 So I work at Automatic. My name is Jesse Friedman. I work in marketing strategic partnerships on the Jetpack team at Automatic. I threw this page up there because all too often I find that people, really talented people, experienced people, sometimes they're all hesitant to jump in and apply at Automatic. But we don't fight and we're eager to meet you. So if you have any questions about the hiring process or if I know you well enough that I can give you a recommendation, please don't hesitate to ask. And join us. We have a lot of fun. You can find me on Twitter. My handle is at Professor. That's because I used to teach. And I joined Twitter on like day two. I also have a pretty cool blog URL because I work at Automatic. And I'm lucky when you got to choose a blog domain. So if you want to check out my site or connect with me afterwards, that's a good place to do that too. But today we're here to talk about personalization. And this is a topic that I've talked on a few times. But something I've never really done is kind of go back and give you guys a high level overview and inspire you to figure out ways in which you can start to approach these things on your website. So in the past I gave a lot of concrete, like specific things that you should be doing to try and reach out to customers. But today what we're going to do is have a more of a high level discussion about ways in which you can start to understand the intent of your customers. And however you want to define personalization, what we're basically doing is changing or augmenting the website for the purposes of a specific user or group of users to change and improve their experience. The idea here is to provide the absolute best experience possible. And sometimes it's to speed up the process, sometimes it's to slow it down. But at the end of the day, at the core of it, what we're doing is basically changing things. A good friend of mine is giving a talk later today, Alvin Shapiro. He's giving a much more practical kind of granular talk on how to use Google Analytics and other tools to really track specific actions that are happening on your website. So I would definitely encourage you to take everything you learn today and go learn how to apply it to Tom. I love that Tom talks after me at these work camps because I get to unload all the stuff I don't cover on him. So one thing I want to point out to everybody is that personalization isn't one thing. I think that a lot of times we think it is, but it's not convenience. Everybody wants convenient and good experience, unless you're this person. And now I've given talks a few times and I've been using an image from someone who brought in a large computer into a Starbucks. And yesterday I was at a Starbucks in Boston and this woman had a showing an iMac computer in the Starbucks. I was thinking about this talk and the thing that made me think, everybody wants a convenient experience. Except for this person who I feel like walked into an Apple Store and said, screw it, I don't want a small 13 inch display that I can put into my laptop bag. I want a 27 inch iMac that weighs 42 pounds and I'm going to bring that to a Starbucks. And just to prove that I was there, I had to take a selfie. But really when we think about convenience, if anybody ever order a pizza off a Domino's app or anything like that and it shows you your previous order, that's a matter of convenience. That's not really innovative or personal. That's showing you what you ordered last and giving you a very convenient click here to reorder a button. That's very different than what we're talking about today, which is customizing an experience for predictors and analytics and the actions that we want to track and watch. Everybody thinks that the people out there who are doing it, who can only do it, are the big names, Netflix, Amazon and Google. And speaking of convenience for what isn't personalization, good design isn't personalization. Good design is just something you should do. And right now these logos look like they're tattooed on Kermit's butt. But switching to a better design, that's not personalization. That's just something that you should be doing all the time. Also, did it just say Kermit's butt? Yeah. Okay. Just want to make sure that that's on there. Kermit's butt here, that's great. And you might think that you have to work this hard all the time to get personalization going, but that's not the case. Last year I played around with the sonography too. I baited them into writing things that you otherwise wouldn't put up. Anyways, so the jump in. There's three things that really you want to start doing when you're just starting out with personalization. One is you want to start to identify who is visiting your website. The second most important thing to figure out is what is their intent. And the assumption that you have a blog post on X topic, and they're reading it, does not mean that they can actually read that blog post. Or if they're visiting your e-commerce site and they're looking at different products, the intent doesn't necessarily mean that they're there to purchase that product. And a lot of times you see this mistake with people purchasing products for families or friends. You make the assumption that this user will be forever tied to a product. Like if I were to purchase my wife a pair of lacy white sandals or something, I don't even know if that's a thing, but I'm just assuming it is. I don't want to forever be tied to white sandals, women's white sandals on whatever website I'm on. So try not to make assumptions and try to understand the intent of the user. And then the third thing you want to understand is how you convert that intent into something valuable for you as the site owner, the developer, the design agency, whatever. So we're going to take a look at four different types of sites today. We're going to take a look at a blog, a restaurant website, an e-commerce website, and a SaaS service website. Now in the past when I've given these talks, what we've talked about is how quickly and easily you can start to discover things about the user. And what we think of as a user is this blog of it could be anybody. We have no idea how they're self-identified, who they are, what they are. And we start to dig into personization when we dig up something like this. And I'm in an