach to driving
additional purchases.
Combining Use Cases
While the use cases in this section
are presented as standing alone,
the reality is that in many cases you
will combine them. Based on our
observations, the consumer use case
combinations that show the highest
conversion rates are:
• Buyer Persona and Location
• Buyer Persona and Behavior
TO PERSONALIZE

Why:
What are your marketing organization’s key objectives? For example: Customer
retention, top-of-funnel acquisition, accelerated nurturing, focusing on targeted
accounts, etc.
1.__________________________________________________________________
2.__________________________________________________________________
3.__________________________________________________________________
Who:
Who is your audience? For example: Specific locations? Industries? People behaving
in certain ways? Existing customers? Anonymous visitors from specific locations?
1.__________________________________________________________________
2.__________________________________________________________________
3.__________________________________________________________________
How do you currently segment them and target them across other
marketing channels?
1.__________________________________________________________________
2.__________________________________________________________________
3.__________________________________________________________________
What:
What will you personalize? What existing content do you have
that fits your audience?
Suggestions:
Calls-to-Action
1.__________________________________________________________________
2.__________________________________________________________________
3.__________________________________________________________________
Content Offers (ebooks, case studies, reviews):
1.__________________________________________________________________
2.__________________________________________________________________
3.__________________________________________________________________
Where:
Where can you personalize? On your website? Via retargeting advertisements?
What areas specifically have room for growth?
1.__________________________________________________________________
2.__________________________________________________________________
3.__________________________________________________________________
BRAINSTORMING WORKSHEET—WEB PERSONALIZATION GOALS
This exercise should help you understand what you want to achieve with web personalization. For example, do you want to
promote a product line for a specific region, or are you looking to gain new customers in a specific vertical? Identify your
organization’s goals and then align your web personalization efforts to those goals.
Fill in your brainstorming responses to the 4 Ws to help you shape your web personalization goals:
52

53
After you established your goals and use cases, it’s
important to think about what success will look like for
your organization and then set up metrics so you can
create a benchmark before you implement your web
personalization campaigns.
ESTABLISH METRICS FOR SUCCESS
IDENTIFY ANALYTICS THAT INFORM
By setting up analytics beforehand,
you can create a benchmark for your
current status with target segments
in terms of engagement and
conversion. It will also help validate
the audience choices you made by
showing you how many prospects/
buyers exist in each segment.
It’s important to set your
measurements up quickly, even
before creating any campaigns, so
you can establish baseline metrics
and begin testing and iterating.
Some web personalization tools,
like Marketo’s, not only deliver their
own metrics but integrate with
Google Analytics as well to give you
visibility into how specific segments,
such as industry, company size,
buyer stage, or any other behavioral
segments, interact with your
website. Combined, web analytics
and web personalization, as part of
a marketing automation platform,
deliver a full-lifecycle tracking
experience. In this example, you can
see Marketo Web Personalization
analytics in action.

54
IDENTIFY ANALYTICS THAT INFORM (continued)
In the example below, you can see
how web personalization gives
marketers a holistic view of the
customer lifecycle. The example
shows a Google Analytics dashboard
integrated with data from the
Marketo Web Personalization solution.
Appending segment match data to
Google Analytics allows you see how
your segments are performing.
Location-based analytics
View of Data From Google Analytics Appended by Marketo Web Personalization

55
IDENTIFY ANALYTICS THAT INFORM (continued)
You are also able to see how visitors
from specific audiences enter your
website and flow through. For
example, by combining Google
Analytics data with Marketo Web
Personalization data, you can see
this interaction flow for specific
audiences. This can be incredibly
beneficial as you shape and iterate
your web personalization campaigns
because you can identify trouble-
spots (like where people bounce
from your site) and adapt your
content and offers to see if they
make an impact.
An Interaction Flow For A Specific Audience In Google Analytics

56
Deﬁnitely
coming back!
SET YOUR SEGMENTS
Once you set up analytics, take note
of how your chosen groups currently
perform. This information helps you
further segment your audience for
more effective nurturing to guide
buyers toward a purchase over time
with relevant messaging and content.
Here is some of the information you
might need:
• Number of Visitors:
How many visitors from each
segment, audience, and vertical
visit the site today? Be sure to
benchmark before and after you
begin web personalization in order
to fully understand how other
marketing efforts drive traffic to
your site and identify potential
areas for improvement. The
number of visitors from a given
segment is a strong indicator of
brand awareness. If you have
very few visitors from a target
segment, it may mean few of
them know about you and you
can’t expect much revenue from
them unless you target them
more effectively through other
channels. Conversely, if you see
a high volume or group of visitors
outside your target audience, you
may want to consider targeting
them specifically.
• Demographics and Behavior:
Which types of people visit your
site? What do they do once they
arrive on your site? Is there specific
content they consume? Is it the
content you wanted them to see?
• Engagement:
Are people from your target
segment browsing several pages
per visit or bouncing right out? Do
they engage with relevant content
or never get to it? How many of
them return to visit your site again?

57
INTEGRATING CROSS CHANNEL
MARKETING INTO YOUR WEB
PERSONALIZATION STRATEGY

58
Your customer’s expectation of a personal
experience is not limited to your website, so your
web personalization efforts need to be attuned to
your customer’s activities across every channel and
throughout the customer lifecycle.
DON’T PERSONALIZE IN A SILO
Web personalization can complement
and coordinate with every marketing
channel that you use, although some
channels coordinate best for different
stages of the customer lifecycle.
According to data from MyBuys’
Personalization Consumer Survey,
coordinating messages across
channels increases the performance
of those channels and improves the
customer’s experience. And that
makes sense when you consider that
the average buyer doesn’t just visit
one channel before purchase. In fact,
they are often self-educating long
before you ever know about them.
According to research from Google,
a majority of consumers take a
multi-device path to purchase and
therefore engage with you on more
than one platform or channel.
STRATEGIC THINKING
Customers take a multi-device path to purchase
65%
Start on a
smartphone
25%
Start on a PC/
laptop
11%
Start on
a tablet
61%
Continue on
a PC/laptop
19%
Continue
on a
smartphone
10%
Continue on
a PC/laptop
4%
Continue
on a tablet
5%
Continue
on a tablet
Source: Google

59
DON’T PERSONALIZE IN
A SILO (continued)
Unfortunately, despite the fact that
customers take this multi-device
path, data from Experian indicates
that only a small fraction of brands
are executing cross-channel
communications informed by a single
view of the customer.
CROSS-CHANNEL WEB
PERSONALIZATION WITH
MARKETING AUTOMATION
If you stop to think about it,
the majority of your marketing
campaigns—from ads to social
media to email to events—drive
prospects to your website. While
it’s very clear for consumer
businesses, the fact is that 83% of
B2B buyers say company websites
are the most popular channel for
their online research. This fact,
combined with the knowledge
that buyers move seamlessly from
channel to channel, makes your
website a critical interaction hub.
While web personalization enables
marketers to listen and respond
to prospects and customers on
their website specifically, often
you need to employ more tools to
effectively listen and respond across
channels to create an experience for
customers that’s not only personal,
but consistent as well.
For marketers to obtain a single view
of their customers and activities
directed toward them, they need to
use a marketing automation platform
that includes a web personalization
app. A marketing automation
platform enables marketers to make
the cross-channel experience a
seamless journey for their customers.
STRATEGIC THINKING
Coordinating messages across channels increases customer experience
Personalize the shopping
experience across all of
their channels
Personalize online ads
that promote offers
and products
I’m likely to engage with a
new brand and purchase
when I see online ads for
products I’m interested in
based on my current past
Send me personalized
emails based on
my past browsing and
buying behavior
Show personalized ads in
my social media feeds
48%
49% 52%
48% 33%

