Ten underutilised strategies to deliver enhanced user personalisation

Published: 09 Dec 2025

When we talk about personalisation, it’s easy to jump straight to content recommendations. But with the rapid jumps in publishing tech, there’s so much untapped potential that goes far beyond a bespoke sidebar. We reached out to our Associates to discover what publishers should be doing in 2026 and beyond to deliver more comprehensive personalised experiences for their users.

Create a flexible site structure that adapts to individual users.

One of the most impactful moves for publishers today is to bridge the gap between audience data and content for a full user experience. Users ignore static content; they engage with information that mirrors their immediate reality and context. Publishers sit on a gold mine of first-party data. The opportunity lies in activating this data not just for targeting, but for tailored content blocks, better on-site guidance, and smoother navigation that reflects real user behaviour.

For instance, knowing a user loves football is the first insight. The real value comes from using that knowledge by surfacing live scores, highlighting related articles, or adapting homepage modules. Ads now enhance this personalisation by displaying the latest scores, effectively creating a service, not just a promotion. This approach boosts comprehension and brand performance significantly. In fact, our survey reveals that 91% of sports fans are more likely to pay attention to ads featuring utility-driven features like sports stickers. Ultimately, by activating first-party data and AI to tailor both content and utility-driven advertising, publishers ensure their content and ads live in syntony, creating a unified and engaging user experience.

Jonathan Haines, Managing Director, Northern Europe, Equativ

Unify your audience data into a single source of truth.

Beyond content recommendations, publishers should focus on identity-driven personalisation. Many publishers still rely on fragmented data sources, which limits their ability to truly understand their audience. By leveraging an identity graph, publishers can unify disparate digital IDs (e.g. device IDs, hashed emails, cookies) into a single, persistent view. This enables them to recognise users across channels and sessions, even as third-party cookies disappear.

With this foundation, publishers can deliver experiences that go beyond “what to read next”. For example, they can tailor subscription offers based on a user’s engagement history or adjust ad frequency to avoid fatigue. Done with the right partner, identity resolution enables privacy-first personalisation, ensuring trust while meeting consumer expectations for relevance.

In short, the one thing publishers should do to optimise personalisation is invest in identity resolution. It transforms anonymous traffic into meaningful relationships – strengthening loyalty, engagement, and monetisation in a privacy-safe environment.

Danny Holmes, Consulting Partner, Media & Agency, Experian

Develop custom pathways and advertising experiences for subscribers.

Advertisers paying media owners to show ads and consumers paying media owners not to be shown ads. That’s the weird dynamics of today’s media industry.

If you’re a publisher, it might not seem like a bad idea. But it is.

Firstly, your audience doesn’t hate ads. They just hate irrelevant ads that get in the way and are optimised for accessing cheap volumes and clicks. Protecting subscribers from such ads is wise, but if protecting them from all ads, you are giving away revenue without improving the audience experience.

Secondly, your most valuable advertisers know that your frequent users – the ones that know and trust your content, that even pay for it – are the ones to advertise to. It’s the audience where you can use frequency, storytelling, and sense of belonging. The advertiser can be a part of a community.

So, if there is one big personalisation journey for publishers to embark on, it is to start treating subscribers differently than passersby. Your subscribers are your best asset for advertisement monetisation, but they expect relevant, high-quality ads, nice, branded content, win-win events and activations.

In short: closing down open programmatic to your subscribers while increasing the price for advertisers who really want to tap into your community, is personalisation at its best. Both advertising and subscription revenues will grow.

Anders Lithner, CEO, Brand Metrics

Offer native, AI-driven search capabilities to turn page views into conversations.

User Behaviour is changing dramatically as LLM apps are gaining adoption. This creates a habit “gap” in the open web, as for the most part, user-facing AI experiences are missing, creating a gap between user expectation and UX on publisher websites. Publishers should deploy an on-site AI answer experience that turns every visit into a two-way, personalised conversation, not just a pageview.

Instead of only recommending more articles, an AI assistant can let users ask questions in their own words and receive tailored answers grounded in the publisher’s trusted journalism and real-time interests. AI chats are quickly becoming a daily search habit, and users expect conversational, instant answers wherever they go online. If publishers don’t offer this natively, those high-intent moments will shift to third-party AI platforms, weakening loyalty and monetisation while also undermining the credibility of the content.

Jason Iliou, Regional Publisher Director, EMEA, Taboola

Develop a rich, data-driven understanding of your audience.

