Contextual Commerce FAQ

Contextual Commerce is a contextualization solution designed for e-commerce that helps retailers deliver personalized experiences to their shoppers, increasing sales from existing website traffic. By using real-time behavioral data and contextual signals like location, pricing, and inventory, it identifies key moments to show tailored messages that boost conversion rates and basket sizes. Contextual Commerce enhances the shopper experience by avoiding the use of PII and instead relying on AI and machine learning to deliver relevant messages. This ensures brand safety while providing features like social proof, pricing updates, inventory status, and User-Generated Content (UGC), all presented at the optimal moment in the shopper's journey to influence conversion and maximize revenue.

Contextualization works by creating tailored shopping experiences using real-time behavioral data and contextual signals, without relying on personally identifiable information (PII). This approach uses AI and machine learning to deliver the right message to shoppers at exactly the right time, improving engagement and conversions. By focusing on non-PII data, contextualization helps overcome common barriers faced by other personalization solutions.

The benefits include:

• Avoiding regulatory issues tied to using personal data.
• Improving the shopping journey by delivering messages when they matter most.
• Increasing sales over time by continually optimizing messages through machine learning.
  

Four key factors set Contextual Commerce apart from its competitors:

• Technology: The advanced machine learning system tailors experiences to each shopper in real time and improves over time, driving higher incremental revenue.
• Support: Clients receive white-glove service with dedicated experts who provide strategic guidance, ensuring faster implementation and successful outcomes, without needing internal resources to manage the platform.
• Data: Contextual Commerce uses real-time shopper behavior, not PII, to create dynamic shopping experiences for every visitor, whether new or returning, reducing privacy concerns.
• Attribution: Clients only pay for proven impact. After validating data is attributable and repeatable, Contextual Commerce only charges for the incremental revenue generated beyond what the client would have earned otherwise. This ensures a no-risk path to revenue growth. 

Contextual Commerce analyzes how visitors browse your site and predicts which visitors are not likely to make a purchase. It then determines how "influenceable" they are. If a visitor can't be influenced, no campaign is shown. But if they can be influenced to buy, Contextual Commerce displays a campaign. The system monitors over 400 behavioral attributes per second, such as mouse movements, scrolling, and page views. This "digital body language" is compared to millions of other shoppers' behaviors in the Contextual Commerce decision engine, allowing it to predict with high accuracy who will buy, who won’t buy, and who might buy after they see a campaign. Campaigns are only shown to that small portion of traffic, about 30% on average, who are not going to purchase on their own and are likely to be influenced by the message.

There are five main phases in the partnership process with Contextual Commerce:

1. Legal: Sign the Master Service Agreement (MSA).
2. Installation: Install the JavaScript snippet on your site. Contextual Commerce will test it to ensure everything is working properly.
3. Concepts: Contextual Commerce designs and proposes initial campaigns based on historical data to provide meaningful revenue uplift. Clients review and approve these campaigns before they are built.
4. Analytics: Ensure alignment between Contextual Commerce and client analytics, and agree on key performance indicators before launch.
5. Launch: The approved campaigns are built and tested on a staging environment before going live on the production site.
   

No, Contextual Commerce will not affect your site’s performance. Its JavaScript library is loaded asynchronously, meaning it doesn’t interfere with other site elements as they load. Even in rare cases of outages, Contextual Commerce's scripts won’t impact the overall performance of your site. Contextual Commerce's scripts report behavioral data like scrolling and mouse activity to the API every second, using minimal resources—less than 0.1% of CPU or RAM. The scripts pause when the browser tab is inactive, ensuring no unnecessary usage. Contextual Commerce is rigorously tested across all major browsers and operating systems to ensure compatibility.

No, Contextual Commerce does not collect PII. Instead, it gathers non-identifiable data like page views, mouse movements, and browsing behavior to optimize campaign performance. Information such as IP addresses (anonymized), products browsed, and purchase history may be collected, but sensitive data like payment information or email addresses is not.

Contextual Commerce handles the design and build of all campaigns. However, clients are involved throughout the process and must approve all elements, including copy, design, and placement. No campaigns are launched without the client’s final approval.