60
CROSS-CHANNEL
WEB PERSONALIZATION
WITH MARKETING
AUTOMATION (continued)
Your marketing automation platform
can make it much easier for you to
implement a cross-channel marketing
strategy—especially when it comes
to communicating to individuals
consistently and intelligently at scale.
Specifically, it helps marketers:
• Listen: Pay close attention
to buyer behavior across all
channels, such as ads, email,
social, mobile, and web, to create
a single, integrated view of the
buyer persona.
• Learn: Process all of your buyer’s
digital behavior for a better
understanding of your customer.
• Speak: Manage, personalize, and
act on conversations with buyers
across all channels.
• Measure: Understand which
activities are working and which
are not from early engagement all
the way to revenue.
If you are using a marketing
automation platform, like Marketo,
you can build customer profiles based
on demographic and behavioral data
gathered across many channels.
With its built-in tools for web
personalization, you can leverage
this data in your web personalization
campaigns to create highly targeted
campaigns. And because your web
personalization campaigns are
informed by the segmentation you
use to power campaigns across
channels—email, mobile, ads, and
more—it becomes a cohesive part of
your overall marketing strategy. By
including web personalization in the
rest of your marketing campaigns,
you’ll make your buyer’s experience
much more interesting and effective.
STRATEGIC THINKING
Paid media
Events
Email programs Website
Social
Your website is your main interaction channel. Almost every
marketing program you have sends your prospects and
customers to your site, whether its clicking an add, an email
link or reviewing your site after visiting your booth

61
STRATEGIC THINKING
CROSS-CHANNEL
WEB PERSONALIZATION
WITH MARKETING
AUTOMATION (continued)
As your customer browses your
website and interacts with your
personalization campaigns, the data
you collect feeds into a master view
of your customer that fuels your
communication with them across
all channels. And vice versa, too.
Actions and expressed interests from
other channels allow you to further
personalize the website experience.
Let’s look at some of the top
examples in the following sections:
WEB PERSONALIZATION
AND MOBILE
With the rise of smartphones and
tablets, the number of mobile devices
has outpaced the global population.
In fact, according to data from
Gartner, tablets alone outnumber
personal computers, with all PC sales
representing only 12% of worldwide
device shipments in 2015.
Because of the proliferation of mobile
and tablet devices amongst consumers,
marketers have been forced to adapt.
Today, mobile marketing is much
more than a trend—it is an increasingly
important part of the market and how
people access websites.
It’s more important than ever that
your web personalization is deeply
connected to your mobile marketing
activities. Web personalization can
help marketers target their mobile
users with personalized, relevant, and
mobile-friendly offers, content, and
calls-to-action. In fact, some web
personalization tools, like Marketo’s,
allow you to identify your incoming
visitors based on their browser or
device—such as iOS Safari—and adapt
your offers accordingly during mobile
web browsing. Marketo also offers
a specific module for in-app mobile
messaging and push notifications
to further enhance your mobile
marketing. For example, by using web
personalization and mobile marketing
together with a marketing automation
system, marketers can offer a
discount via in-app messages or push
notifications based on the product
the visitor viewed while she is on
their website—which ultimately allows
them to convert visitors faster.
320,964Tablets shipped in 2015
316,689PC market total in 2015
1,946,456Mobile phone shipped in 2015
49%of those
surveyed
own two
mobile
devices
PC sales fell to
12%of worldwide
device shipments
in 2015

62
WEB PERSONALIZATION AND DIGITAL ADVERTISING
Traditionally a key channel for online
acquisition, digital advertising has
hit its stride, with the ability to reach
customers at just the right time via
website retargeting, which places
display ads across an ad network for
a website visitor who leaves without
taking a desired action. Now, it’s not
just about serving ads to prospects
and customers at the right time—it’s
about retargeting them with the
right ad–one that’s specific to their
needs or interests. According to a
study from Econsultancy, 88% of
marketers say using social graph data
to personalize the online experience
has a high impact on both ROI and
engagement. But only 6% actually
do it. The visitor insights gathered
instantly via web personalization can
be used to personalize retargeting ads
when the visitor leaves your site. This
makes digital advertising a perfect
partner for web personalization.
For example, a web personalization
system may know that an anonymous
visitor is from the healthcare industry
and display a healthcare-focused case
study for this visitor. This information
is not typically known by an ad
retargeting platform, but what if it was
made available to the ad retargeting
platform? It would know this person
belongs in your healthcare segment
and could then serve a retargeting
ad that offers, for example, a best
practices whitepaper for healthcare
professionals. By leveraging this data
in your ad retargeting platform, you
can “reel” visitors back to your site to
show them more new and relevant
content when they get there by
using web personalization. This “1-2
punch” boosts website conversions
and delivers the kind of personalized
experience that consumers and
professionals have come to expect.
STRATEGIC THINKING
Integrating Cross Channel Marketing into
Your Web Personalization Strategy

63
STRATEGIC THINKING
WEB PERSONALIZATION AND DIGITAL ADVERTISING (continued)
If your web personalization system
is part of an overall marketing
automation solution, such as
Marketo’s, you can leverage a site
visitor’s lead or engagement score
or buyer stage to further personalize
web experiences and retargeting ads.
Someone highly engaged might get
a demo offer through a retargeting
ad if they are a business professional,
or a discount if they are a consumer
who has engaged through a number
of channels over time, but hasn’t
made a purchase.
Targeting your ads to the right
prospects—those who have already
engaged with your brand and
expressed interest—is a great way to
improve ad ROI and personalizing
those ads further increases your
results and ROI.
In the example below, you can see
advertisements on social media
targeted to segments that mirror those
in web personalization. These are
examples of web personalization and
retargeting working hand in hand.
Geo-Location Vertical Company Revenue

MARKETO WEB PERSONALIZATION
AND DIGITAL ADVERTISING
Marketo Web Personalization dynamically creates relevant website
experiences for individual visitors as they arrive on your site and browse
your content and pages. It connects to ad retargeting platforms, like
Facebook and Google, to instantly enhance what those platforms
know about your website visitors, so you can reach them with more
personalized retargeting ads. For example, because Marketo Web
Personalization is an application on the Marketo Engagement Marketing
Platform, it can leverage customer profile and intent data gathered
across many channels, such as email, social, mobile and more, plus
internal CRM systems. Let’s say a prospect signed up for a product trial,
then clicked on a link in an email to download a Getting Started guide.
Later, if the person comes to your website, Marketo Web Personalization
could present an offer to download a Top 3 Use Cases ebook. Then, after
leaving your website, your ad retargeting platform could display an ad
offering a Tips and Tricks guide.
This is how Marketo enables marketers to reach customers intelligently
across channels and nurture them through a process—in this case,
adopting a trial product. You can personalize your ads based on who the
individual is from their behavior, their demographics, where they are in the
buying cycle, their level of engagement with your brand, and the content
or offers they have viewed. With one streamlined view of the customer,
you can have more relevant conversations with buyers regardless of which
channel they are on—which is truly the holy grail for marketers!

