The report, "Beyond the Personalization Myth: Cost Effective Alternatives to Influence Intent", is based on interviews with dozens of companies and a recent survey.
Only 14% of consumers surveyed said they would buy more often from on-line stores with personalised offers or recommendations. Just 8% said that personalisation increased their repeat visits to content, news or entertainment web sites.
This is in contrast to the majority of consumers who stated that basic site improvements would make them buy or visit web sites more often – 54% cited faster-loading pages and 52% cited better navigation as greater incentives. Indeed, consumers are often suspicious of sites that seem to require information from them, with over 25% of respondents avoiding such sites altogether.
But the cost of building and operating a personalised web site, including the licensing of specialised software, can be over four times more expensive than operating a comparable non-personalised site, says the report. Most sites that have gone down the personalisation route have not made adequate returns on the investment.
According to Matthew Berk, Research Director at Jupiter Research:
"Most web site personalisation projects fail to deliver real business benefits. Our industry has always assumed that a personalised web site was a better one, both for the visitor and the site operator. Our research has found that this is not the case."
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.