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Using Audiences to Deliver Personalized Content

While the primary focus of many data management technologies is to manage data assets for better audience targeting, the capabilities of a data management platform (DMP) go far beyond audience targeting. DMPs and content management systems (CMSs) can work together to deliver relevant content for your site visitors to increase your loyal user base and their engagement levels.

Audience Insights From Data Management Platforms

Let’s start with audience insights available from data management platforms. A sophisticated DMP creates rules around various elements of a page to collect specific behaviors exhibited by the users while consuming page content. For example, a user visiting a health section of a website, clicking on a “share this” link, or submitting a comment each create different behavioral data points.

These data points are arranged into a detailed hierarchy of behaviors, actions and demographics specific to the company’s digital audience. Clients use this information to create complex audience definitions and behaviorally target them in various digital media campaigns.

In addition to the first-party data collected from a client website, DMPs also provide access to third-party data that can be used by the client to enrich their audiences. For example, a user visiting yoursite.com might have exhibited interest in sports on yoursite.com, as well as a health behavior on a third-party site. Leveraging a DMP, yoursite.com will gain additional insights on their sports user such as the user’s interest in health-related content that you might not otherwise be aware of.

DMP Integration With CMS

Audience insights collected from data management platforms can be used to power content management systems to increase the number of pages viewed, engagement and loyalty of your site visitors.

Content Personalization

This integration between DMP and CMS can be used to personalize content that’s appropriate for the user interests and that resonates well with the user. This in turn increases user loyalty and engagement with the site, resulting in increased ad inventory levels for monetization.

Dynamic Content Creation

You can also use both systems to create dynamic rules to identify and segment audience behavior on-the-fly. Dynamic classification by DMP allows your CMS to show extremely personalized content to the user as the user navigates through the site.

Content Targeting

Based on the pages visited and actions performed by a user in a given session, a DMP can create user behaviors in real-time. For example, a user on a website visited the movies section and sports section. Your DMP will immediately identify these behaviors and categorize them. Using third-party data, the DMP can also inform you that the aforementioned user is a male interested in golf. By passing this information to the CMS, content owners can show movie reviews and sports reviews to the user in the subsequent visit. They can also customize the navigation of the site and related links section to increase the engagement of the user by showing relevant content.

Content owners with an e-commerce module on their site, such as retailers, can use such behaviors to display coupons or offers specific to user interests. By knowing that the user started to purchase a product in their previous session and did not complete the checkout process, their CMS can create a rule that displays any current promotions on that product to create new and better opportunities for sale.

Below are some examples on how DMPs and CMS can work together.

Simple Integration Between DMP and CMS

Using an API or a server-to-server integration, data management platforms allow a client’s CMS to extract comprehensive audience insights specific to a user visiting a site. DMPs can immediately inform any system used by a website, including ad servers and content management systems, about the interests and behaviors of the user visiting the website.

As soon as a user visits a website, the DMP will send the CMS a comprehensive list of attributes known about the user. The CMS will determine content blocks or templates that should be shown to users depending on the attributes passed by the DMP.

Examples include:

  • Showing a health article if the DMP determines that the user is interested in health.
  • Requesting the user to ‘share content’ based on third-party influencer data informed by DMP.

Advanced Integration Between DMP and CMS

You can throw some modeling into the mix to achieve even better results. By working with their DMP, content owners can identify content blocks that will be served to their site visitors using a CMS. Content blocks can be composed of site sections, groups of articles or articles themselves. Once the content blocks are identified, the DMP will track user visitation to these content blocks to identify user behaviors frequently exhibited by users visiting these content blocks. This helps to understand which content blocks atttract which users based on their behaviors.

When a user visits a site, the CMS will call the DMP to obtain a ranking of content blocks that will resonate well with the user based on their interests and known behaviors. This ranking can be used to display relevant content on the page or in the related links section of a page to keep the user engaged on a visit.

In addition to the behavioral affiliation identified by the DMP for each content block, you can input default rules in your CMS that can work alongside content block ranking recommended by DMP. For example, a breaking story or content on the home page should be shown to all users irrespective of their behavioral affiliation.

Content owners can also make it multi-dimensional by creating multiple sections on each page, and by calling the DMP to understand the combination of content blocks that should be shown in each section for maximum impact on user engagement:

In summary, Data Management Platforms and Content Management Systems are born to work together. Digital stakeholders use DMPs for effective audience targeting within their available inventory. But a DMP-CMS integration can lead to increased inventory, loyal users who can always be reached, and improved engagement and intra-site navigation to increase available inventory levels.

This article was originally published on February 23, 2012 by admonsters.com, titled: “Can Data Management Platforms and Content Management Systems Get Along?”