65
EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is still one of the
most effective ways to market to
known audiences of prospects and
customers. In fact, according to
Capterra, 91% of U.S. consumers use
email every day. Furthermore, email
has been proven to prompt purchases
three times more often than social
media—and the average order value
is about 17% higher, according to
McKinsey. But imagine the tried and
true power of email combined with
other channels to create a consistent
story and experience.
Web personalization and email
marketing combined enable
marketers to create customized
experiences, respond in real-time
to customer behavior, and offer
each individual customer deals and
information about products and
services that they are looking for at
that moment—straight to their inbox.
Customer nurturing—across the
entire customer lifecycle—is better
with a personalized web experience
and emails that draw on the same
data to pick up where the other
left off. Marketers are now able to
offer customers a seamless and
personalized experience across all
channels, including personalized
emails in addition to your
personalized website.
OFFLINE MARKETING
While many marketing activities
are digital, there are plenty of
offline channels that can integrate
well with, and benefit from, web
personalization. For example, if
your company is a brick-and-mortar
store, retaining a database of your
customer’s activities in and out of the
store—such as social media contest
submissions, recent purchases,
online reviews, etc.—can help you
tailor your interactions with them. Do
you want that visitor to sign up for
your loyalty program? Invite them to
sign up during their in-store visit and
once they are a part of it, send them
a welcome email directing them to
your website to deliver a unique or
exclusive experience to encourage
the next action.
In another example, if you are
attending an industry tradeshow,
every scan that you get there can
serve as a way to target users who
visited your booth. You can use this
to score them as being interested
in your company and continue the
conversation with them post-show.
Or you can use this information to
offer location-based offers around
the vicinity of the show—so that
even prospects you didn’t scan,
but checked out your website after
seeing your booth, can have a
personalized experience and see
offers related to the specific event or
get offers to revisit the booth for a
personal meeting.
Another offline channel that web
personalization can enhance is print
advertising. If you send direct mail
campaigns, using personalized URLs
(PURLs) can not only drive your
customer to your website, but also
allow you to hand-select the type of
content they see. This can be a great
way to gather information about
your leads. For example, if you are
missing someone’s email address,
you can send them a direct mail piece
with a PURL to download a coupon.
When they visit the website, they’ll
be directed to a personalized landing
page to fill out their email address to
get the coupon. Once you have their
email, you can start including them in
your email nurture campaigns.
STRATEGIC THINKING

YOUR CROSS-CHANNEL WEB PERSONALIZATION PLANNING WORKSHEET
Use this worksheet to help you, and your team, determine how to incorporate web personalization into your activities for each of the
marketing channels listed below. It’s important that the web personalization type supports both your goal and your messages, and
coordinates tightly with the messages on the supporting channels. It’s OK to not use all of the channels or to have multiple rows for
some channels. We filled in the first section for you as an example:Marketing Channel Goal PersonalizationType Message/Offer/CTA Supporting
Channels Budget
Event Drive attendees tobooth Location-based
Visit our booth to meet aconsultant and for a chance towin an iPad
Social Media
Paid Advertising $1,000
Print
In-Store
Blog
Email
Website
Mobile
Review Sites
Social Media
Paid Advertising
Paid Search
Retargeting

67
CREATE A PERSONALIZED WEB
EXPERIENCE WITH CONTENT

68
Create a Personalized Web Experience with Content
A successful web personalization campaign requires
content. To create a fully personalized experience, map
out your existing content to include customized calls-
to-action, offers, and content for each segment, at each
stage of the customer journey. For instance, a CTA to
download an ebook should be personalized based on
the site visitor, and the ebook itself should be consistent
with the CTA and match the customer’s stage.
CONTENT DISCOVERY
Once you know who you’re targeting,
it’s time to decide what message
format you’d like to present to them.
Whether you’re a B2B marketer
working with content like case studies,
videos, and ebooks or a consumer
marketer working with special offers,
videos, and ads, you probably already
have content that appeals to many
of your different audience segments.
But personalization is all about making
sure that your content gets seen and
consumed by the right people and that
it provides value to them. To do that,
you may want to consider the type of
content you offer and at what stage it’s
best for, in addition to what it looks like
and where it will display on your site.
While it may sound daunting to
create the amount of customized
content needed to implement
web personalization, the fact is,
most of the content you need for
personalization already exists!
There are strategies you can employ
to do more with less. To make your
existing content go even further, you
can recreate sections to make them
more relevant to specific industries
or demographics.
CREATE A CONTENT PLAN

69
CONTENT DISCOVERY (continued)
Think about all of the ebooks,
customer reviews, case studies,
product videos, special offers, and
testimonials you already have. Can
you use those for different segments?
Can you change a few minor details
or examples in order to be relevant?
Employing a content recommendation
engine (which we will define in greater
detail later in this section) helps
you to provide a seamless, relevant
experience to your visitors. A content
discovery tool allows you to identify
the content you already have and
discover the opportunities to use it
and/or tailor it more effectively.
CONTENT TYPE
Many people wonder what type of
content they should use and when.
Video versus white papers, ebooks
versus case studies, or various types
of special offers versus customer
testimonials. While there is no one
answer (you should always test…
which we will cover later) there are
some best practices and guidelines
that indicate what type of content is
appropriate for different stages of the
customer journey. We’ll explore this
more on the next page.
CONTENT DISCOVERY
Some tools, like Marketo Web Personalization, offer a content
discovery module, which automatically discovers content on
your website. This helps you learn about all the content you
have available and its current consumption patterns and lead
gen performance, making it easier for you to choose which
content to display and to whom, without the manual work of
listing and evaluating it.
Books Video
Case study Article

70
1. Early-Stage:
This content addresses buyers
that are becoming aware of your
product or service, therefore the
content you offer should be easily
accessible. The goal here is to build
awareness and thought leadership,
or address a pain point. This type
of content doesn’t really talk about
products or services. Often, it is
digestible and lightweight—such
as videos, infographics, or happy
customer testimonials.
2. Mid-Stage:
This content most often addresses
buyers during the engagement
stage as they are considering a
purchase. At this stage, your buyer
has an addressable need, so your
content can be more specific to
your product or service. Because
you are trying to learn more about
your buyer (converting anonymous
visitors to known), content at this
stage is usually gated. In many
cases, your mid-stage assets or
offers may be your most valuable
assets—whether that’s a third-party
analyst report or strong special offer.
3. Late-Stage:
The content at this stage is
meant to remove any barriers
to conversion. Your content
aims to answer why the buyer
should purchase from you.
This means you can draw your
big guns in terms of content—
offering a checklist for purchase
consideration, customer reviews,
or your best offer (whether that’s
a percentage discount and free
shipping if you “Buy Now” or
“Meet our CTO”).
After mapping out your campaign
matrix (which we do in the next
section), you may discover that you
have some content gaps that you
need to fill.
Early-Stage
Mid-Stage
Late-Stage

71
CONTENT AND THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
To effectively map out your content,
consider which content you will
deliver to each of your segments at
each stage of the customer journey.
It’s critical that your content is not only
tailored to who your visitors are, but
where they are in their journey. Web
personalization software allows you to
adjust your calls-to-action based on
the person visiting your website.
Outline your chosen groups—
whether you’re targeting separate
regions, demographics, or verticals—
and select relevant content for each
stage of the buyer journey.
B2B Campaign Program Matrix
For B2B, this will include sections for
awareness, interest, evaluation, and
commitment (this maps closely to
the stages of the customer lifecycle
we discussed earlier in this guide,
but keep in mind that each marketer
may have different stages defined).
You might start with an infographic
or short video for awareness, move
on to a testimonial or case study for
interest, and finish with a demo
or 3rd party analyst report as you
near conversion.
To the right is an example plan for an
industry vertical. You can see that the
content is not only tailored to the
segment and its interests, but also
the stage. If you have more than
one asset that could fit a certain
segment and stage, don’t overthink
it—test it. Use segmented A/B testing
(we will talk about this in a later
section) to learn which asset actually
works best for each segment
and stage.
This matrix template can be used for
other scenarios other than segment/
stage such as segment/location,
customer type/location, and more.
In the next example, you can
see how CA Technologies—an IT
management software and
solutions company—mapped
out their campaign matrix for
web personalization.
Campaign Program Matrix
Example: Vertical Customer Journey: Company X
Segment/
Asset Type
Awareness Interest Evaluation Commitment
Fortune 500
Companies
State of the
Modern Meeting
Infographic
Facebook
Case Study
How Company X
Helps You
Live Demo
Company X
Advanced Solutions
User Group
Educational
Industry
Learning with
Company X
Use Case
Wharton University
Testimonial
Cloud-based Video
Conferencing
Whitepaper
Company X
User Summit
Event/Conference
Named Account
Lists
Company X
Demo Center
Overview Video
Wharton Connects
Students
Videocast
Company X
Mandate and
Promise
Advanced Services
Join Our Top
Executives
Networking
Meeting
Awareness
Anonymous
Education
Known Lead Score 20
Validation
20 Lead Score 50
Solutions
50 Lead Score 100
How To Buy
Lead Score 100

