• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 25, 2014

Consumers have begun to expect a personalized Web experience in real-time on desktop, tablets and smartphones. BloomReach Tuesday will begin rolling out a smart application that personalizes site discovery for all consumers on any device or channel. The company calls it SNAP (Search, Navigation and Personalization), and uses mounds of data to determine what the consumers want to see.

BloomReach SNAP connects consumer experiences anonymously as they shop across devices, and then adapts site search, navigation and content uniquely to each visitor. The platform dynamically creates the content as the site visitor engages with the site, combining behavioral patterns, natural-language processing, machine-learning and other intent signals to serve the most relevant search results.

One unique feature, Boost and Bury, allows marketers to promote or demote products based on real-time performance metrics, explains Joelle Kaufman, head of marketing at BloomReach. The content becomes discoverable through the site based on the link structure. "Merchant can create a whole campaign based on red jackets," she said. "The site learns about the consumer with each interaction with the site."

Some 60% of marketers struggle to personalize content in real-time, yet 77% believe real-time personalization is crucial, per Adobe.

David Cost, VP of ecommerce and digital marketing at Deb Shops, began using the mobile version in July, followed by the desktop and the tablet version two weeks ago.

Cost said the company optimizes for engagement rather than conversion, which has helped the company grow revenue. He measures engagement by time on site and pages per visit. People who interact with BloomReach on mobile spend three-times longer on the site and see three times more pages since implementing the platform, although the goal remains getting consumers the content they want in the shortest time possible.

"As a retailer, would you like someone to come to your store every day, even if they don't have the budget to buy from you once monthly, or just come in on the day they will make the purchase?" Cost said. "We would like them to come, interact and browse our product, so when they do have the money to make the purchase we're top of mind."

Cost said some of the features in BloomReach Search, such as "More Like This" or the trending feature "Just for You," reduce the time between identifying the desire for something to the time the consumer makes the purchase.