One of the most important things publishers can do to deliver personalised experiences is to develop a deeper understanding of their audience’s behaviour at scale. Rather than relying on identity-based targeting, many publishers are now focusing on broader behavioural signals that don’t require knowing who an individual user is. This shift allows them to recognise patterns of interest and intent in a way that is respectful of user expectations while still enabling meaningful relevance. With a clearer view of how different audience groups engage, what motivates them, when they are most receptive, and how their needs change across contexts, publishers can adapt layouts, ad placement, creative formats, and site experiences to better match moments of intent. This leads to smoother, less intrusive advertising experiences that feel naturally aligned with what readers are trying to accomplish.

By serving fewer but more relevant impressions, publishers can improve attention, strengthen loyalty, and minimise wasted media spend. Ultimately, a richer behavioural understanding supports a more thoughtful balance between user experience and business goals, while helping publishers deliver sustainable revenue growth without relying on personal identifiers.

Russell James, Senior Director, Publisher Development, Northern Europe, Ogury

A/B test to understand the impact on attention metrics.

It is important to understand both what types of content users consume and how they consume it. Consider investing in a robust A/B testing strategy that establishes a clear test case for the personalisation your audience prefers. User presence metrics such as hover and dwell time are helpful to track during your tests and can guide future personalisation strategies. Just be certain that your tests run long enough to give you meaningful data, and that they account for significant external factors such as seasonality.

Other aspects of attention measurement are worth exploring. Although the data often applies to ads, it can help prevent site changes that can negatively affect revenue. Based on how your exposure and engagement scores trend after an adjustment, you can better understand how advertising clients are impacted. Plus, you can use attention analysis to test multiple layouts at once and track trends across a number of segments such as device, media type and more.

Anya Libova, Senior Sales Director, EMEA, DoubleVerify

Adapt content formats to user preferences.

When we talk about personalisation, we often jump straight to ‘what content should this person see?’ But there’s a much bigger opportunity in how people want to experience that content. With so much of the AI ecosystem centred on text, publishers can create a far more personal, intuitive journey by weaving short, contextually aligned video directly into the page experience. It honours different consumption preferences, gives readers choice, and creates a richer moment of connection. We’ve seen that when video becomes part of the experience — not an add-on — audiences stay longer, engage more deeply, and publishers see meaningful gains as a result.

Shachar Orren, Co-founder & CRO/CMO, EX.CO

Aligning advertising with user intent.

Delivering more personalised experiences should go beyond recommending content. By analysing themes, entities, sentiment or topical cues within an article, publishers can adjust everything from on-page messaging to ad relevance, so the experience aligns with the user’s intent in that moment. This creates a form of personalisation that does not rely on tracking individuals but instead responds intelligently to the content being consumed.

Context-aligned ad experiences help maintain user trust, reduce the sense of being followed around the web and create a more cohesive reading journey while still giving advertisers meaningful relevance without the need for personal data. Publishers can achieve this with Content Ignite’s contextual technology.

Ben Spencer, COO, Content Ignite

Match your advertising to the nuanced context – including device, content type and topic, and user behaviour.

One of the most effective steps publishers can take is to tailor the ad experience to each user segment based on real context. Different behaviours call for different experiences: subscribers expect lighter ad loads, search-led visitors bounce quickly without careful pacing, mobile readers need adapted formats, and long-scroll homepages benefit from specific layouts. Adjusting intensity, placement, and format to these patterns creates meaningful, privacy-safe personalisation that keeps users engaged and crucially, keeps traffic on-site for longer.

To achieve this, many publishers now use solutions that let them run multiple ad experiences simultaneously, adapting layouts, formats, and stack configurations to the user’s environment or journey. This contextual approach reduces friction, improves viewability, and makes the experience feel more intuitive overall. In a market where user attention is increasingly fragile, solutions that allow publishers to tailor the experience by page type, device, and engagement level — rather than offering one generic setup — are becoming essential to strengthening loyalty, retaining traffic, and delivering genuinely user-first experiences at scale.

Ronan Murphy, Country Manager UK, Pubstack

Build loyalty and engagement with personalised newsletters.

Publishers can go beyond on-site recommendations by sending personalised daily or weekly newsletters. Instead of generic roundups, curate stories around each user’s interests. This saves readers from hunting for updates across multiple sites and strengthens loyalty and subscription potential. The ad experience should match the content too, using a combination of contextual targeting and first-party data.

Thuy Ho, Senior Sales Manager, Relevant Digital