Build and test personalized, optimized, and synchronized digital interactions at every touchpoint, with the flexibility, security, and scalability you need.
As personalization and experience optimization has become increasingly strategic for brands, many teams are looking to integrate such capabilities natively across new and emerging channels. With Experience APIs, Dynamic Yield’s entire personalization suite, including programmatic targeting, product recommendations, behavioral messaging, and more can now be implemented on the server-side.
Traditionally, A/B testing and personalization campaigns are implemented on the client-side using in-browser javascript libraries. Easy to integrate and offering marketers the ability to independently test and deliver web-based experiences with minimal reliance on developers, it’s no wonder it has become an industry standard.
Fast-forward to the age of digital connectivity and you will find, however, that customers today expect the same superior experience they receive on-site across every channel of interaction, whether online or off. Forced to seek out more sophisticated solutions that will allow them to expand beyond the web, teams can now leverage Dynamic Yield’s Experience APIs to natively integrate the personalization capabilities they rely on within the mobile app, email, IoT devices, in-store kiosks, call centers, or any other digital touchpoint a brand has with a customer.
In this post, we’ll dive into some of the exciting use cases and benefits moving to the server-side unlock, which include improved performance, centralized code control, and greater security, in addition to the experience continuity teams so vitally require to keep pace.
Dynamic Yield’s Experience APIs are a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that provide product managers and developers with a greater level of flexibility and control when it comes to delivering relevant and synchronized digital interactions across the entire stack.
Find a breakdown of the different APIs and what they do, below:
Personalization and Targeting API – Test and target behavioral 1:1 messaging, homepage banners, recommendations, and more based on specific markets or audience groups across any digital touchpoint.
Recommendation API – Serve recommendations with manual rule designation and per-slot level targeting in addition to algorithm-driven results according to performance. Also, push individual changes to the product feed in real time.
Customer Data API – Reorder the layout or content selection based on a user’s affinity, as well as capture and retrieve person-level profile data (no matter the source) to create custom experiences for each visitor.
We understand that the client-side vs. server-side debate is a real one, but thankfully, you don’t necessarily have to make an either/or choice. Dynamic Yield provides two distinct implementation methods to choose from:
Web-Script + APIs
With our classic offering, you can now take advantage of the many client-side benefits you’ve come to love, such as Dynamic Yield’s out-of-the-box templates, WYSIWYG, friendly user interface, and more while also rolling out API-based experiences.
This not only allows marketing teams to continue creating and launching campaigns on their own but also opens the door for development teams to build more advanced use cases that would not have been possible using only the Dynamic Yield script.
APIs Only
For those who have the technical resources and long-term vision, the option to run experiences purely via API is also available. Although more involved, the wider range of capabilities, deeper insights, and overall sophistication of server-side testing compensate for what the method may lack in ease and convenience.
The APIs Only implementation truly provides teams with a blank canvas, granting developers complete and centralized control over the code to create innovative experiences without limitation.
| Web Script + APIs | APIs-Only | |
| How is page load affected? |
Experiences can be rendered server- and client-side. Below the fold experiences can be done asynchronously, minimizing load impact. | Personalization is done before the page is rendered, so there is minimal effect on performance. |
| Degree of developer control? |
Configurable, as structural changes can remain within the development workflow, with minor or below-the-fold changes still able to be done by business users. | Higher, as changes to the site can be monitored and controlled by IT. |
| Ease of use for marketers? |
Depending on the implementation, marketers can easily deploy client-side campaigns alongside those via API when necessary. | Business users will need to rely heavily on developers to create new programs but can use templates to easily make changes and launch campaigns. |
| Reach | Limited to desktop and mobile web browsers. | Personalization can be achieved on any device or platform capable of making an API call. |
Operating in the world of APIs requires close collaboration between stakeholders in marketing and product as launching API-based campaigns differs from the current workflow, which is often handled by folks on the business side.
Now, once a team comes up with a hypothesis to test, developers will need to first build the experience or template in the backend with variables to alter. Then, marketers, merchandisers, product managers, and so on can reuse and customize these predefined templates to create multiple campaigns with the flexibility and freedom they are familiar with.
ICYMI, we’re offering a free 14-day Experience APIs trial. Simply sign-up for access to a sandbox environment and start playing.
While certainly a change, the benefits of our Experience APIs and how they can be utilized are vast, which I’ll now cover.
There is no limit to the channels, touchpoints, devices, and interactions that personalization can influence with Dynamic Yield’s Experience APIs. In fact, with each and every connection, personalization becomes more powerful – not to mention, relevant.
For instance, retailers who are looking to create more immersive in-store experiences can leverage kiosks to assist shoppers in product discovery. These digital screens can allow loyalty members to sign-in and claim personalized offers based on their past purchase behavior and affinities. Or, using self-segmentation surveys, recommend items based on the visitor’s responses as well as info on where to find them in the store. Location data could also be leveraged to showcase the most popular products available based on what other shoppers in the area are purchasing.
The data collected can then be used to enrich a customer’s profile or further augment experiences online.
In 2014, Walmart measured the impact of site performance on conversions and found that when page load time jumped from one to four seconds, conversions declined sharply. On the flip side, for every one second reduced, it saw a two percent increase in conversions. For an eCommerce site raking in $10M a year, that improvement could mean a $200,000 increase in revenue – only likely much more as consumer expectations have significantly risen since then.
This is especially important for elements above the fold which are immediately visible when the page loads, where minimal latency or no flicker is the preferred outcome. In these instances, teams can call Dynamic Yield’s Experience APIs from the server, as with this approach, the personalized content is already included in the markup before the page is rendered, resulting in a flawless execution of the experience (see ya never, flicker).
Client-side campaigns can also then be rendered “below the fold” asynchronously, minimizing page load impact for those implementing Dynamic Yield in a hybrid fashion.
Many teams want to test things like different pricing models or use proprietary customer data to better match visitors with the appropriate products or content, but don’t want to expose any of the sensitive information necessary to serve experiences such as this in the browser.
By running tests via our Experience APIs, only the chosen variation is served to customers (without revealing any other data), opening up new opportunities to experiment with different use cases of personalization.
As teams go through the implementation process and begin launching API-based experiences, developers will need a way to quickly review the calls they are making to verify there are no issues or errors.
Our API logs give an in-depth overview of events, pageviews, clicks, and choose variation calls, allowing for simple troubleshooting of unexpected behavior to find and rectify the root cause. Teams can filter results by time range, type, status, warnings, and errors for more details, and drill down into any API call for the full text of any errors or warnings, plus the full body of the request that’s been made.
Whether you support the claim that APIs are eating the world or not, more and more brands are moving to unite the logic powering both their web and mobile apps into one core set of flexible and secure server-side services.
If you’re ready to look beyond the use of third-party client scripts, we’ve designed our Experience APIs to be called from either the client-side, server-side, or both, with each team’s architecture and privacy concerns in mind.
If you’re a current customer and want to get started, contact your CSM to come up with a roadmap that makes sense for you. We’re also offering a 14-day Experience APIs trial for those who want to take our server-side solutions for a test drive, so sign-up today and feel the power!
