Use Online Behavior to Predict and Influence Customer Purchases

For businesses interested in social data and personalized marketing, the recently introduced social login feature can be a game changer.

Social login enables users to log in to a business’s website using an existing social media account rather than registering a new account. This means a better user experience because users can unify their login credentials, and remember a single password for multiple sites. It also means that, by enabling social logins on your site, you’ll gain access to your customers’ social network—which contains information about their interests.

You’ll also be able to further enrich your databases by using social login usernames to match your customers’ profiles across otherwise unrelated data sources, like purchase history and online forum participation.

In this article, we focus on consumer interests and how you can leverage the concept of an interest graph to implement interest-based marketing. We also compare interest-based personalization with the state-of-the-art demographics-based and geography-based approaches and discuss why the interest-based approach is more accurate.

To see sample interest graphs and learn how you can use consumer interests to create personalized content, download the article. [PDF, 1.3MB]

Consumer data has increased in volume significantly in recent years. In particular, the huge growth in the usage of social media sites means that people are revealing more and more about themselves and their interests.

Accenture Technology Labs believes that there is a direct causal link between a consumer’s interests and his or her consumption choices. This link supports the business case for offering personalized content, recommendations and advertisements based on interests.

The recently introduced social log-in feature offers companies access to exactly this kind of information—information that could help them understand consumer interests better. This feature helps users to log in to websites using their social media accounts rather than registering new ones. In so doing, they give the website owner access to their social network profiles, which contain information that can be used to deepen a firm’s understanding of a particular customer.

Interests are defined broadly to include books, films, political figures, activities, business interests and products or brands. This kind of information can be gleaned directly from the consumer’s own activities on the Web (such as “likes” and wall posts on Facebook, and reviews on online retail sites) and indirectly from purchase histories tracked by loyalty programs or Web-browsing behavior.

Despite the causal link between a consumer’s interest and purchase behavior, it seems that most companies continue to rely on demographics and location-based targeting to reach customers. But demographics and geographic location do not directly determine consumers’ consumption choices—they are simply good indicators of choices likely to be made in certain scenarios.

Interest graphs can now be created from aggregated information in the social media databases. These track links between interests, and can help companies refine the process of presenting interest-specific content to individual customers.

With social log-ins, companies now have access to the vast stores of interest information held by the social media companies. This data must be used to supplement or even replace traditional demographics.

Companies can leverage technology’s ability to auto-generate interest graphs from database information such as web logs, purchase history, and social data. Matching these interest graphs against predetermined sets of customer interest profiles can deliver more accurate, and potentially better-performing, personalized content.