Recommending content is a great way to increase visitor engagement. If you aren't giving your visitors something to do or read next, you are silently asking them to leave. Let your existing content work for you using a Lytics content recommendation on-site widget.
1) Choose a campaign type
From the Personalize section of the Lytics Product, click "Custom" under "Create a new campaign".
Then click the "Recommend Content" campaign type, since that's what we'll be doing.
2) Choose the content you wish to recommend
All that you need to do is select the content that is available for recommendation. This can be as few as one article, or thousands of articles. Once you are happy with the available content for recommendation, Lytics will determine which content is best for each visitor.
To select content, hover over a document thumbnail and click "Select this content".
To better search for content, use the filters on the left.
Note: By default the content selection is "Locked". Using the toggle in the top left, a selection can be switched to "Dynamic". A dynamic selection will recommend any content that matches the filters set. For instance, using the above filters of "articles published in the last 6 months", if I add a job posting a month from now, it won't be matched by a dynamic selection, but every future blog post I write will.
3) Customize the design of the widget
Continue progressing through the wizard using the action bar on the bottom of the screen. The next is the "Design" step.
This is where we get to choose how we want to show the content recommendations. A full screen takeover using a modal or something more discreet using a slideout?
I'm going with the slideout style. The inline widget preview will provide some context for how this will show up as you fill out the form on the right-hand side.
Beyond copy settings, the widget designer allows for color customization options and a CSS class override if you are interested in completely customizing the shape, colors, and text treatment using your own CSS.
Read more about the personalization editor in our product documentation.
4) Preview the campaign
At this point we have provided enough information to see what the campaign would look like. Click the "Preview" button in the actions bar above, found on the right-hand side.
When prompted for a URL, provide any URL to your site.
NOTE: You must provide a URL that has jstag installed on it. Furthermore, jstag must be configured for the account you are creating a campaign in.
On clicking preview, the widget should immediately show up.
5) Choose the segment to target with this campaign
Previewing a campaign will always open a new tab, so go ahead and close that tab to return to the personalization editor. Click "Next step" to continue on to the "Target" step.
This single, powerful dropdown lists every available segment for targeting. As a Lytics account matures, this list will be mostly full of custom segments created by you and your team. However, since content recommendations already provide user-level personalization, the only reason to narrow our target is to turn content recommendations on or off for subsets of our audience.
I'm fine with everyone getting a content recommendation, so I'm going to use the segment every visitor is a member of: "All".
Note: Even new visitors, who have not yet been tracked by Lytics, will be a member of the All segment.
The All segment is also the default segment, so we don't have to do anything here.
NOTE: When previewing a campaign, the target segment is ignored. This way, no matter how precise your target is, as the marketer you will get to see the preview. This is not true for a published campaign.
6) Decide on some display triggers
Beyond the segment targeting, additional display triggers can be set to define exactly when a widget will open.
This is a very interesting space to explore, since it includes options like Exit Intent, Open on Scroll Percentage, Only Show X Times Total, and more.
For the first section "What URLs do you want this campaign to appear on?", I'm going to add a "URL Contains" rule set to "blog/post/". This way, a visitor only gets a content recommendation while already reading a blog post.
Under Advanced Display Options I'm going to set a page scroll display trigger at 25%. This way the widget will only show up after the visitor has scrolled down the page a bit. This is a simple heuristic for interest. If the user hasn't scrolled, it's unlikely they are engaged in the post. Furthermore, why are we recommending what to read next before they have started reading the current post?
A reasonable question is "why 25%? and not 100%?". This is to hedge my bets against anyone who won't finish this post. If they abandon before the page scroll trigger, they will never get a recommendation, and the recommendation may be more interesting to the visitor than the post they are already reading.
The last section is for setting a start and end date on the campaign. Since this campaign isn't coordinated with any sort of event or promotion, I am happy having it start as soon as I publish it and having it run until I manually stop it. So I'll leave this blank as well.
7) Review it, save it, launch it
Now that everything is set, review all the settings to make sure there are no mistakes. From here, you can save it as a draft to be published later or publish it immediately.
That's all there is to it! Go forth and keep visitors engaged!
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