Dynamic Yield Offers Flexible Omni-Channel Personalization

There are dozens of Web personalization tools available. All do roughly the same thing: look at data about a visitor, pick messages based on that data, and deploy those messages. So how do you tell them apart?

The differences fall along several dimensions. These include what data is available, how messages are chosen, which channels are supported, and how the system is implemented. Let’s look at how Dynamic Yield stacks up.

Data: Dynamic Yield can install its own Javascript tag to identify visitors and gather their information, or it can accept an API call with a visitor ID. It can also build profiles by ingesting data from email, CRM, mobile apps, or third party sources. It will stitch data together when the same personal identifier is used in different source systems, but it doesn’t do fuzzy or probabilistic cross-device matching. Data is ingested in real time, allowing the system to react to customer behaviors as they happen.

Message selection: this is probably where personalization systems vary the most. Dynamic Yield largely relies on users to define selection rules. Specifically, users create “experiences” that usually relate to a single position on a Web page or single message in another channel.  Each experience has a list of associated promotions and each promotion has its own target audience, content, and related settings. When a visitor engages with an experience, the system finds the first promotion audience the visitor matches and delivers the related content.

This is a pretty basic approach and doesn’t necessarily deliver the best message to visitors who qualify for several audiences. But dynamic content rules, machine-learning, and automated recommendations can improve results by tailoring the final message to each individual. In addition, the system can test different messages within each promotion and optimize the results against a user-specified goal.  This lets it send different messages to different segments within the audience.

Product recommendations are especially powerful.  Dynamic Yield supports multiple recommendation rules, including similarity, bought together, most popular, user affinity, and recently viewed.  One experience can return multiple products, with different products selected by different rules.  In other words, the system present a combination of recommendations including some that are similar to the current product, some that are often purchased with it, and some that are most popular over all. 

Channels: this is a particular strength for Dynamic Yield, which can personalize Web pages, emails, landing pages, mobile apps, mobile push, display ads, and offline channels. Most personalization options are available in most channels, although there are some exceptions: you can’t do multi-product recommendations within a display ad and system-hosted landing pages can’t include dynamic content.

Implementation: this also varies by channel. Web site personalization is especially flexible: the Javascript tag can read an existing Web page and either replace it entirely or create a version with a Dynamic Yield object inserted, without changing the page code itself. Users who do control the page code can insert a call the Dynamic Yield API.  Email personalization can also be done by inserting an API call, which lets Dynamic Yield reselect the message each time the email is rendered. The system has direct integration with major ad servers and networks, letting it send targeting rules with different ad versions for each target.

Dynamic Yield’s multi-channel scope and easy deployment options will be appealing to many marketers. The company has more than 100 customers, primarily in ecommerce and media. Pricing is based on the number of unique user profiles managed and on system components. A small client might pay as little as $25,000 per year, although larger companies can pay much more.