72
Campaign Program Matrix
Example: Consumer Product
Target Segments Awareness Interest Decision
Product Interest A Product Highlights
Infographic
Product A Versus
the Others
Video Comparison
Last Minute
Special Offers
Localized Delivery and
Shipping Details
Shipping Policy
Product Interest B Product Introduction
Introduction Video
Happy Customer
Testimonial
How Product B Won
International Awards
Press Release
Consumer Campaign
Program Matrix
For consumers, you would typically
include three sections: awareness,
consideration, and decision
(depending on the length of your
sales cycle and type of product/
service). Identify content assets
for each phase. To promote brand
awareness, you could start with a
product highlight featuring your
most popular item and then move
onto a customer testimonial once
their interest has perked. Finally, you
may want to seal the deal with a
special offer.
A campaign matrix for consumers
might look like this:

73
Original Report
Breakout Assets for Segments—two infographics
PDF
Infographics
CHOOSE AND CREATE
SMART CONTENT
Content is the fuel that drives
personalization success. Instead of
creating tons of new customized
content from scratch, make the most of
existing assets by recreating particular
sections, changing visuals, or modifying
CTAs. The trick is to repurpose what
you have and tweak it to fit the needs
of each particular segment.
Repurpose Content
To maximize the potential of your
personalized campaigns, you may
have to create new content, but you
may also be able to repurpose some
of the assets you already have. Take
a look at the relevant content you’ve
already developed and see if you
can revise the following to make it
targeted to your specific groups:
• Titles: Revise titles as necessary
to better resonate with your
target readers.
• CTAs: Edit the call-to-action to
reflect the targeted segment.
• Statistics and Copy: Look for
industry-specific studies or other
data unique to each segment.
• Maximize Content: Slice and dice
the content you have into smaller
assets, like cheat sheets, short
ebooks, or even blog posts. In
the following example, you can
see how a larger report, The Rise
of The Marketer, was broken into
different assets based on segment.
• Visuals: Can you swap out the
cover page and some of the
interior artwork to make it feel
more relevant and targeted to
your audience?

74
understand what content works
and doesn’t work.
TEST AND OPTIMIZE
YOUR CONTENT
understand what content works and
doesn’t work. Whether you’re using a
content recommendation engine or
not, it’s a great way to identify whether
your content, message, or offer
resonates with your target audience.
We’ll get into the details of how
to test and optimize your specific
campaigns later in this guide,
but it’s important to make this
part of your web personalization
practice—not only to make your web
personalization more effective, but
also to fine-tune your messaging
and content creation efforts for your
whole organization and identify gaps.
CONTENT PLACEMENT
A good web personalization tool
allows you to not only choose what
specific content to display, but also
offers various ways to do so. For
instance, you can swap an existing
part of your page with a relevant case
study or use an overlay to provide
a more proactive CTA promoting
a local event. We’ll get into where
your web personalization campaigns
can go on your website later, in the
“Choosing the Right Place To Serve
Your Personalized Content” section.

75
Once you’re equipped with all the assets you need,
this is when content recommendation engines (CRE),
such as Marketo Predictive Content, come into play.
WHAT’S A PREDICTIVE CONTENT RECOMMENDATION ENGINE?
CREs do four things to help marketers deliver a successful web
personalization experience:
1. Auto-discover and map all of your content assets.
2. Learn which content works best and for who.
3. Recommend relevant content to web visitors—known and unknown.
4. Increase content consumption and onsite engagement and conversions.
Content discovery and recommendation engines (CREs) combine the speed
of real-time targeting and personalization with the insights of machine-
learning and predictive analytics.
According to eMarketer, only 57% of digital marketing decision-makers are
using machine learning to personalize interactions across digital channels.
There is a huge amount of room for growth and for organizations to take
advantage of the benefits of this incredibly personalized and targeted way
to communicate with their visitors.
PREDICTIVE CONTENT
RECOMMENDATION
4. Increase
content consumption
and onsite engagement
and conversions
1. Auto-discover
and map all of your
content assets
2. Learn
which content works
best and for who
3. Recommend
relevant content to
web visitors—known
and unknown
WHAT’S A PREDICTIVE CONTENT RECOMMENDATION ENGINE?

76
MARKETO’S PREDICTIVE CONTENT
Marketo’s Predictive Content is
designed to identify visitor profile and
behavior patterns and automatically
discover and recommend the
most appropriate content for each
interaction. The content discovery
engine automatically discovers all
of the content assets on your site—
blogs, videos, case studies, ebooks,
and more—eliminating the need
for a manual inventory project. This
shows you all the “inventory” you
have, including the consumption
performance of each content piece.
Then, it leverages machine learning to
recommend the right content, to the
right visitor, at the right time.
Essentially, the platform discovers
and maps your content assets, learns
which content works best for specific
visitors, and uses this information
to recommend the most relevant
content to your visitors. This tool
supports your web personalization
campaigns by providing valuable
content in real-time to accelerate
buyers further along their journey.
You will still run your rule-based,
targeted campaigns as usual, but
the CRE will also be running in the
background to supplement your
campaigns with additional content
to increase consumption.
PREDICTIVE CONTENT RECOMMENDATION
Marketo’s Predictive Content Dashboard analytics for a single asset A deeper look at the Predictive Content dashboard for a single asset

77
Marketo’s Content Recommendation Engine Dashboard with Content Analytics
Think about it this way: while a CMO
at a financial services company might
be underwhelmed by a general
marketing whitepaper, she might
be more likely to take a look at a
marketing whitepaper written with
her industry in mind that addresses
her pain points. The CRE system also
takes previous behavior into account
to deliver new results with each
new visit, slowly drawing her toward
conversion. So in this example, after
the CMO downloads a whitepaper,
she may be presented with a new
content asset, such as a different
targeted whitepaper or webinar.
Content suggestions allow you to
dramatically increase the value of web
personalization with little effort. In this
example, you can see how Marketo
leverages content suggestions
from its CRE engine to provide a
suggestion to a blog reader.
CONTENT ANALYTICS
Understanding the value that
each content asset provides to a
specific audience is one benefit of
a CRE, which highlights your top
performing assets automatically by
serving them more often. This can
be instructive when it comes time
to request new content assets or
choose what to refresh.
PREDICTIVE CONTENT RECOMMENDATION

78
Where and when you place your personalized content
in front of your targeted audience can have an impact
on the overall effectiveness.
WHERE TO USE PERSONALIZATION
There is a wide range of options for where to place your content (homepage,
inner page, blog, all of the above) and the actual visual to use (floating dialog,
in-zone replacement, and widget)—essentially, anywhere on your website in a
variety of ways. Let’s take a look at the most common places:
CHOOSING THE RIGHT
PLACE TO SERVE YOUR
PERSONALIZED CONTENT
source: eMarketer, Researchscape
Types of Personalized Web Messages/Content
Used by Marketers Worldwide
% of respondents
Pop-ups (messages of varying sizes that appear anywhere on the page)
Inline content (text or images inserted dynamically within the page content)
Information bars (messages across top or bottom of page)
Callouts (short explanatory messages that call attention to specific items on the page
Inline edits (text or images that change or replace existing page content)
Survey questions (interactive polls/surveys selectively added/inserted to page content)
Other
None of the above
53%
53%
43%
41%
27%
22%
6%
5%

79
Homepage: This personalized content sits on the homepage of your website,
making the visitor’s experience on your site unique upon landing on the page.
In this example, elastic—a data insights company—customizes their homepage
for their visitors based on the region they are coming from.
Standard elastic homepage
Elastic homepage for visitors from German-speaking countries—note the second
call-to-action changes
Elastic homepage for United Kingdom visitors—note the second call-to-action changes.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT PLACE TO SERVE
YOUR PERSONALIZED CONTENT

