Clever Blog

Google and Personalization

Google’s making a big push for personalization. They invited journalists to the first-ever Google Personalization Day to unveil some new stuff they’re up to with personalization. For one, Google is allowing users to set a default geographical location, which will allow them to get targeted search results; searchers who type in “spa” would get listings for spas in their town, for example. And then Google is doing some “behind the scenes” personalization with its Web History, allowing users to get more relevant results based on their past browsing and search history.

We think it’s great that Google is making forays into personalization. After all, the future of the Web is about creating a personal experience for each user – not a one-size-fits-all Internet. In fact, here at CleverSet, personalization is our mantra. We believe that until the Web is totally personalized, it’s falling short of consumers’ needs. Our idea of personalization is complementary to Google’s emerging offerings, because we personalize on a real-time, one-on-one level every time a visitor comes to a website. We analyze the relationships between a user’s current behavior, clickstream data, stored customer information, product catalog details and purchase history to actually predict what a customer will want to buy next.

So when someone visits a website to shop for chardonnay, they get recommendations for chardonnay. When they come back an hour later to look for a corkscrew, they get recommendations for corkscrews. Our technology doesn’t “store” your browsing behavior, but instead looks at your immediate, real-time activity on a site to offer totally relevant, up-to-the-minute recommendations. We think it’s great that Google is attempting to deliver on the personalization promise of a “the Internet just for me” – because that’s CleverSet’s goal, too.

Froogle and A New Generation of Search and Disovery

Late last week, Google pulled the plug on its Froogle brand. Froogle’s days have been numbered since Google demoted it from its home page last August. In Froogle’s place, Google has introduced Google Product Search – “Search for Stuff to Buy”. Google Product Search features a cleaner interface and a continually refreshed list of 25 things recently and randomly found with the service: minibars, pumpkin seeds, a mullet wig, diamond earrings, pond pumps and Star Wars lego sets on a recent visit.

Google’s re-focused efforts on product search is great news for online shoppers.  However, despite the power of search algorithms and relevant results, search alone isn’t the best way to find enticing products on the web. Search, as perfected by Google, is a great tool for finding exactly what you are looking for. It is a less effective way of finding “something interesting, new or unique”. As the recent momentum for StumbleUpon.com shows, there is a huge consumer demand for online tools that let you discover, not search for, intriguing products and information.

Retailers, hamstrung by inadequate site search tools, are also turning towards product discovery as the new paradigm for eCommerce browsing. In fact, Forrester’s Sucharita Mulpuru cited product discovery as one of the top new e-commerce buzzwords for 2007.

Our experience at CleverSet has shown that retailers who help online shoppers discover relevant and appealing products, both through search and onsite discovery, are able to sell more by surfacing the long-tail of products that remain invisible to most browsers and searchers. The next big eCommerce opportunity isn’t perfecting product search – we’ll leave that to Google – but helping consumers effortlessly find the things they love but didn’t know to search for. 

More Clicks for Google: What the DoubleClick Aquisition Means for Online Marketers

Another day, another multi-billion acquisition by Google. But this time, the search giant’s plans to acquire Doubleclick for $3.1 billion are making a lot of people in the advertising market nervous, with claims of a monopoly on the “pre-click” side of the advertising equation circulating. No one knows for sure how this mega-merger will impact the online advertising industry, but it’s certainly a wake-up call to those on the “post-click” side of the fence. According to Google “This new partnership represents a tremendous opportunity for us at Google to broaden and deepen our inventory of available ads and to better serve both our publishers and users.” That may be true, in part. Certainly, for online marketers, a combined Google-DoubleClick is an opportunity to bring a whole new level of interactivity to their “post-click” marketing, branding and online advertising programs. Fred Wilson wrote a great piece

about the resurgence of the banner ad and how banners carry branding value that search ads don’t.

But it also means that Google will own even more of the “pre-click” ad marketplace, and online advertisers will sign over even more of their online ad budgets to Google. The more Google owns the "pre-click", the more marketers will be forced to pay attention to the "post-click." In my opinion, to survive and thrive, marketers will have to increasingly control what happens on their sites after the click. With Google once again in the news, the whole world is focusing on driving traffic – but the experience that users have on the site is what turns those clicks into dollars.