The early days of Customer Personalization meant a website which could localize its language preferences Well, the world has changed drastically since these old days

This article discusses the customer personalization aspects of two widely known CMS platforms, Drupal (open source) and Sitecore (proprietary).

You may want to read this article which will help you choose the CMS that can fulfill all your business needs.

Alright, let’s begin with Drupal.

Drupal’s content personalization is based on the logic of attributing scores to different categories and terms that are linked to users. This works on 5 below mentioned approaches.

Geolocation: Location of a visitor can be tracked with its geolocation module, since it can identify the latitudes and longitudes of a user based on their IP address or we can even use HTML5 to collect the geolocation info.

Search: You can map specific search terms with a particular taxonomy term and assign a score to them. For example if you have mapped and scored ‘XBOX’ with ‘Game Console’, then anyone landing on your website after searching for XBOX on search engines will be attributed the score.

Content Access: Whenever a visitor goes through a particular content node, a corresponding score is given.

Suggested Content: The module also offers content matching functionality for visitors which are deemed relevant. The module can even trigger a series of themed pages at the right moment.

Dynamic Page Cache: Drupal 8 offers Dynamic Page Cache module which makes it possible to cache the content of dynamic pages without the personalized part, this can speed up the page loading time for authenticated users.

Rule Based: You can set the rule through which a personalized content is delivered to the visitor. It uses the same IP address based, Location based, Search Keywords based etc. as the determining factors to deliver personalized content

Adaptive: You can deploy visitor profiles and pattern-card matching functionality given in the module to adapt the delivered content in real time.

Historical: You can even show personalized content to the visitor based on the historical data from the visitor’s past visits.

A/B Testing: You can use A/B testing method to conclude and optimize different sets of content and accordingly rate your site’s goals. This is powerful tool which allows you decide which type of content works best for certain visitor personas.

Journey: You can outline your visitor’s journey on the website along with multiple milestones, with each milestone signifying a particular action taken on the site. You can deploy content trigger points for each milestone which will help the customer with his/her onward journey.

Takeaway

You can clearly see how both CMS platforms are adept at delivering personalized content to their respective site visitors. Despite Drupal’s personalization features, Sitecore has a clear upper hand as it offers them without any code level customizations or third party integrations to deliver personalized content. In case of Drupal the site content can be personalized with help of third party plugin and APIs and it takes considerable amount of time to implement them which leads to cost implications. This is one of the major reasons why Sitecore is often chosen over Drupal.