80
Inner-page: Placing personalized
content on the subpages of your
website allows you to offer your visitors
unique content based on how invested
or deep into your website they get. In
many cases, your visitors will not land
on your homepage or a designated
landing page, but rather on an internal
page with good SEO rankings and one
relevant to their previous searches.
Being able to personalize wherever
a visitor might land is therefore
essential. For example, if a visitor
lands on a product page, with web
personalization you would be able to
show the visitor a video that is relevant
to them, based on their industry or
gender, or any other attribute.
Landing Page: Like a personalized
web page, a personalized landing page
that offers your visitor something or
aims to convert them can make a big
difference. This is especially true when
it comes to optimizing your digital
advertising or email marketing efforts.
After delivering a highly targeted
advertisement or email, driving your
visitors to an un-personalized page
makes them feel disconnected.
However, a page that can continue
the conversation will convert at a
higher rate. Even though most landing
pages are purpose-built for a specific
campaign, they may still receive traffic
from various segments, depending on
the email or ad that drives prospects
to it. Therefore, it is effective to further
personalize them based on key
attributes of your visitors.
Good web personalization tools let you
choose to display ads on one or all of
the options listed before, in which case,
personalized content will be presented
to a visitor wherever he might land in
your site, using widgets or other visuals
that look appropriate across site.
Beyond that, you are also able to place
your content on different areas of the
page, some being more interruptive
and others being relatively unobtrusive
to the overall website experience.
Here are some of the most common
ways to personalize on a page:
Dialog: This is an overlay box that
comes up in the middle of the page
or on one of its sides and corners,
while the rest of the page fades in
the background (optional). This is a
great option when you really want to
capture a visitor’s attention because
it immediately interrupts the visitor
in the middle of their path to your
site. You want to reserve these for
high-value, high-importance offers
because there is a possibility that a
visitor does not respond well to the
interruption and then bounces out.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT PLACE TO SERVE YOUR PERSONALIZED CONTENT
Dialog box example

81
In-Zone: An in-zone personalized
experience happens when the
personalization platform replaces
a specific area or zone of the site.
Many of these zones are identified by
DIV tags, that almost every website
has, making it very easy for the
marketer to choose different ones to
swap for different cases.
Image A: In-Zone section of website without personalization and with original content
Image B: In-Zone section of website personalized with content specifically for “companies with a mobile app”
In-zone Personalization Example: The
before and after of in-zone personalization.

Widget: Similar to the dialog
personalization, widget personalization
appears as a user navigates the site;
however, it slides out on either the
left or right side of the page. From a
visitor experience perspective, this
provides an unobstructed view of
the page while also offering them
personalized content. There is also
an option to have the widget almost
disappear and yet remain available
for the visitor to review all throughout
their visit. In this example below from
CA Technologies—an IT management
software and solutions company—
you can see the widget on the right
appears on designated pages that offer
articles specifically on security.
Redirect: You may find that you
have a segment that you only want
to see specific content or perhaps a
mini site tailored for that audience.
Web personalization can help with
that too by quickly identifying them
and taking them to a page or mini
site that’s built specifically for them,
with the products and messages that
are relevant to them. With a redirect,
the visitor never reaches the original
page they navigated to; instead, they
are identified based on their targeted
characteristics and taken to a page
that is more relevant to them.
IDEAS FOR PERSONALIZATION
99 Calls-to-Action
99 Special offers
99 Content item
 Ebook
 Case study
 Customer review
99 Blog
99 Dynamic customer
logos
99 Event promotions
99 Dynamic phone
numbers
(per location)
Widget Example: CA Technologies widget appears only on specific pages with certain
content topics.

84
A/B Testing
By testing your personalization efforts, your website
personalization becomes one of the most powerful
tools in your marketing arsenal. It provides real data on
how web personalization makes a difference on your
site and to your visitors by pointing out which content
assets or calls-to-action have the greatest impact on
specific audiences.
Testing is an important element of creating a successful web personalization strategy
and campaign. By using A/B testing, it is easier to optimize your web personalization
campaigns for greater ROI.
A/B testing is created to be inherently simple—you are only testing one single variable
at a time. This makes it easier to form actionable conclusions. By assessing the actions
of buyers, A/B testing reveals what truly appeals to them. In doing so, it also advances
visitor engagement, campaign effectiveness, and marketing expertise. A good web
personalization tool allows you to A/B test for specific segments and audiences rather
than to your whole audience, which makes the results more relevant.
WHAT IS A/B TESTING?
A/B Testing, also known as split testing, compares two or more
versions of the same campaign or message on a certain channel
so you can determine what is working and what isn’t.
A/B TESTING
LEMON
LAVENDER
COCONUT
BILBERRY

85
WHY IS A/B TESTING IMPORTANT?
1. A/B testing increases
engagement with customers:
The goal of A/B testing is to
improve interactions between
buyers and brands by uncovering
which campaign variations
resonate the most with the target
audience. Since this type of
testing applies to everything from
more engaging personalized
emails to social networks, it
opens up all channels to
stronger communication.
2. A/B testing enhances campaign
effectiveness and optimizes
programs for a company’s
target audience:
By trying out different combinations
for a specific group of customers,
marketers can eliminate elements
that alienate users, drive visitors
away, or have no effect on
conversion rates whatsoever. In
addition, all audiences do not
respond identically to a single
campaign, so by testing different
versions, marketers can identify
which ones work best for
specific segments.
3. A/B testing enhances marketers’
awareness and expertise of
audience preferences:
A/B testing provides businesses
with enormous amounts of
data on audience behavior.
The more tests marketers run, the
more robust their understanding
will be, and they can begin to
make more intuitive choices
in their marketing.
SET UP MULTIPLE CAMPAIGNS
There are several components to any
campaign, and it’s possible to run A/B
tests for all of them. The more you
A/B test, the better insight you have
for your next campaign. Create more
than one version of a campaign for
each segment, so that you have a
basis for comparison. Each campaign
might include different CTAs, different
content for each stage of the buyer
journey, and even unique ad targeting.
But, be sure to only test one element
at a time so your conclusions are
clear and easy to draw. Many web
personalization tools can help by
automatically performing your A/B
testing with minimal setup.
An example of healthcare campaigns being A/B tested and their metrics within Marketo’s Web Personalization app
A/B TESTING

WHAT TO TEST
When it comes to A/B testing
your web personalization
campaigns, you can test
almost anything. With that
being said, here are some
general areas to consider
and pursue:
Messages
…… Which message and/or copy
resonated the most with your
target audience?
…… Test different messaging for
new vs. returning visitors.
…… Create seasonal or
location-based offers and
test them on visitors living
in specific locations.
Promotion Location
…… Which visual impacted the
most conversions? Dialog, in-
zone, or widget?
…… Page location: Where in a page
is it best to personalize for a
specific type of campaign–the
main banner, the boxes below
it, or the sidebar?
…… Test different page designs for
new vs. returning visitors.
Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
…… Buy now? Purchase?
Download? Learn more?
Change your CTA text on
your buttons to see which
word or phrase converts the
most visitors.
…… Vary the location of your CTA
button—make some more
prominent than others.
…… Test different colors, shapes,
and sizes of images for CTA
buttons on your website.
Content
…… Test different content relevant to
a visitor’s segment and profile.
…… Test gated content against
non-gated content. Find out
which gets more downloads
and whether users are willing
to fill out forms.
…… Test how and where your
content is displayed. Do users
prefer your content to be part
of the page or on a pop-up? Do
you see higher success if they
stay on the same page or if you
have them navigate to a more
specific page?
Copy
…… Test different headline texts.
Try headlines that are more
straightforward, goofy,
or creative based on
your audience.
…… Test paragraphs vs. bulleted lists.
…… Test shorter vs. longer copy.
Visual Media
…… Test different types of
imagery—people vs. products
and photos vs. illustrations.
…… See how stock images stack
up against images of your
employees or customers
in action.
…… Test auto-play against click-to-
play for videos.
Site Navigation
…… Test the order of the menu
items in your site navigation.
…… Test the display of your
navigation bar. Do visitors
prefer a horizontal or
vertical orientation?
Forms
…… Test the length of sign-up forms.
…… Try a special offer, discount, or
promotion to increase sign-ups.
…… Try asking for different pieces of
information in your form fields.
Pricing and Shipping
…… Test a free trial offer vs. a free
demo offer for short-term and
long-term conversions.
…… Test annual billing vs. monthly
billing on your pricing page.
Which generates more
subscriptions?
A/B TESTINGA/B TESTING

