Nick Veenhof presented “ Open Personalization with Apache Unomi in the GDPR era” on the second day of Drupal Dev Days at Ghent, Belgium 2022. Nick is the  CTO of DropSolid and also a member of the Board of Drupal Association. He had done a lot of research into the Drupal Ecosystem in the past.  He had worked in the Acquia Lift while in Acquia, eight to ten years ago. 

Nick spoke about Personalization and how vague it was for some people. While personalization may differ it was important for marketers to figure out how it worked. He first covered the perspective of DropSolid and then went into the more generic approach. Here is an abstract of Nick’s introduction to the topic of personalization with Apache Unomi.

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Nick gave the example of a flower website. “Say you have a flower website so you’re looking for people that want to buy either flowers or workshop. This person comes to your website after searching for flowers. It's fully anonymous and she accepts the marketing cookies. You probably don’t know who this person is even in Google Analytics. She comes to the website and browses around. She has visited all these pages, still not logged in, anonymous. Wouldn’t it be nice if you understood this person after filling in the email to your form, even may be based on rules or maybe some intelligence? We know she is exploring the site. She is not interested in buying, but that is okay and the next time the person visits the website you know she’s exploring and maybe the next conversion is actually a workshop. She wasn’t interested in buying flowers but it was for the workshops. So how can you get her to engage more while she is still fully anonymous as there is no login You will definitely need a big user base to make this conversion optimization worldwide. 

What is the goal of all websites you build? It is conversion. Conversion does not necessarily mean purchasing alone. If people are long enough on your website-3 or 4 minutes and are informed, that is a good conversion. But say after visiting government website, people are frustrated that will not mean good conversion.”

  Nick took the example of Odisee University where the event was going on. He asked who they thought their website targeted in terms of segments, personas?  Students, people looking for university.  There are more than one type of people groups. There is not a single group.The University created four use cases based on an algorithm. Students who are 18, someone who is in the older age group say 30 to 35 who wants a change in career, people who are working at Odisee or people studying at Odisee.

Who would like to be personalized? How do you work with the available data like geolocation, language preference, device used, browsing behavior,etc? Watch the presentation to know in detail.