ID. We understand what browser they're using, what device they're on, and what their location is, but that's not really painting the full picture. But those are really important pieces of the puzzle. So we can start there and start to build a relationship with our users from there on out. So the first few things that are very easy to discover through just technological advances in the HTML5 and browsers and everything else is just around location, the device, whether they're returning users, cookies, or if you're lucky enough to run a website where you can get people to log in, that's my favorite. Because then you're not just relying on a cookie to save this information about this user, but you can actually store this information on the website in your database securely, of course, and then make decisions every time that person returns. So diving in, first thing we're going to look at is a blog. What are the goals of the blog? Well, in this case, we want people to subscribe and we want people to comment. We might want them to share and maybe stay a little bit longer than they otherwise would. So today, thinking of my wife who's sitting right here, she made a mistake in showing up today to support me and of course Payback is there. This is her blog. I think it's a really great blog. It's on a few different topics, so it's a good example for us to pick on. So when you think about the goals, we want people to subscribe. Joy has the Jetpack Subscribe button on the widget on the sidebar of the site. She has a form for you to fill out a comment so the tools are there. She also has Jetpack Sharing buttons. You guys can tell I'm shamelessly promoting our products. And they also have Related Posts, which are a really nice subtle way to increase engagement. In fact, when we helped a newspaper install Jetpack and turn on Related Posts, it was the Albuquerque Journal. It was a newspaper that gets to 500,000 visitors a month or a day, and I can't remember. It was significant. We increased engagement by 4% overnight just by them turning on Related Posts. But the more significant thing was that we actually reduced their infrastructure costs because Jetpack handles all of the Related Posts algorithms on WordPress.com servers. So you don't have to actually put that onto your posts or your servers. All right, so we also have tags. But unfortunately, Joy is taking advantage of categories, and we're going to talk about that in a little bit. I told you we wouldn't get out of this room. All right, so first thing we're going to do is start listening to the user. Let's take an example. I'm a user and I arrive at Joy's website on this post, and she's about why it's important to wear bracelets if you have an allergy, like a medical bracelet. So we know what poster page this person has visited. Do this scroll all the way down? This is a great question to ask, and not a lot of people think about it, because it allows us to start doing things like marking the post red. So if you want to in the future, you can organize posts by either red or unred for the user. And it also kind of speaks to whether or not the user was on there long enough to read the post, which is the next point. Did they do a search? After they've read that, did they do a search? They put on a related post and they stick around. Search is super important, and I'll get to that. They click any links or categories or tags. And the funny thing about categories and tags is that everything that is built into your posts or Google and for organizing things and keeping things really on point and focused. But there's so many advantages to categories and tags, and we don't take advantage of that. And did they share? And for whatever reason, did they comment? So the first step, just if you want to make this a little bit more personal for the user, you take that subscribe button that just says something very plain and simple, and we change it to or relate it to the category that this post is in. So this post could be in an allergy-related category, and this would be one of the simplest things you can do to change and start personalizing your site, would be to just grab the category name for the poster that's in and just shove it into anywhere that that person wants. So that's a very, very basic simple example. And I talked about categories. Unfortunately, this post is uncategorized, but if it did have a category, there would be a lot of stuff that we can do. It's free data. If anybody clicks on a category, works through a post, or visits multiple posts in the same category, you can immediately start to profile that user as someone who's interested in that category. So making sure that your post has categories is really important, not just for link structure or Google, but for you to be able to understand the path the user's taking. Did everybody in here know that every single category and every single tag right now on your WordPress website has its own RSS feed? If you go to any tag or any category at WordPress, and you just do slash feed at the end, it will automatically convert to RSS. This means that you can automatically give your users the opportunity to subscribe to very specific feeds within your site. This is no extra work. You don't have to do anything at all. Any time that you have a category or a tag listed, you can have a subscribe button that just goes to whatever URL you're on now slash feed, and then that person can choose to subscribe. Alright, so next thing, commenting. We want people to comment, but one way in which we can improve the experience is that once they comment, we have them pre-checked a lot to say that we're going to get in contact with you. Commenting is one of the most underutilized things, I think, in all of WordPress. I mean, at this point, this person has given you their name, their email address, their website URL, and have made some kind of comment on your website, whether it be positive or negative. So if you're a serious blogger and you're not reaching out to these people and talking to people who comment on your site, you're missing out. There's definitely also other tools out there that you can go look at like auto-following people, so if they have a website and they have Facebook and Twitter on their website, you can auto-follow them and things like that, so you can really reach out to these