What is Personalization?

Every link that you show a reader is just noise if it doesn’t interest that reader. Noise hurts you because it drives away visitors and wears out even your valuable repeat visitors. Nobody likes noise. That is why it doesn’t help to pile on the links, because you just add to the noise problem. What you really need - and what your visitors need - is personalization. Every reader is unique, so why not treat them that way? Kibboko is the only company that can do that for you.

What does it mean to “personalize” a content recommendation? It means choosing and recommending content based on the behavior of the reader; it also means using the choices of other visitors to glean further insights. It is far more subtle than just showing “related articles”, which is technically trivial; true personalization is like a good conversation in combining depth and breadth. True personalization is fresh and stimulating while still fitting to the overall temper and taste of the visitor. Because it hard to do well, Kibboko devotes much effort to its advanced patent-pending back-end algorithm packages.

And Kibboko uniquely goes even farther, by putting control into the hands of the readers, with our patent-pending rich design that features dismissible preview boxes, filters for date and category, expansion options, and switchable viewing formats. Kibboko alone offers dynamite controls that put your visitors in charge. And that is what they want. For you it will mean big increases in audience satisfaction, ad-views, and time spent on your site. And all for the one hour it takes to implement our service.

We’d love to deliver the pleasure of personalization to your visitors, so give us a call or write us an email. Let’s have a short chat. You’ll be very pleased to learn just what we can do for you and why our motto is “More visitors, staying longer.” You can call me at (416) 969-0307 ext. 222 or email me at Keith [dot] Bates [at] Kibboko [dot] com.

Case Study

Recently, we conducted an in-depth review of Kibboko’s performance across the various sites in our network. For each site, we have seen an increase in page-views, ad-views, and depth of penetration. The data from one site, due to its size and status as an established publication, is representative of our performance across our network.

Since introducing the Kibboko service on this particular web site, time spent by visitors on the site has increased by 25.7%, and the average number of page-views per visit has increased by 10.6%. The chart to the right shows the increase in average page-views per visit from August to December.

Kibboko contributes to this growth in two ways. First, readers choose Kibboko recommendations to directly reach 3% to 6% more articles. Second, readers interact with other parts of the publisher’s site with every additional page that they reach through the Kibboko micro-site. This buffer effect likely accounts for an additional 30% page-view increase, meaning Kibboko delivers 3.9% to 7.8% increase in page-views overall. This means that the single hour that it took to set up the Kibboko micro-site has translated into readers viewing 216,930 more pages in November alone. In addition, about two-thirds of these page-views were delivered to returning users that live in the publisher’s local market.

This deployment illustrates how Kibboko’s personalized recommendations boost in-market page-views and time spent on site. In addition, we demonstrated that our service is well suited to large publications, with effectively 100% up-time while indexing thousands of articles per week and delivering roughly six million page-views per month.

For more information about the Kibboko service call Keith Bates at (416) 969-0307 ext. 222.

Feature Focus: Grid vs. Text View

The Kibboko micro-site is unique in offering publishers two viewing modes. As shown below, Grid View (left) displays articles and any accompanying images in boxes, while Text View (right) displays articles as a list.

As part of the customization process, the publisher can choose the default viewing mode. If your site has many articles with images and if you want maximum aesthetic appeal, we recommend setting Grid View as the default. On the other hand, Text View is an excellent option if there are fewer articles with images or if you want to showcase as many stories as possible in a limited space.

In addition to the options Kibboko offers the publisher, our micro-site is unique in allowing individual users to take charge of their own reading experiences. Our patent-pending design offers various intuitive controls that add a second dimension of personalization, on top of the sophisticated back-end recommendation algorithms. Among other options, readers can select their preferred viewing mode using the buttons in the top, right-hand corner of the micro-site (see above images). To try out this feature and many others, visit our live demo at