Usability wins over Personalisation in Cost Effectiveness says Report

Jupiter Research reports that only 14% of consumers say personalised offers or recommendations on shopping Web sites lead them to buy more often from online stores, and just 8% say that personalisation increases their repeat visits to content, news or entertainment websites. By contrast, the majority of consumers said that basic site improvements would make them buy or visit websites more often - 54% cited faster-loading pages and 52% cited better navigation as greater incentives.

According to the report, for every intended benefit tied to a personalisation-related agenda, site operators can select from many other tactics to achieve the same goals, at far lower cost. 'To drive key business metrics, most sites are better off focusing on the basics, like usability, information architecture and making key tasks easy for users to accomplish,' said David Schatsky, senior vice president at Jupiter Research.

Based on interviews with dozens of companies and a recent Jupiter Research executive survey, the new report "Beyond the Personalization Myth: Cost Effective Alternatives to Influence Intent" finds that building and operating a personalised website can cost four or more times more than operating a comparable dynamic site. Yet most sites that have deployed personalisation have realised inadequate returns on their investments.

According to Matthew Berk, research director at Jupiter Research, 'Most website personalization projects fail to deliver real business benefits. Our industry has always assumed that a personalized website was a better one, both for the visitor and the site operator. Our research has found that this is not the case.'

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