people on a more personal level. But one thing I think that's really important to think about is an email follow-up within the commenters. So if you use something like a kismet to block out all the spam she was plugging in, then you can start to look at these comments that are good and start reaching out to them. And you can do this in an automated way if you want. The thing I'd like to do is remind them that they share their free code with you. So don't come off like super creepy and have them email them a week later and be like, hey, you were on my site, what's up? That's not cool. But if you tell them, remind them of the comments they left and thank them for doing it and tell them how appreciative they are that they left that comment and then you recap their visit. This is something that a lot of people don't do either. But the second that they have timed all of their visit and the time that they spend on your website to a form submission, that's data that you can then take and get back to them. So for example, if I visit your blog and I go to the Allermates post at Joybro and then I go click on another post and maybe another post, then I leave a comment. There's no reason that I couldn't grab those URLs that you visited and summarize them and send them back to me and say, hey, thanks for visiting these links. If you'd like to share them or if you just want to bookmark them for later, they're in your inbox now. It's totally something you can do. Searching. Searching is so, so important. This is because they're explicitly telling you what it is that they want to be doing on your website. How many people have a customized search page? How many people have a customized search 404 page? No. This is a really great way that you can take advantage of someone's intents on their website. So in this case, I typed in the word gluten and nothing showed up. Also, by the way, I swear to God, I'm not going to do this the whole time. But if you want to check out really advanced searching, Jetpack has Elastic Search now. It gives you more relevant responses and faster responses. But through search, like I said, you can see what the intent of the user was, what you're missing, and you can create a reason to reach out. So now I can convert that search page into something like, thanks for searching my site, I haven't finished any posts on gluten yet, but I can email you the moment it's done. So this is giving someone an opportunity now. It may not always work. But if I visited another Joy's post on her website that I now trust her, I might want to see what she has to say about gluten when it finally comes time. So now, not only can Joy look at her gluten analytics or her Jetpack stats and see what people are searching on your site, and that gives you intent and maybe even helps you create the content that you're missing on your website, but now you can start to prioritize that based on subscriptions that people are making based off of the searches. So if you get 10 people searching for gluten and two of them subscribed for that gluten post, that's a really good opportunity for you to prioritize that next post and write that sooner than later. And this is something that applies to bloggers, or you have clients that are bloggers. This is something that you can be encouraging them to do. And if you are a designer or an agency, there's no reason you couldn't be charging for this service to your blog customers or your clients. So you could be sending them reports and saying to them, I think you should be writing about this. I think you should be writing about that. I think you should, you know, you would have over here because I've never used it. All right, so we covered blogs. For whatever reason, this is my first time ever doing a Google Slides presentation. They didn't have a checkbox or a checkmark. So I thought half-man meeting the lighting bolts would be better to mark it as done. Don't ask me why. So next is restaurant. So what are the goals of a restaurant? The goals of a restaurant website are very different from a blog website. A blog website, you typically want engagement. You want people on the site longer. You want them to go from page to page. For a restaurant website, and I think on restaurant websites all the time, because they're easy, the most important thing is to bring in customers. You want them to visit the location. You want them to make phone calls or get directions to your location or make a reservation. The idea that time on a site for a restaurant website is extremely relevant I think is wrong. In my opinion, if you built a really great restaurant website, the likelihood of that person sticking around for very long is low. Because what they've come to your restaurant website for is hours, directions, make a reservation, see what's on the menu if you have any specials. I want to get in and out. And especially in this day and age when there's so many options and the internet has given me the ability to connect with restaurants across the world, I want to find what I'm looking for and get out as fast as possible. And frankly, having 20 pages and 50 blog posts and all that stuff might be good to get traffic in, but it doesn't necessarily make sense to try and force people to stay on your site. So you have completely different goals when you're running a restaurant website. So this is a restaurant in Boston that my wife and I love. Paparazzi is an Italian restaurant. I'm very happy with the way that they built their site. It's very simple, it's very easy, it's mobile. And when I clicked on Locations, they gave me lots of phone numbers multiple times. They gave me lots of addresses, lots of maps, lots of hours. At the very end of the day, all I care about is the fact that this looks like it's up to date, it looks like it's accurate, and I can get in and out. But let's take an example of what things we can learn from a user just by location and their intent for the restaurant website. We have one user who's 500 miles away and they're looking at the restaurant website while the hours of the restaurant are closed. And then we have another user who is looking at the restaurant website. They're within 10 minutes of the restaurant and it's while the restaurant is open. You guys see immediately what's happening here. The first person on the top right, maybe they're visiting