As privacy laws tighten and third-party cookies disappear, many companies face a frustrating trade-off: respect user privacy or deliver personalized experiences that drive sales. New research published in the Journal of Business Research, shows they don’t have to choose.
Brianna Paulich
In “Managing conversions of anonymous online users: a privacy-compliant framework,” researcher Brianna Paulich, assistant professor of marketing at the University of South Florida, developed a way to understand what anonymous website visitors want — without collecting personal data.
Instead of tracking people across sites, the team relied only on privacy-compliant session cookies and basic web server logs. Their study was in the context of a large U.S. financial services firm. Using a semi-supervised machine learning model, they inferred anonymous users’ intentions to visit the website to learn about offered services, act (e.g., open an account), visit a branch, or speak with customer service.
The anonymous website users were randomly assigned to real-time marketing communications that are one of the following: random, sales-oriented, or content tailored to their inferred intent.
The results were striking. Intent-based content nearly doubled conversion rates compared to traditional sales-focused marketing and significantly boosted engagement. Even without personal identifiers or long browsing histories, aligning website content with real-time intent improved performance.
In an era defined by privacy regulation, the study offers a practical path forward by demonstrating that smart, respectful data use can still drive meaningful business results.
Authors: Brianna JeeWon Paulich, University of South Florida; Yichen Cheng and Denish Shah, Georgia State University.