SEE WHAT WORKED BEST
Keep track of the insights gleaned
from your A/B tests and keep this
data in mind for your next web
personalization campaign. Continue
to utilize A/B testing with each of your
campaigns so you can measure and
improve your campaigns over time.
You know the drill; without A/B
testing, you’ll never know what
works (and what doesn’t) or
what might work better in your
personalization campaigns. So,
what kind of metrics should you
be examining up close? Tools like
Marketo’s Web Personalization
automatically track five key metrics
when it comes to testing:
Impressions/Views:
Impressions are the number of times
your web personalization campaign
is displayed to different visitors,
whether it is clicked on or not. Based
on your targeting and configurations,
customers may see multiple
impressions of the same campaign.
Clicks:
This is simply the number of times
your personalized web campaign gets
clicked on. Note: some campaigns
are not aimed at getting clicks, but
rather at providing a better holistic
experience for the customer.
Examples are displaying a local phone
number to provide a more local
feel, changing site images based on
weather, or displaying company logos
relevant to a certain industry.
Click-Through Rate:
Click-through rate (CTR) is a measure
of the efficiency of a test or web
personalization campaign. It is the
percentage of clicks to impressions and
is a metric that marketers can use to
compare the performance of different
campaigns. For example, if a marketer
runs a web personalization campaign
on a product page to a segmented
audience of 5,000 visitors and on the
homepage to an audience of 200,000
visitors, the CTR of each of these
campaigns is a metric that the marketer
can compare with: to identify which
campaign performed better. So if the
campaign was seen 100,000 times
(impressions) and 100 users clicked it,
the CTR is 100/100,000 = 0.01 or 1%.
Leads Generated:
In B2B, leads generated is one of
the most important measurement
points. It counts the amount of leads
that converted following a successful
web personalization campaign. This
might occur when promoting gated
content that requires visitors to fill out
a form to download or even when
promoting ungated content that is
convincing enough that the visitors
then choose to contact you.
Revenue/Purchase:
More typical to consumer and
e-commerce sites that sell via the
web, marketers can measure the
direct impact of their personalization
campaigns on online purchases.
Some results show the click-to-buy
flow, while others impact buying
behavior by simply displaying content
that isn’t necessarily clicked (such
as improved shipping terms for a
given location).
A/B TESTING
CTR = Clicks/Impressions
87
HOW LONG
SHOULD YOU RUN
AN A/B TEST?
At Marketo, we run our web
personalization tests for about
2-4 weeks to reach statistical
significance (the length of time
depends on how much traffic
the site gets). But keep in mind
that different company sizes
will have different benchmarks.
You can even set your test to
run autonomously if your web
personalization tool offers
auto-tuning. Once you set
up your test and it’s reached
statistical significance, the
tool will start only running the
winning test.

Predictive Optimization
A predictive content engine is constantly working to optimize how content
is served to your website visitors. This engine is effectively an automatic
multivariate A/B test done over and over again every time you have a
website visitor.
Predictive content recommendation engines test assumptions and make
evidence-based conclusions to deliver the most relevant results. In
Marketo’s Web Personalization tool, for example, this type of optimization
is backed by complex algorithms and machine learning, rather than
trigger-based content offers.
A complex tool with predictive optimization is actually very easy to use as
it’s almost 100% automatic apart from some configuration options and
helps marketers achieve the most effective results much faster than a
manual testing process.
While predictive optimization is generally an automatic process, there are
still lessons that you can learn from it. It might highlight content gaps that
you have or help you realize that while you promote a specific type of
asset more, another type does very well organically. Use the learnings you
gather from the predictive content recommendation engine to help you
calibrate your content creation.

89
INTEGRATION WITH
ANALYTICS TOOLS
A good web personalization tool
will integrate seamlessly with other
technologies, allowing you to
get a full and robust view of your
customer. These integrations can
provide a symbiotic effect on the
technologies, enhancing each other’s
capabilities. For example, Marketo’s
Web Personalization tool integrates
with both Marketo’s marketing
automation platform and its features,
including Marketo Ad Bridge and
Google Analytics. In both cases, web
personalization augments the data of
the original platform, fine-tuning the
understanding of customer activities
across channels and benefitting
from the data flowing from
these platforms.
Additionally, integration with popular
web analytics tools, like Google
Analytics and Adobe SiteCatalyst,
allows marketers to enrich those
platforms with firmographic data to
enable better reporting and advanced
slicing and dicing of data.
A/B TESTING

Measurement
91
3 LEVELS OF MEASUREMENT
How do marketers measure web personalization?
% of respondents
Note: n=90; among those who use real-time personalization; *data-driven personalization
completed in less than 1 second.” Source: eMarketer, Researchscape 2015
Selecting the right metrics to measure the success of
your web personalization, like any marketing activity, is
extremely important—not only for any one campaign but
also for determining the ROI of the channel as a whole.
Based on the goals you set for your web personalization
efforts, there are some standard early, mid, and
late-stage metrics that you may want to track.
Measurement
58%Conversion lift
40%Increase in time on site
22%Increase in customer
satisfaction
39%Revenue lift 11%Improve retention rate
37%Increase in page views
22%Don’t measure
the benefits

Measurement
Web Personalization Metrics—From Early to Late
1. EARLY-STAGE METRICS
These early-stage, or engagement,
metrics demonstrate that your web
personalization campaigns are
making an impact and generating
engagement and interest on your
website. Consider measuring:
• Time on Site: This is the next step
beyond the time on page metric
as it tracks the entire length of
time a visitor is on your site—across
multiple pages.
• Visitor Frequency: This metric
tracks how many times in
a specific period (you can
determine the period) the
same visitor comes to your site.
Revisiting a website is usually a
good indicator of interest.
• Content Consumed/Pages
Visited: The content consumed
or pages visited indicates a level of
engagement and self-education
or research. The goal of most
websites is to engage their visitors,
so having your visitor consume
more content and visit more of
your site is a good indicator.
• Volume of Known vs. Unknown
Visitors: While this metric doesn’t
show engagement, it is an
interesting metric to track as a
trend over time. The volume of
your known versus unknown
visitors over time can show you
the opportunity and potential
reach you have with a tool like
web personalization.
• New vs. Returning Visitors: This
metric allows you to see the mix
of visitors coming to your site
and helps you shape your web
personalization strategy—i.e. where
in the buying journey you will get
more value from personalization.
• Time on Page: This tracks the
amount of time a specific visitor
spent on an individual page. A
longer period of time generally
indicates a higher interest or
engagement level and is considered
a positive indicator. This is closely
related to time on site.
Increase in time on site,
content consumption,
and page visited
Lower bounce
rate, increase in
return visitors
Lift in your digital
advertising ROI
Contact quality
is higher
Number of actions
taken increases
Opportunities/
pipeline Revenue attribution ROI
92

93
Measurement
2. MID-STAGE METRICS
Mid-stage metrics, also known as
conversion, are more focused on
getting the right visitor to engage
and become a contact in your
database. Finding more of the right
kinds of visitors is a key advantage of
web personalization and therefore
something that organizations should
track and measure. Let’s look at some
common mid-stage metrics:
• Actions Taken: When a visitor
comes to your site and fills out a
form—whether that’s for a content
asset, coupon, or mailing list—you
learn more about them. This action
is also considered as visitor activity.
Beyond engagement, driving lead-
generating activity on your website
is a critical metric of success.
• Contact Quality: Are the people
visiting your website and taking
action the right people? You know
your target audiences and you
want to attract more of them, so
track the volume of the profiles
you are looking for and targeting.
Are you seeing an increase?
• Lift in Digital Advertising ROI:
Your digital advertisements target
and retarget visitors across the
web. With web personalization,
you are able to personalize the
pages they land on. Track if there
is a lift in the conversion rates
from these pages.