the website because they're looking for a restaurant that's close to them and they found the wrong one. Good for you to show up in the search results. That's great. There's nothing you really need to do about that. But maybe it's because they're visiting Boston. Maybe they're planning on going to Boston soon. Maybe they live in Boston and they've traveled outside of town. Someone called and said, hey, let's make a reservation at this restaurant. Or maybe they're traveling here for a vacation. At that point, setting them a coupon or something like that right at that moment or at discount is really less relevant. What's really relevant is to show them that they can make a reservation and keep reminding them of that. The other person is obviously has a much more stronger level of intent to arrive at that restaurant today. So they're probably looking for a place to eat. They're probably looking for a place to eat within the next hour or so. And this is a great opportunity to show them a proximity coupon. And I love proximity coupons and that decision to come in when they otherwise might not. So you might travel through the internet and find two or three restaurant websites before you decide where you want to go. But the one that shows me a proximity coupon, the one that shows me 20% off if I come in the next hour or if I made a reservation or something like that, it's highly relevant to me and my intent at that moment. And if you know anything about this user, you must all them visit different things on their site. And they did check it out some, I don't know, cool drink like a watermelon sangria which they actually have. You can offer that to them. Take what is relevant to them at that moment, what you learned about them in the last few moments that they're searching your site. And apply it. If they look at a menu item for a decent amount of time, offer it to them for free or offer it to them for 50% off. They get there within the next two hours. That's a good decision to come in. All right, so more have been for women. Next is e-commerce. What are the goals of an e-commerce site? We're going to keep it simple for today. We want to make the sale or get the email. That's a last resort. So, most important thing when you're searching a website, an e-commerce site is search. A lot of search happens outside of the site. It's happening on Google. Most of my searching happens unless I have a really trusted brand like Amazon. And then I'll go and search their site. One of the things that I love about the times that you visit something is that you can start becoming extremely passionate about converting people. So, here's our automatic hiring page or graduate hiring for someone who's as a remote controller. But on the right there, you see that blue box? That happens that pops up if you visit that page a few times. It's a nice little prompt to encourage people to apply if they've been to this page enough times. So, if you look at a standard e-commerce page if I visited this bag on more than one occasion but I haven't actually done it and added it to the cart and purchased it this is a great opportunity to track that user understand their intent if they're obviously interested in this product but they haven't pulled the trigger yet maybe all you need to do is give them 10% off and if you add a sense of urgency usually with a ticker or a time-sensitive element or something like that you can get them to increase the likelihood that they would add it to the cart. The next thing is let's say that they go through the whole sales process and they check out that's great but let's say they get to the cart and they abandon them cart abandonment is probably one of the most important things that e-commerce shops are researching and proving on all the time if you have their e-mail address you can send them coupons which happens all the time you all get coupons right in your email so here's a little nugget that nobody really does I haven't seen it happen yet and I'm not sure why because I think it's a really advantageous thing in that e-mail everybody who's ever used MailChimp or anything like that you can track open rates on an e-mail but if you tie that open rate to a coupons date of expiration you can see that they opened a coupon a week or two after the sale ended and so that person had intent they went into their e-maps they searched out the e-mail they opened it again and now that coupon is completely useless you can tie that experience to a new e-mail and just fire off another e-mail and tell them, hey here's another 100 bucks off so if I'm going through this process and I see that I have I remember that this company sent me a coupon and let's pretend that today on the 23rd that old e-mail opening you can pay in your server with that open rate and you can fire off a new one and so now I can write something like we're bummed that you missed the $100 off sale you're in luck you found the next $100 line around and it's all yours in the next 20 minutes so I would hope that you had better content writers than me but I think it's a great opportunity for us to reach out to those customers that we otherwise would have lost and it's a very large segment of customers who will only buy something when it's on sale so if they're going through the process of looking for a coupon and finding that old archive e-mail don't lose out because the coupon's expired and think that that's the end of the journey and you have to wait for them to show back up and in real time make a decision to e-mail them and reach back out again alright status and we have seven minutes so I don't need to display we'll do the same goals for a status company so status I'm going to do a point out is that you're basically selling a service rather than a product, there's no shipping you're not trying to get them to buy something once it's usually buying and recurring subscriptions with product or service years ago I used to work for a company that did insurance websites and one of the few things that we made decisions early on is that when these locations when these businesses had 50 or 100 locations the fastest way that we could make things relevant for you were to sort those locations by closest to you where you were at that moment especially for insurance agencies when you need to get to your local office and you need