By Santi Bolivar
The relationship between Machine Learning (ML) and websites has evolved to a point where we practically run into it every day.
Amazon, Netflix, Google, and perhaps every social media site you can think of uses some type of ML algorithm to provide its users with personalized experiences.
However, these are giant companies with tons of people and resources by their side. What about your website? Could you get any real benefit from machine learning?
The answer is: it depends. Machine learning is a powerful tool with far-reaching capabilities, but there are several things you should keep in mind before investing in it.
You’ll most likely need help to implement it, so it might be a good idea to partner up with a software development company. And if you want to get the best cost-efficiency, try to outsource to South America or any other top outsourcing region.
Anyway, let’s get started.
What can Machine Learning do for my website?
The general role of machine learning is to extract valuable insights from large or complex sets of raw data. This is where the “learning” part comes in. As the algorithm gathers more and higher-quality data, it increases its efficiency and success rate to solve complex problems and predict user behaviors.
If your website is currently going through any kind of significant growing user volume period, I can tell you right now that implementing machine learning is the right move. Basically, reaching more people means more available data, which the faster and more cost-effective computational processing of ML can turn into very useful insights.
As long as there is a considerable amount of traffic running through your web, machine learning can be a great help to optimize your site’s speed, understand the way customers interact with it, and identify key opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Let’s dive deeper into the three main advantages ML can bring to your business.
- Learn customer patterns and trends: Haven’t you ever thought about getting inside your customer’s mind and finding out exactly what they think? Well, with machine learning, you can. Using an ML algorithm, your website would be able to track customer actions and quickly organize their behavior into familiar patterns. This is essentially a shortcut to learning what makes your users tick, and perhaps even getting some insight into their thoughts about your brand and services.
Being automated, ML is more agile, accurate, and cost-effective at analysis data than any other method. Not only that but as the algorithm tracks more information, it will learn to recognize other patterns and trends without the need to program it to search for them. Certainly a huge step up from manual data analysis.
- Access Next-level Searching: If finding something on your website takes more than a few seconds, users will get frustrated rapidly and forget about you. Machine Learning can provide more value to search results by adjusting them to better satisfy the shopper’s request based on their information, rather than running simple searches on your web’s database. This is a high chance of boosting your click rates, customer ratings and conversions.
- Predict User Behavior: After learning your userbase’s patterns and trends, a machine learning algorithm can start to predict what they want to do or what they will be looking out for. If there is any type of store on your website, these predictions can translate into targeted and powerful product recommendations—going beyond general product popularity and tossing user’s unique qualities into the mix.
This is done by tapping into some very precise data, such as buying habits, preferred style options, and even available budget. If you want to go a step further, you can even program an algorithm to prioritize products that will bring in the most revenue or generate incremental sales.
So, is machine learning right for your business?
Machine Learning is not a futuristic technology—it is something any website owner can access right now, and start taking advantage of its many benefits. Without a doubt, ML is set on a path to become a major asset to the web development industry and automate some of the most cost-intensive manual processes that we are currently dealing with.
This way, businesses will be able to extract meaningful insights from their customers and act upon that information to generate more clicks, visits, purchases, and engagements with the brand.
Based on all of this, we could say that implementing machine learning technology into your website is the right move—sooner or later, it is going to become an industry standard. So, if you want to create smart web applications that will increase your user’s engagement, interaction, and overall experience, machine learning is the way to go.
