The Realities of Online Personalisation Report is based on a survey of more than 1,100 digital and ecommerce professionals working for brands and agencies carried out in February 2013.

It looks in detail at what is driving online personalisation, the tactics and types of data being used to tailor the online customer experience and the barriers to success.

Which of the following channels are you using to deliver personalised experiences?

Types of personalisation

The report shows that on-site behaviour (30%) and inbound marketing channels or traffic sources (29%) are used most often when creating personalised website experiences.

Interestingly, in-house marketers are twice as likely as agency respondents to say they don’t personalise website experiences based on any of these factors: 42% compared to 21% of agencies.

Do you create personalised website experiences based on any of the following factors?

Tactics and testing strategies

Finally, the survey also asked what type of personalisation tactics businesses are currently implementing on their websites. Product recommendations (42%) proved to be the most common tactic, followed by on-site search results (40%) and images or text (40%).

Just 12% of businesses state that they either don’t deploy or have no plans to deploy product recommendations in the next 12 months, which reflects the fact that some 61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision.

At the other end of the scale, 14% of in-house marketers indicated they use badging compared to only 11% of agency respondents.

What personalisation tactics do you currently deploy on your website?