Measurement
3. LATE-STAGE METRICS
Late-stage, or revenue-oriented,
metrics give marketers insight into
how marketing activities specifically
impacted revenue and allow them
to see the ROI of their activities.
Not only does web personalization
generate its own ROI, it’s important
to consider its impact on other
programs—does it make your
advertising more effective? This
cannot only show value for your web
personalization activities, but can
help you see higher ROI across
other channels and help you make
budget allocation decisions. Some
late-stage metrics that you may want
to track include:
• Opportunities: While this is a
B2B-centric metric, it illustrates
how web personalization
activities fill the pipeline with
sales opportunities. Aside from
sales revenue, this is one of
the most powerful metrics
to show the ROI of your web
personalization efforts.
• Revenue Attribution: This metric
is the consumer equivalent of
opportunities—it demonstrates
what revenue came as a result
of your web personalization
activities, mainly on site purchases
and, when applicable, immediate
offline purchases such as
contacting a sales center.
SHOW REPORTS TO SALES
If you’re in a business that operates with a sales team, at some point
you’ll need to turn over these primed accounts to them to help you turn
your engaged contacts into closed sales. To begin this transition, start
putting together reports from your web personalization campaign.
Key Organizations from Sales Territories: Once the campaign has been
up and running, are certain organizations showing more interest in your
company than others? Are these organizations a good fit for your company?
Key Leads Coming from Sales Territories: Are there specific
decision-makers you located in sales territories? Be sure to
highlight these as well as their level of engagement.
Specific Reports on Mobile Data: Produce reports on how many
leads accessed your materials using mobile devices. This information is
valuable for sales reps and is also a key consideration for future campaigns.

95
BUILDING YOUR WEB
PERSONALIZATION TEAM

96
Your web personalization marketing starts with
creating a strategy that addresses and supports your
organizational marketing goals. Then, you need to
actually implement it—and for many organizations,
this requires identifying the resources you need.
Web personalization tools, like Marketo’s, can be a simple deployment and,
based on the tool, may be able to integrate seamlessly into your existing
marketing automation platform. Understanding how you want to deploy a
web personalization tool will help you identify how to allocate the people
and resources needed to manage it. Because of the variety in organizations’
sizes, we separated our guidelines based on whether you have a small (1-10) or
medium/large (10+) marketing team so that you can determine the best way
for you to structure your web personalization team resources.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO RUN
WEB PERSONALIZATION

Position

Add to Roster

Admin

Power User

Content Creator

Data Analysis

A few items that can take up resources when you are implementing web personalization
that you may want to consider are:
• Content: If you don’t already have existing content, you may want to develop it.
If you do have existing content, but it needs to be repurposed for specific, targeted
audiences—consider who will do this and on what timeline. With smart repurposing,
creating content often does not take much time.
• Technical Ability: The standard web personalization tool deployment does not
take much technical skill. For implementation, it’s as simple as adding a snippet of
JavaScript to your website, similar to when you deploy Google Analytics. No coding
or HTML skills are required.
• Marketing Automation: If you are already using marketing automation, you
probably already have the relevant skill set to support web personalization, and in
many cases the same people deploying marketing automation will be the ones
using web personalization. If this team is already overloaded, you might need to
add a resource to them.
• Existing Activities: Typically, web personalization becomes part of your current
audience targeting and existing campaigns and promotions. This means that
most of the underlying logic of who to target and what to say to them, including
the content, images, and messages themselves, already exist and can be reused.
For example, your next event promotion typically already has an email invite with
relevant text and images, a landing page, and a targeting criteria, so there isn’t much
additional work required to deploy it on your site with web personalization.
• Number of Concurrent Programs: The number of different offers, promotions,
and different target audiences will obviously impact the resources you will require.
While the possibilities are near endless, it doesn’t mean you have to have a hundred
campaigns running on day one. You have to walk before you run—start small and
build your campaigns as your team, or capacity, grows.
GET STAKEHOLDER BUY-IN
The first step in executing a web personalization strategy for
your organization is assembling a cross-functional team of
stakeholders to vet your plan and agree on the objectives and
metrics of success. Based on your organization’s structure,
it’s important to achieve the buy-in of your executives by
illustrating how web personalization fits into and supports your
organizational marketing goals.
Also consider including the team members that will benefit from
or help with the deployment like your web development team,
customer lifecycle stage owners, or channel owners.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO RUN
WEB PERSONALIZATION
97

98
With a small or medium-sized team,
you know that with any activity you take
on, you need to be resourceful to cover
as much ground as possible without
stretching your team too thin. With a
small team, you are forced to focus
on the tasks that matter the most in
carrying out your web personalization
strategy and meeting your goals. So
with limited resources, how you divvy
up web personalization responsibilities
really depends on your marketing
organization’s structure. Here are a few
roles that we think a small- to medium-
sized team may want to consider:
• Admin/Web Personalization
Champion: On a team with very
limited resources, this might be the
only role that you have. This person
could wear many hats and their
day-to-day role may be to manage
different aspects of marketing—like
parts of your customer lifecycle or
various marketing channels, where
web personalization is just one of
the programs or channels they work
on. This person is the champion for
driving a web personalization strategy
at your organization. Often, they act
as the centralized admin for the tool
itself and understand the tool inside
and out. Depending on the size of
your team, this might also be the
person who executes and reports on
its success. In many cases, this person
won’t need to dedicate more than a
couple of hours a day to running and
maintaining web personalization.
• Power User: These may be
marketers in other roles, for
example, a field marketer, who runs
their own cross-channel program.
Power users understand how to
use the tool—including how to
add their segmentation, create
campaigns, and measure their
success on web personalization
and as a part of their overall
cross-channel marketing effort.
SMALL- TO MEDIUM-SIZED TEAMS

99
• Creative Services: You may need
to tap into your creative services
resources in order to get the
personalized visuals you need to
coordinate with your personalized
content and offers. If you plan your
campaigns and offers in advance, this
can come as a bundle of requests
and be completed all at once.
• Content Creator: While you don’t
need new content to implement
web personalization, you do need
someone who understands the
voice, tone, and unique attributes
of your target segments. On a
very small team, this might be
the same person who creates
your campaigns. But if you have
a content team, you may want to
request the small changes you
need for each audience through
them. If you do plan to create
new content beyond repurposing
what you already have, a person
responsible for content comes in
handy—saving time and making
sure your content has the correct
messaging for your audience.
The bottom line is that most SMBs
have one or two people focused on
web personalization and are able
to show great results, even though
neither of them is fully dedicated to
that task but rather handles it 20-40%
of the time.
SMALL TO MEDIUM-SIZED TEAMS

Do I Need a Web Developer?
The best web personalization tools offer a quick
and easy implementation—as simple as adding
a line of JavaScript to your website—similar
to Google Analytics and therefore, need no
development knowledge or help whatsoever.
In some cases, depending on how you want to
use web personalization, you may require more
technical skills. For example, if you want to use
in-zone personalization, but your site is not set
up with zone tags for the different sections of
the page, you may need a web developer to add
those to your site template–this would be a short,
one-time effort. If you don’t have access to a web
developer, you can still use a web personalization
tool for the other placements on a page.

