When I started writing this blog post I thought it was just an update about two items in our latest Release Notes (you may want to read this post if you are new to our Release Notes). Then it occurred to me there was more to it than that. But first, the two items, both of which expand Monetate’s targeting capabilities.

First, we have added the ability to target messages and promotions based on the amount of time a visitor has spent on the site. We also added the ability to target based on number of pageviews. This pair of new targeting dimensions will be useful when our personalization experts are creating campaigns to target “window shoppers.” For example, we can now extend a discount specifically for visitors to your site who have viewed a lot of pages or spent a lot of time on site but have not yet purchased (my guess is that these visitors are ripe for conversion into customers, so even a small discount might push them past the tipping point).

And as I’m writing this, it occurs to me that Monetate’s targeting dimensions just keep expanding, often in response to client requests. If you’re one of our clients and have requested a particular targeting parameter you are likely to know when it is available, but you might not be aware of all the targeting choices that have been put in place to date. So it seems to me that a quick review is in order, and could spark fresh ideas for new campaigns. To this end I have made a table listing the main dimensions across the five categories: Landing, Technographics, Location, Weather, and Behavior. Bear in mind that there are further parameters nested below some of these dimensions and this table is only current as of today. There are no doubt many more to come.
As I was making this table, I thought about how you can mix and match these dimensions as you build a campaign, and how some dimensions have multiple parameters, and I realized that the total number of possible combinations is a very big number. Could we be getting close to infinite personalization here? I decided to come up with a campaign example to illustrate just how granular it is possible to get.

Suppose we want to target visitors returning to your web site while surfing from locations that are within 10 miles of your retail store, and who haven’t bought anything for more than 30 days, but have spent more than 5 minutes on the site today, looking at Brand A products on this visit, yet only including them if they looked at Brand B last visit, and only showing them the messaging, on the product pages and the category pages, if they’ve put more than $40 worth of products into their cart already, including at least one from Category A, but only while shopping with Firefox on a Mac during the lunch hour when it’s raining outside.

Setting aside the question of why we might want such a campaign, the point is this: We could create it if we wanted to. Furthermore, we could have that campaign built and launched in about the same amount of time it takes to read the description, with no integration other than one copy-and-paste javascript tag. That’s when I realized we’re well on our way to infinite personalization, and beyond…

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