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Strategies, research, industry trends — your pulse on the marketplace
 

What is contextualization? and why it's not what you think

Contextualization

September 19, 2025

By Maria Ray

Anonymous traffic and fragmented journeys are your biggest threats to revenue. With 95% of your website visitors remaining anonymous, your traditional personalization efforts are missing the mark. They’re limited to a fraction of your audience and can’t keep up with real-time shopper behavior, that contextualization can. This leaves a massive amount of revenue on the table. The gap between a shopper’s intent and your ability to respond in the moment is a problem traditional personalization simply can’t solve.

This isn’t about personalization anymore; it’s about intelligent optimization. By utilising advanced AI to understand shopper intent instantly, we deliver powerful, real-time messages. This creates urgency and drives higher margins that transforms stagnant traffic into a dynamic revenue stream. Let’s explore how contextualization helps you convert more shoppers, boost profitability, and build a partnership based on provable impact.

Your Personalization strategy is hitting roadblocks

For enterprise commerce leaders, the limitations of traditional personalization aren’t just inconveniences; they’re significant business blockers.

  • The anonymous majority: Your personalization efforts are designed for a small segment of your audience, logged-in customers or individuals with cookies. This approach completely misses the vast majority of your website traffic, the anonymous shoppers, and the substantial revenue they represent.
  • The burden of effort and cost: Traditional personalization is a resource-intensive burden. It requires significant implementation and ongoing management, while also adding risk due to the high effort and cost of managing highly regulated personal datasets and ensuring compliance.
  • Stale, rules-based logic: What many solutions call “contextualization” falls short because it’s based on rigid, rules-based logic. These systems attach generic messages to products, not individual shopper behavior, resulting in repetitive or irrelevant messages that fail to create urgency or drive real impact. Without the credibility of user-generated content (UGC), these messages can feel hollow, failing to influence purchase decisions.

The Bazaarvoice Contextual Commerce™ difference: intelligent, real-time engagement

Bazaarvoice Contextual Commerce™ is a dynamic, real-time approach that works for every shopper, known or anonymous. Instead of relying on static rules, it uses a powerful AI decision engine that learns from a shopper’s “digital body language” in real-time (contextualization). This engine dynamically determines the best conversion strategy for every shopper, delivering relevant messages precisely when they are most likely to impact a purchase. These real-time messages can also drive conversions on pages without existing UGC.

This isn’t just a one-time setup; it’s an all-inclusive, fully managed service that provides expert support every step of the way, from strategic planning to ongoing optimization. This approach is a perfect complement to your existing personalization strategies, expanding their reach to engage all shoppers and maximize the effectiveness of your overall efforts. Proven data shows that this solution boosts incremental revenue by over 6% and significantly enhances profitability from your existing web traffic. This means you can drive a 7.32% average conversion rate lift and a 7.36% average revenue per session lift. For example, our customer, Kendra Scott, saw a 6.90% lift in revenue per session and a 5.78% lift in conversion rate within the first 60 days. These are real results, from real revenue.

A partnership built on provable value

At the heart of the Bazaarvoice Contextual Commerce™ solution are three key elements that set us apart:

  • The most advanced AI: Our decision engine is built on 14 years of machine learning. It provides the industry’s largest library of techniques and analyzes 1.5 trillion shopping sessions each month. Furthermore, it collects over 500 behavioral data points per second for each visitor in real-time.
Advanced AI

  • Fully managed & optimized service: This is an all-inclusive managed service that ensures maximum results at no additional cost. From strategic planning to ongoing optimization, our team of experts is with you every step of the way.

  • Transparent provable impact: We use scientific methods and a unique ‘Test and Control’ A/B methodology to precisely measure the true, incremental revenue that Contextual Commerce unlocks for your business. This provides reliability and transparency in the results.

After the purchase, the process continues by soliciting reviews and photos from first-time purchasers to kickstart your content flywheel and generate foundational UGC. This new UGC is then integrated directly into Bazaarvoice Contextual Commerce™ experiences to improve campaign performance and accelerate your content flywheel.

Content Flywheel

Ready for a risk-free test drive?

We understand the need to see results before committing. That’s why we offer a risk-free Proof of Value (PoV) period. It’s an AI-powered trial where we implement Bazaarvoice Contextual Commerce on a single site, completely free of charge. This typically runs for 4-6 weeks, providing a clear, accelerated path to seeing tangible revenue gains. You keep all the incremental revenue generated during this period, with zero setup cost or obligation. With our streamlined installation process, we get you to launch faster, ensuring a more efficient path to seeing value.

Our solution doesn’t just promise growth; it proves it. The partnership is built on predictable growth, incremental sales, maximize return on existing investments, and improve bottom-line operating margins. This transparent, provable impact extends to your content strategy, where we help you build a self-sustaining UGC flywheel. It continuously improves campaign performance with its contextualization features and accelerates your content.

It’s time to convert the traffic you already have.

Contact us today to learn more about a partnership that turns browsers into buyers and builds your bottom line.

mray

Maria Ray

Content Specialist

Maria has spent over six years in her content marketing role and has gone from a solo creator to a full-blown specialist at Bazaarvoice. She lives for User-Generated Content (UGC) — the raw, unfiltered gold that brands can’t fake and shoppers swear by. Whether it’s shaping retail narratives or making sales content less salesy, she’s here to turn engagement into impact.

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