About the Demo

This website is a demonstration of Pantheon's next-generation Edge Personalization capability, a modern approach to audience-based content personalization which presents an alternative to that taken by most personalization engines. The goal of this project is to help more people drive content engagement by simplifying and de-risking the process. This demo is currently a work in progress.

Unlike traditional vendors with complex implementation requirements, our approach leverages tight integration between the CMS and our Global CDN with Edge Computing capabilities to deliver the right content to the right audience directly, with fewer moving parts. Rather than a painful "crawl, walk, run" process, you can skip straight to walking in 90 days or less. There are several benefits to this approach:

  1. Boost engagement quickly: By leveraging the existing capabilities of your CMS and the data already present in your analytics toolset, this approach brings proven personalization tactics within reach of everyday organizations.
  2. Bulletproof user experience: Because whole pages are delivered directly from the CDN, there's no slowdown while users wait for the personalization engine load, make API calls, and then finally display the adjusted page. There's also no chance that the personalization changes introduce visible jitter, or show the dreaded "flash of depersonalized content."
  3. Manage the content in one place: This approach lets you get more out of your CMS and avoids the unfortunate situation where an intermediary personalization layer becomes a source of confusion, with a lack of clarity around how the final end-user experience is determined, and increased complexity to making changes to the site.
  4. Highly scalable: Because this approach leverages the Global CDN to deliver to users, the content variants that it produces are inherently scalable.

What Does This Site Do?

This demo site showcases a few different capabilities of the forthcoming Edge Personalization capability:

  • Geographic targeting: Based on the location of the visitor, the site will deliver a different homepage here for Canadian visitors vs US (Poutine vs Pizza).
  • Interest fingerprinting: Repeated engagement with types of content — e.g. looking at multiple vegan recipes — will put a visitor in an interest cohort, which will  reorganize the recipes landing page.
  • Paywall: The site showcases a scalable Paywall capability which kicks in after three free articles; after login (password: 1234), the visitor is still receiving cached content, but from a "subscriber audience" with access to full articles.

There are many more potential ways to leverage content variation to identify valuable audience segments or variants. Our approach is to focus on getting immediate lift for existing sites, and building from there.

Can I Get This For My Website Today?

Not just yet. But stay tuned for updates. ;)