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Deliver 1:1 content and product recommendations

Both publishers and content marketers alike are challenged with devising strategies to engage readers and generate sought-after advertising revenue through increased page views.

You can use BlueConic personalized content and product recommendations to engage and retain your customers and visitors, creating rich content experiences that deliver the right content at the right time. Increased engagement with readers online can lead to longer session durations, increased ad revenue, and reader loyalty.

Note: This article shows how you can add content recommendations to your channels. You can also use the Open-Time Email Recommendations feature to deliver dynamic, individualized content or product recommendations via email based on up-to-the-minute customer data.

Personalization and product recommendations: This example shows you how to build content recommendations. To build product recommendations in BlueConic, you follow the same steps substituting product recommendations tools for the content tools mentioned here.

Before you begin

Before you set up content recommendations, complete the following steps:

Make a request to BlueConic Support or your dedicated Customer Success Manager to add the Content Collector Connection and the Content Recommendations toolbar to your BlueConic environment.
Identify the Channel (website or mobile app) where you would like to place content recommendations (e.g. below an article, inline, on the right rail, etc.) and define a channel position where the content recommendation should be placed.
Create a Dialogue that will deliver your content recommendations. You may wish to create or modify an existing template to display your recommendations.
While you can measure the result of content recommendations within BlueConic, you may want to do additional analysis outside of BlueConic within a tool such as Google Analytics 4. In order to do this, you will need to establish a BlueConic connection to Google Analytics 4. You should set this up before you create your content recommendations.

Collect data for personalization

Using the Dialogue you created for content recommendations, be sure to allow all visitors to see your placement. By default, BlueConic collects information for all visitors and in a segment called “All Visitors.”

Open the Dialogue you created above.
From the “Who” tab, leave the default setting for All Visitors.
Click Save.

Activate data

If you have already been doing content recommendations of your own, we suggest that you do an A/B test to establish a baseline to better gauge how your own recommendations perform against those from BlueConic. If you have not done content recommendations previously, you don't need to complete this section.

Set up an A/B test

To set up an A/B test, use the Optimization area within your Dialogue:

Open your Dialogue.
Click on Optimization.
In the Distribution column, enter 50% for the Original.
Note: When your dialogue is turned on, the Distribution for Variant A automatically changes to 50%.
On the bottom portion of the page, choose a Variants Strategy of A/B testing.
Click Save in the upper right corner to save your dialogue.

Allow your dialogue to run for at least two weeks up to one month using this split.

Measure your success

Insight Report #1: Dialogue Performance

To show the views, clicks, and the click through rate, use a Dialogue Performance report.

From BlueConic, choose More > Insights.
Click Add dashboard.
Enter the name Dialogue Performance for your Dashboard. Click Save.
Click Add insight from the upper right corner.
Using the Search box, search for the Dialogues Table.
When found, click the Dialogues Table insight once.
Click Close.
Next, click Configure this insight.
Using the Dialogues filtering options, select the Dialogues you’d like to report on.
- Click Position. In the column on the right, you'll see all the available positions for your site. Choose the position that represents your content recommendations placement.
Next, click the Table columns option, and select the metrics you’d like to view. Check off the options for Views, Clicks, and Clicks/views ratio.
Click OK.

Insight Dashboard #2: Content Recommendations

This report shows the effect that interacting with BlueConic personalized content recommendations will have on increasing visitor and customer engagement through more page views and increased engagement scores.

Start by creating two segments

Before you add this insight, create two segments in the Segments area:

Go to Segments.
Click Add segment.
Name your Segment “Views of [Name of placement]” where [Name of placement] represents the Dialogue with content recommendations. An example might be “Views of Right Rail Recs”.
Click Save.
Next, select a Drill down condition. Click the Select condition drop-down list.
From the drop-down list, select profile property.
From the select profile property window, use the Search option to filter the list of available profile properties.
Enter variants in the Search field.
Select Variants viewed.
Next choose the Variant.
1. In the list of available Variants, you will see all of your Dialogues from the perspective of Control Groups and Variants. Every BlueConic dialogue by default has two versions: the Control Group, which is the original content, and the first Variant, called “Variant A”.
2. Choose “Variant A (Name of your Dialogue)”. This will represent actual views of your content recommendations placement versus views of the Control group.
3. Click Save.
To create the second segment, repeat the above steps. For the profile property, use Variants Clicked. Choose “Variant A (Name of your Dialogue)” to isolate visitors who not only saw your content recommendations but also clicked on them.

Create the Insight dashboard "Content Recommendations Engagement"

From the BlueConic header, choose More > Insights.
Click Add dashboard.
Enter the name Content Recommendations Engagement for your Dashboard. Click Save.
Click Add insight from the upper right corner.
Using the Search box, search for the Profile Property insight.
Click twice onto the Profile Property insight to add two insights to your report.
Click Close.
Click Configure this insight.
Profile Property field, select the profile property for Page views (All Visits).
In the Segment field, select the radio button Use segment. Search for the name of the segment you created that tracks clicks of the content recommendations placement.
Click OK.
Repeat the above steps for the second Profile Property insight in your report. For this report in the Use segment area, you specify views of the content recommendations placement.
When you're done editing your Dashboard, click Save in the upper right corner.

Google Analytics 4 reporting

In addition to using BlueConic insights to report on the click-through rate of your content recommendations dialogues, you can also use Google Analytics 4.

Note: Before proceeding with the below steps, you must first establish a Google Analytics 4 Connection from your BlueConic tenant.

To do this, you will want to instrument the hyperlink <a></a> tags of your content recommendations templates with Google Analytics 4 event tracking similar to the following:

<a href="{{URL}}" title="{{name}}" onclick="ga('send', 'event', 'bc_dialogue', 'bc_recs',

'bc_name_of_dialogue');">{{name}}</a>

where

bc_dialogue can refer to the fact that the click was generated from a BlueConic dialogue.
bc_recs can refer to the fact that the click was for a content recommendation.
bc_name_of_dialogue can refer specifically to the name of the dialogue in question.

With this level of click detail in Google Analytics 4, you will not only be able to attribute clicks from BlueConic dialogues (in general) but also from content recommendations down to the dialogue that generated the click.