Algolia AI Personalisation For The Quickest & Easiest Way To Increase Conversions

Five years ago, Algolia was among the leaders in integrating advanced search personalization into their platform when they introduced the ability to personalize search results. But in June of 2024, they went one step further and introduced AI Personalization into their platform.

Algolia's AI Personalization empowers merchandisers and developers to offer each online visitor content that is personally customized to their unique behaviors, preferences, feedback, and attributes; adjusting and adapting in real-time to provide valuable content. The system leverages comprehensive insights to tailor content based on other users with similar goals.

1. Improved User Experience

2. Increased Engagement

3. Higher Conversion Rates.

4. Set It and Forget It Scalable System

As a Lead Front-End Developer for Adapt Agency, I've implemented Algolia Search for many of our clients, including Workhuman, Aerospike, and edX. Thanks to comprehensive documentation and Algolia’s flexible API, I've not encountered any blockers. This is something I enjoy most about Algolia, their attention to detail for developers. 

For standard solutions, React InstantSearch has no competitors. It enables rapid implementation, time to market is super quick and it supports almost any use case out of the box. There are components for search, refinements, pagination, result highlighting and many more. It's easy to customize and style it to match your branding.

If you have a special case or a tech stack, Algolia's SDK has got you covered. Its composable nature allows you to access it through your whole stack. (Backend, Frontend, CI and third party integrations).

You get the same vibe when implementing AI Personalization. If you already have common user events and enough data, you are just a few clicks away from deployment.

Once you have Algolia Search frontend implemented, you just need these events to get started:

• Record viewed in a listing.

• Record details viewed.

• Events indicating user interest in a record. (i.e. Add to cart, bookmarked item, sharing, etc..)

• User goal achievement. (i.e. Completion of the buy, form submission, etc..)

From here, all you need to do is decide on the personalization strength and affinity type. Algolia gives you two options for generating personalized search experience. Basic affinities and AI-powered affinities.

The last (optional, albeit highly recommended) step is to set up the A/B test and compare your user engagement. This enables your business to test different personalization strategies and directly measure their impact on user behavior and conversion rates. At Adapt, we love data informed decision making, so we love this feature.

edX is an online learning platform founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2012. It offers a wide range of university-level courses in various disciplines, including computer science, languages, engineering, psychology, writing, electronics, biology, and marketing. edX provides courses from universities and institutions around the world, making higher education more accessible to a global audience.

With Algolia, edX has utilized dynamic AI synonym suggestions, categorization, query rewriting/ranking, analytics, and has planted seeds for personalization. I witnessed firsthand the impact of Algolia’s implementation in enhancing learner engagement and operational efficiency. By implementing Algolia’s search capabilities, we significantly improved how knowledge-hungry users interacted with the platform. Users can now swiftly and accurately search for courses they’re interested in, discover similar courses, and explore edX-recommended programs.

Additionally, Algolia's robust analytics tools provide the capability to monitor and analyze search behaviors, allowing edX the opportunity to gain invaluable insights into what visitors search for most and to identify trends in educational interests and learning patterns. These analytics help edX to continually refine and optimize the platform, ensuring it remains aligned with user needs and preferences, thereby maximizing user retention.

Algolia’s documentation and SDK are comprehensive and cover most cases out of the box. Our experience implementing this into client platforms has made it our top choice for search personalization. Dedicate your upcoming sprint for implementing AI Personalization and watch your conversions increase.

If you aren't confident implementing it yourself. Don't hesitate, reach out. We are more than happy to help you out.