Liked This? You’ll Love That – Exploring Recommendation Engines

If you’ve ever been on Amazon.com you may probably have recognized the numerous personalized recommendations. Amazon knows what you saved in your cart and makes recommendations based on that. It knows what you’ve purchased and viewed in the past and attempts to show you similar products. I admit, I often click on those recommendations, check them out and eventually buy them. It just makes sense when a shopper is browsing for something, they may also be interested in items that share similar design or features.

Now that is smart use of data and technology for their marketing. This technology is known as Recommendation Engines. Of late, I’ve been deeply interested in recommendation engines and took time to research what solutions are available to small, home based businesses like ours. Recommendation engines are technically complex and you need a lot of data so the results can be accurate.

With almost non-existent technical resources plus small data pool compared to Amazon, can we take advantage of recommendation engines? Here’s what I found.

Content Publishers

I was very excited to find the WP Recommender plugin. It works in two ways. First, it tries to match relevant content you have already written to recommend to readers. I already do this with another plugin on my blog but that’s not all. WP Recommender also calculates the user’s browsing history and aggregates that information. Over time, the recommendations are fine tuned based on what people actually read which is more relevant than keyword matching with other posts. This should keep readers on your site longer or at least expose them to more of your great content. The nice thing about it, you can use Google Analytics to measure how recommendations influence your content consumption.

For e-stores

I found MyBuys which looked really interesting. It integrates into your shopping cart and makes recommendations based on purchase history, web site activity and shopper preferences. As for setup, you only need to copy and paste some simple code to your web site templates.

Paul Rosenblum, MyBuy’s VP of Products and Strategy says, “[MyBuy] is a pay-for-performance service. That means that online merchants have no upfront fees — no licensing fees, no consulting fees, no set up fees.  We get paid for the performance we generate for them.  This is a nice low risk proposition for the merchant — they only pay for revenue we actually drive for them.” Now that sounds sweet. Something that I’d definitely look in to if I had an e-store.

Recommendation engines have been receiving a lot of attention in 2009 alone and it’s only March. Fueled by the slow economy, it makes sense for marketers to use this technology to dig deeper into user preferences and behavior to increase orders and sales amount per order.