to make a phone call something like that so that was just a quick little trick that we did back then but the thing about insurance agencies is that they often have web pages that look like this which aren't bad and I want to make a point that this is a great way to segue in your side if you offer multiple products you should definitely build pages like this to talk about each one individually and it's not just about informing the customer because you could do that on a single landing page it's about understanding their intent and what is valuable to them so in this case I had a single landing page and it explained the benefits of auto, home, life, umbrella, flood renters insurance, all that on one page I might provide just as good of an example to those customers or experience to those customers but I'm not learning as much but when customers are clicking motorcycle ATV or whatever they're not beginning to understand what it is that's important to them so building pages like this out are great but here's the thing that we did we built a system so that you would get the email address early on in the user's journey so you ask them one thing what is it that brought you in for insurance today 90 times out of 10 is either renters or home or insurance and that was a very quick way for us to get their email the thing was is that once we collected their email at the end of the website they often started to browse other things and the more information we gathered the more relevant an experience we could build for them if we knew that they were in California we might not offer them earthquake insurance but if they did it in Chicago where there's a ton of quotes on the lakes out there we might offer them marine insurance but then what we started doing is tracking what they were doing after they submitted that form and tying that to our CRM so if you fill out a form saying I'm interested in home insurance and we ask you are you interested in anything else and you say no, fine but then you go on to look at ATV insurance or loan insurance or something like that what we did was we tied that traffic to the CRM so that the insurance company the insurance agent when they would call that person they had notes on what that person was specifically doing on that website after they submitted that form so then they can start into conversations about like hey, are you thinking about buying a boat or are you thinking about buying an RV those types of things help them understand the value that you provide to this customer beyond just sending home money or insurance like that alright, moving a little bit quicker onboarding is the next most important thing and one of the tools that we built that automatic is Jetpack onboarding and as you can see here the opening page we wanted to provide value to customers but we also wanted to profile and the reason we want to profile them is because the more we understand about what you're trying to build what kind of website you're trying to build the better tools we can provide you so our opening question is what kind of site can we help you set up today, business or personal and what this leads into is a variety of other questions and based off the answers that you give it takes you down a different path so for example on the business website we might ask you do you need a map on it and then you type in your address and then the map would automatically show up or we might automatically give you a contact us page with a contact form or we might offer you WooCommerce because you're selling online every single question inside of this onboarding tool and I was going to demo over we're out of time is built in a way of giving us information so this is where I end the description of today's talk I talked about fair trade data the idea that I'm collecting information from you it's extremely important and it provides a much better experience for the customer if you're asking for that information through providing value to those customers just keep that in mind in the future I don't want you guys backing yourself in the corner sometimes things can go awry this is my current Amazon recommendation list I wanted a ceiling fan for the one bathroom in my house and Amazon won't stop trying to sell me ceiling fans I don't know why they think I need 40 but for whatever reason they haven't tied that product to a single purchase every few years that's definitely important it's not like a restaurant website where you want them to come in weekly this is a product you want to move off that real estate you don't want it on that real estate taking up that space because you can be shown me completely other relative things and the worst thing is that I bought my ceiling fan from Amazon so they should know that I made that purchase the other thing is and I bought it out is that there's something going on I'm not even going to show it it's not quite inappropriate but it's definitely not something I want to work in but I've never searched for women's apparel on Amazon ever and this was making a recommendation of things undergarments and I have no idea why and I joked around with Amazon on Twitter about it but they completely missed the mark on that just keep in mind that you don't want to try to over personalize things to the point where you make mistakes and the other thing is don't try to be smarter than the user so this is my website today and looking for trains I know there are more trains in this but it's only showing me the next three trains because it thinks that's all that I care about that I'm making a decision because I'm on a mobile device I must need it to get immediately and so it's only going to show me three whereas if I'm on a desktop it might show me more because I have more real estate that's a big time mistake don't do that because I'm actually looking for a train around four or five o'clock that's it sorry for the speediness of this talk 90% of what I talked about today is not in Jetpack yet they're just basic tools that you can use for pretty much any WordPress plugin the real trick to this is the insights and understanding the things like setting cookies and understanding the users and their analytics and tools but if you go to Tom's talk he'll talk about exactly that sorry there's no time for questions but I will be at the Jetpack table if anybody wants to ask