How personalisation works in Convivial for GovCMS

This website contains a number of personalisation features which can potentially be implemented on any GovCMS website. This article walks you through what the personalisations are and how they were achieved.

Foundations

Taxonomy

The first step in driving personalization is to have a solid data structure which is able to organise your content and the kinds of segments your users will fall into. This website has content types for Topic and Audience which have been helpful dimensions for categorising content and delivering personalised results. 

The site also has vocabularies for Goal and Stage. Goal specifies when a user has attained a certain goal, such as booking a demo. Stage can be used for categorising a page as belonging to a certain stage in the user journey. Both of these vocabularies can be applied by editors to content on the site.

Metadata

The site publishes key page information as metatags in the head of the HTML document. Publishing the metatags in this way allows external applications to consume the data and then take action. Usually, metadata is used for indexing by search engines to find out about the page. However, in the case of Convivial for GovCMS, the metadata is used to build a user profile for the user who is viewing the page.

If you view the metadata on any page in the site you will possibly see metadata for:

• topics
• audience
• content type
• stage
• intent

This metadata is the driver for the personalisations that are shown to users.

Personalised content

Personalised content comes in different types and can be displayed in a variety of ways depending on the need.

Promotions (book a demo, stage)

Promotions are displayed to users as calls to action. CivicTheme ships with a Promotion component and this has been combined with Convivial personalisation to produce dynamic sections of the page that can adapt to user behaviour.

If you look to the bottom of this page you will see a Book a Demo CTA. There are many variants of this CTA which depend on whether you have booked a demo, current ad campaign, current decision tree outcome, current audience, underlying favourite audience or the "general" default audience. 

Further, on the homepage, you will see a "Stage" promotion which will encourage you to take the next step in your journey. This includes learning about the site, the features of Convivial for Covic and finally booking a demo.

Top tasks (audience)

The user profile which is formed for each user keeps track of the content the user views and the audiences which the user favours most strongly. This is the "audience_top". Further, if a user directly visits the landing page for an audience, this will give rise to an "audience_intent" which lasts for 5 minutes. Both of these variables combine to make an "audience_affinity", the audience that is most closely associated with the user at this point in time.

Audience affinity is then user to show the top tasks for that audience. In the backend, each Audience contains a list of tasks which are relevant for the audience. The system then is able to fetch these tasks based on audience affinity and display the tasks to the user.

If you go to the homepage, you will see the tasks most relevant to you at the top of the page.

Latest articles (topic)

In a similar way to audiences, the system will derive "topic_affinity" for the user. This value can be used to fetch the most recent articles for that particular topic. 

If you go to the homepage, you will see the latest articles being shown to you which best suit the topic you have the closest affinity for.

Convivial Profiler

Convivial Profiler is a Javascript library that sits under the hood, tracking user behaviour on the site, summarising it and then saving it to local storage - creating a user profile. User behaviour is tracked along a number of sources with Convivial Profiler making use of page metadata, user interactions, the page URL, cookies and values available from Javascript. The collected data is then processed along a number of dimensions so that summary statistics can be generated based on the stream of interactions produced by the user.

Privacy is an important consideration. No data is sent from the user's computer to a third party for processing or storage and so the data remains safely with the user. The Convivial Profiler system uses no third-party cookies.

On this site, the user profile is generated from a number of dimensions as follows.

• Page visits and experience
• Stages and journey
• Audiences
• Topics
• Campaigns
• Goals
• Time of day

Any one of these variables can then be used to personalise the site.

Personified components

Morpht has developed two special personalisation components which deliver the personalised experiences to the user. In Drupal speak they are blocks and paragraphs which can be embedded into pages to deliver the content as needed. These components make use of the local storage variables in the user profile and make use of Handlebars templates for transforming the JSON results to HTML.

Personified Data

The personfied data component queries an endpoint in Drupal (or elsewhere) and receives JSON data back. This data is usually in the form of a list of items, although it could just be one. The results are transformed and displayed on the page.

Personified data is used in many places on this site:

• Audience tasks
• Topic articles
• Stage CTA
• Book a demo CTA

Personified Content

The personified content component is used to display personised messages. A handlebars template can be defined by an editor. It is then mixed with the local storage variables to produce the final content.. 

Personified content is used for the "Behind the scenes" content which appears at the bottom of this page. 

Conclusion

The personalisation features of Convivial for Covic have been designed with security, flexibility and functionality in mind. The solution is capable of working on GovCMS SaaS and is a good approach for agencies who are looking to start their personalisation journey. The integration of these features with CivicTheme ensures that agencies can enjoy the best design and user experience on their new site.