101
With a large team, there is often more
specialization within each role. This
can be a great benefit because it often
means you have the ability to test and
do richer optimization for your target
segments. You also may have more
audiences, products, territories, and
business units to serve.
In large organizations, there are
two main ways web personalization
is handled:
1. Each business unit or territory has
almost full independence running
their own programs, sometimes
without much more than basic central
governance and sometimes even on
separate instances.
2. There is a stronger central team
that provides campaign services to
the business units based on their
requirements. The business unit’s focal
points can review results and approve
visuals, but not launch campaigns.
While this method relies heavily on the
existing structure of your marketing
team, it is sometimes more suitable,
since there is typically one site that
hosts all products and receives traffic
from all audiences.
Certain responsibilities, like the
ones described for small teams,
are critical to a sound web
personalization strategy and should
be a part of every team. Because
you have the ability to invest in
additional people, it’s a good idea
to make sure that the following
responsibilities are covered:
Each business running their own programs A central team that provides campaign services to the business units
LARGE TEAMS

102
• Dedicated Web Personalization
Strategist: Having a single person
responsible for understanding how
your web personalization activities
complement other cross-channel
marketing activities can be a huge
advantage. This role is responsible
for educating the marketing team
on the capabilities and benefits of
web personalization. Additionally,
they should understand the
marketing activities across the
board and determine if there
are opportunities to implement
web personalization to make an
incremental impact.
• Data Analysis: Data is always there
for the taking, but there’s not always
someone to devote time to it. With
a large team, someone can take
on this role full-time, assessing the
effectiveness of various campaigns
and then making recommendations
for the future accordingly. While
the auto-tuning and content
recommendation elements of
your web personalization tool add
an automated element to making
these decisions, having someone
dedicated to diving into the data
injects higher ROI into your web
personalization efforts. In many
cases the Data Analyst is responsible
for analyzing various channel
performance—web, email, paid,
and social—and the interaction
between them.
• Cross-Functional Power Users:
Unlike on a small team, on a large
team, you may have many individual
program owners and therefore
many more people interested in
personally implementing web
personalization as a part of their
campaigns. These power users
are responsible for creating an
optimized web experience for a
specific segment or audience within
their campaigns.
• Content/Developer/Design: As
your web personalization scales
across your organization, so will
your demands for unique designs,
targeted content, and specialized
web personalization campaigns.
Each of which will require resources
from their respective teams or even
an individual responsible for that on
your web personalization team.
LARGE TEAMS

103
BUILDING YOUR
WEB PERSONALIZATION
TOOLBOX

104
A web personalization tool is
necessary if you want to make web
personalization a seamless part of
your marketing programs. In fact,
according to eMarketer, more than
85% of marketers who use a web
personalization tool that incorporates
real-time capabilities are satisfied
with their tool. Implementing a web
personalization tool allows you
to spend time planning strategic
campaigns, rather than assembling
the right people and resources to
execute all the technical details.
If you are already marketing to a
set of segments or personas across
your other marketing channels,
and you have a website and a few
offers or pieces of content, you have
what it takes to get started with web
personalization. So why wouldn’t you?
As we demonstrated throughout this
guide, web personalization is a low-
risk, high-reward marketing activity
that many marketers haven’t utilized. If
you’re ready to get started, in the next
section we’ll explore what to look for
in a web personalization tool.
As we covered throughout this guide, web
personalization is a critical component of how you
talk to customers as individuals and with relevant
messages. If you’re not using web personalization as a
part of your marketing mix, you’re missing out.
DO YOU NEED A WEB PERSONALIZATION TOOL?
ANY CMS. ANY CONTENT. ZERO IT.
An intelligent web personalization solution requires zero
IT implementation or management, and simply clicks into
place with your existing content management system (CMS),
allowing you to access even more information and feedback
on your content marketing. You simply leverage your current
CMS and existing content—it’s that easy.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A WEB PERSONALIZATION APP:
Use this checklist as a tool to help guide you to a complete web personalization tool and set your team up for success:
-

106
Web personalization empowers you
to provide more relevant experiences
to your online visitors and speak to
them with personalized messages
at scale. The data is undisputable—
consumers and decision-makers
expect companies to know them and
to offer personal experiences; and for
companies, personalization is proven
to be more effective at doing this.
Web personalization is valuable at
every stage of the customer journey
and can be implemented for unknown
visitors as well as for longtime
customers. Most importantly, it is no
longer a marketing vision, but a reality.
Modern technology continues to make
web personalization more attainable
for marketers at any level and
organizations of any size—with easier
implementation and coordination
across channels. Web personalization
can be implemented with systems you
already have in place and can leverage
content you already have.
In a digital marketing landscape
that is becoming increasingly
competitive, being personal, relevant,
and timely is vital for your company
to differentiate itself and prove to
customers that you have the right
products and services for them. Web
personalization is how marketers can
more effectively engage, convert, and
retain their customers and improve
their cross-channel performance by
demonstrating to their customers that
they understand them as individuals
and speak to them directly.
CONCLUSION

107
Written and Edited By:
Ellen Gomes
Content Marketing Manager
Marketo
@egomes1019
Heidi Bullock
VP Demand Generation
Marketo
@hbullock
Elaine Ip
Content Marketing Specialist
@_elaineip
Special Thanks To:
Becky Wolfe
Customer Marketing Specialist
Marketo
@keenwolfe
Brian Glover
Senior Product Marketing Manager
Marketo
@brianglover
Chandar Pattabihiram
Group VP Product and
Corporate Marketing
Marketo
@Chandarp
David Cain
Group VP Global Marketing
and Operations
Marketo
@DavidCain
Davis Lee
Creative Director
Marketo
@designsbydavis
Mike Telem
VP Product Marketing
Marketo
@miketelem
Mike Tomita
Senior Manager, Web Marketing
Marketo
ABOUT THE GUIDE

More than 85% of internet
users specifically expect and
accept personalization as
a part of their online retail
experience. And, 83% of B2B
buyers say company websites
are the most popular channel
for their online research.
– eMarketer
Coordinating messages
across channels increases
the performance of those
channels and improves the
customer’s experience.
– MyBuys’ Personalization
Consumer Survey
82
% of visitors find content made for their specific
industries more valuable, and 67% also value
content created for their specific positions.
– Marketing Sherpa
70
% of buyers have
indicated that a
vendor’s website
was the most influential channel
in making a purchase decision.
– DemandGen Report
40
% of consumers
buy more from
retailers who
personalize their shopping
experience across channels
– MyBuys
Nearly three-fourths (74%) of
online consumers get frustrated
with websites when content
(e.g. offers, ads, promotions)
appears that has nothing to do
with their interests.
– Janrain Harris Interactive
The most important
element of a shopping journey
is an easy and relevant
online experience.
– Magnetic and Retail TouchPoints
The average bounce
rate for a website is
– Rocket Fuel
Over 80% of consumers do
their own research online
before buying.
– Retailingtoday
Only a small fraction of brands
are executing cross-channel
communications informed by a
single view of the customer.
- Experian
55
%
#MKTOGUIDE
#MKTOGUIDE
#MKTOGUIDE
#MKTOGUIDE
#MKTOGUIDE
#MKTOGUIDE#MKTOGUIDE
#MKTOGUIDE
#MKTOGUIDE
#MKTOGUIDE

109
Marketo (NASDAQ: MKTO) provides the leading engagement marketing software
and solutions designed to help marketers develop long-term relationships with
their customers—from acquisition to advocacy. Marketo is built for marketers, by
marketers and is setting the innovation agenda for marketing technology. Marketo
puts Marketing First. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, with offices around the
world, Marketo serves as a strategic partner to large enterprise and fast-growing
small companies across a wide variety of industries.
To learn more about Marketo’s Engagement Marketing Platform, LaunchPoint®
partner ecosystem, and the vast community that is the Marketo Marketing Nation®,
visit www.marketo.com.
© 2016 Marketo, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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