A new survey has been released from the etailing-group, MyBuys, which found that most customers like having cross-channel personalization. The results of the survey suggest that people prefer to see advertisements on websites, in email, and on other digital properties that match up with their specific interests. This is possible, of course, only by gathering data from browsing and searching history. It is important to note that the survey is done by a company that provides ad personalization capabilities to online researchers, so the objectivity of the results may be questionable.
For what it is worth, however, this survey does seem to show that more and more people are becoming willing to accept the monitoring of their web activity in exchange for an improved online experience. The survey found that people want, and expect, personalization in a variety of places online. Specifically, 70% of respondents said that they want and expect this type of personalization when visiting normal websites. 68% wanted it in email. The numbers drop significantly when it comes to display ads (42%) and social ads (39%), which is quite interesting since those two platforms likely monitor the most data.
Another interesting statistic that was reported in the survey was that the top three factors that drove decision making in online purchases were discounts (75%), free shipping (74%) and finally, finding the right product at 68%. One might be surprised that getting discounts and free shipping is more important than finding the right product.
Whether this data is entirely accurate, or slightly skewed from the way the questions were asked, it does seem to show that a growing number of people are willing to accept some data tracking in order to get the deals that they want. Additional studies will undoubtedly be performed in this area to help get information that is not tainted by the perception of bias.
