Personalization Data Provider Lytics Adds Netflix-Like Content Analyzer

Suppose a marketer knew what kinds of specific content might interest you, the way Netflix knows what movies you might like.

That’s the idea behind the new release from personalization data provider Lytics.

The Portland, Oregon-based company is announcing today that it is adding individual-level content analytics to its repertoire, in the form of a Content Affinity Engine.

For about the past 18 months, Lytics’ core product — its Customer Data Platform — has been taking user signals from websites and apps and providing feedback to marketers on what approaches might work best.

The signals — web traffic, email response patterns, social media interactions, customer purchase data, mobile app data, and the like — are used to populate identified and anonymous profiles of a business’s customers or visitors.

From this data, for instance, Lytics might determine that some users who do not open marketing emails might better respond to Facebook ads, if those same users are on the social network. The Data Platform is integrated with dozens of third-party marketing tools that don’t have built-in customer intelligence, like ones for email marketing, retargeting, web site optimization, or mobile push notifications.

But, CEO and co-founder James McDermott told me, his company began to realize that “companies do a poor job building a taxonomy.”

A client company might provide Lytics with the category, title and keywords for a page on its website that a visitor viewed, he said, but that might tell only part of the story about what interested the visitor. A page that might have been tagged as having “exercise” content, for instance, may really have been about yoga and nutrition.

Lytics’ Affinity Engine now crawls a site or app’s content, including blog posts, articles, videos, or product photos and automatically classifies each component according to topics. User engagement is also tracked through such variables as time on page. A third-party image recognition engine is also integrated into the platform to break down photos or graphics by topics.

The platform builds a Content Graph for each person that infers what topics you’re most interested in, so a publisher or marketer can decide how best to serve up related content, products, or offers.

Out-of-the-box, Lytics provides the intelligence as reports and segmented users, and customer companies can set up triggers in their marketing tools in response. For those customers who have shown a strong interest in yoga, for instance, show them this new page on the subject when they return to the site.

In addition to content preferences, the Lytics platform can also tell the marketer such factors as a visitor’s preference for mobile apps over mobile web sites, or that the visitor’s behavior suggests she is ready to buy some yoga-related products.

Of course, content analysis, optimization, and the resulting personalization are not new, but McDermott said his company’s new capabilities offer a unique individual level of granularity beyond what others offer. By contrast, he said, such content intelligence as Bombora’s content-informed intent data, Percolate’s content marketing, and BrightEdge’s content performance marketing operate at a macro and aggregate level.

“What Netflix does is build up a huge taxonomy about the movies,” he said. “We’re using machine learning to [similarly] build up a Content Graph about your website” or app, and then apply the graph to each visitor.