Pantheon and Lytics Are Bringing Personalization Within Reach

Today we are proud to announce our partnership with Pantheon to bring personalization within reach for every web team.  Over the last 10 years we’ve helped hundreds of companies connect and activate their first party data, using Lytics CDP  to deliver personalized experiences at scale.  But this partnership with Pantheon marks a shift in accessibility to personalization as we  join forces to reduce the cost and complexity of getting started.

We want to help web teams rethink their approach to customer data and digital experiences. This partnership will democratize personalization, and together we can help companies find a much simpler path to a first-party data strategy and personalization for every Drupal and WordPress website.  

Get started now by signing up for your free Personalization Engine account.  

The Problem: An Oversized Dream, Always Out of Reach

For most digital marketers, website personalization is an aspiration – but it’s been too expensive and complex to get started.  A few have shown that it can have tremendous value and it’s well established that successfully tailoring a site to its audience makes it more engaging for visitors. But too many have reached for this value and come up short, and for the rest, the cost, complexity, and the risk of failure have been too strong a deterrent.

The legacy DXP players like Adobe, Acquia and Sitecore haven’t helped. They sold the personalization dream, but it came with a hefty price-tag and a suite of unevenly integrated software acquisitions that often fell short, especially if the price tag for the tools drained the budget for delivery. Even customers who could historically afford to write big checks often realized halfway through that the project plan born of that dreamy sales pitch was fatally over-ambitious, not to mention far too slow to show real value. They feel burned because they are locked into a multi-year contract they only use in rudimentary ways.  

Breaking Through the Barriers to Personalization: Personalization Made Simple

The three things that keep personalization aspirational for many teams, and have led to projects going off the rails for others are:

• Cost: most personalization engines start at $50k or more, and they’re useless without a customer data platform (CDP) to connect and enable real-time profiles with the context you need to drive personalization, which could easily cost you the same; sheer cost of tools alone has locked out a ton of teams.

• Complexity: the conventional approaches are architecturally messy and involve a lot of moving parts; as a result the amount of custom implementation needed is substantial. That adds to cost, but also drives risk way up, because the more complex your setup, the more likely it will break down.
• Content: teams that sign on to an ambitious technical vision for personalization often run into a buzz-saw when they discover that their content roadmap got exponentially bigger, and they actually don’t have systems to actually manage content variations, so the level of effort to deliver that roadmap for any given piece also went up considerably.

The Benefits Are Clear

• Reduced Cost and Complexity: The cost to get started with Lytics for Pantheon customers is zero, and that’s not a feature-limited trial. Everything you need to get up and running for five million monthly impressions is included – both CDP and Personalization Engine.  You can also steal the best playbooks from industry leaders with solutions that “just work.”.   
• 1st Party Data Foundation For a Cookie-less Future: Reckoning with the impending demise of third-party cookies needs to happen in 2024. This new partnership provides a forward-thinking solution that enables companies to easily adopt a 1st Party Data Strategy and build real-time, unified profiles – the foundation of personalization –  and connect what you know about your customers with your content.  By integrating directly with existing tools website management, companies can deliver audience-tailored content without relying on expensive and complex integrations, ensuring a seamless experience for users across all devices.
• AI Technology Built-In: Leveraging cutting-edge AI, including machine learning and Google’s Generative AI, our offering empowers marketers to analyze visitor behavior, identify engagement opportunities, and generate content suggestions with unprecedented accuracy. By capitalizing on Google’s AI innovations with a tech and data stack that is 100% Google Cloud, companies can stay ahead of the curve and deliver personalized experiences that drive results.

Real talk: finally delivering personalization won’t start by boiling the ocean.  It will start by testing the waters in a low-risk environment and scaling up from there. Lytics’ Inspiration Book can help you figure out what the best starting points are for you. 

Stop Eating Cookies — Start Picking Low-Hanging Fruit

This isn’t just some shiny object martech tag you throw on your site and then forget. This partnership provides a durable and direct integration to the CMS that powers your most valuable digital experience. You’ll leverage audience-specific content seamlessly as part of your normal website operations workflow and unlock other use-cases like intelligent content recommendations to keep your visitors engaged.

Backed by a strong shared infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform, Pantheon and Lytics are helping customers take the first step towards a cookieless future. With 100% GCP-native DNA we are positioned to continue bringing innovation deeper in the stack from Google up to our shared customers.

Indeed, we see an opportunity to leverage Google’s Generative AI to help solve the bigger picture content problem. Everybody knows (or should know) that it’s way too risky to just let AI write content for you. But if you think about AI as “Artificial Interns” – you could have it looking at what content gets the most engagement from disparate audiences, looking into how they might see that content differently, and coming up with suggestions for where to start creating personalized variants. 

Generative AI opens up a path to grow from “just fix the slider” into a more complex personalized content strategy over time, without doubling or tripling the content production workload. Not only can you gradually lean in, the  overhead of maintenance can be much lower. It’s still early days, but we’re very excited to see how we can uniquely leverage this capability as 100% GCP native tools.

If you are ready to re-think your approach to website personalization, or have been waiting for this kind of opportunity to get started, we’re ready for that conversation. Stay tuned for more updates as we roll out the open source starter kits, as well as more detailed reference architectures and our Inspiration Book. 

If you’re a Pantheon customer or Digital Agency partner, learn more about this new free offering and sign up here.  And make sure to sign up for our upcoming Pantheon+Lytics live online office-hours.