Contextually Aware Widgets – Testing Criteo’s AutoRoll Widget

Criteo is a white label provider of recommendation engine functionality to ecommerce and social networking sites, similar to Aggregate Knowledge and Loomia.  Specifically, Criteo uses collaborative filtering powered by data gleaned from millions of consumers to crank out product, service, and content recommendations.

AutoRoll is Criteo’s attempt to pack this recommendation service into a widget.  Installed AutoRoll widgets collect data about the visitors who frequent the widget’s host blog.  This data is fed back to Criteo’s recommendation engine, which scours the AutoRoll network for other blogs that might be of interest to the reader based on the usage patterns of others.

It’s a neat concept, and the execution should get even better as more and more blogs give it a shot, feeding more and more data back to the Criteo mother ship, and expanding the universe of potential blog recommendations.

So how did it work out for Sexy Widget?  Just about perfectly.  If you look at the bottom widget in the right hand column, you’ll see that AutoRoll is recommending Widgets Lab, Widgetoko, Stickiwidgets, Technically Speaking, and Wii Rally.

The first three blogs are about as good a match for Sexy Widget that exist in the blogosphere.  Technically Speaking looks like a relevant, quality blog that I didn’t know about, and Wii Rally is a gaming blog which may or may not be interesting to Sexy Widget readers.  Overall, these are excellent results, and assuming that they are organic and not hand tweaked, they speak very well to the accuracy of the engine. 

Obviously, each of the recommended blogs is displaying the AutoRoll widget.

From a publisher perspective, there are two obvious benefits: 1) providing a nice feature for your users; and 2) putting yourself on the receiving end of some referrals from related blogs. 

From a referral perspective, it's important that Criteo find a way to "get credit" for the referrals they are sending.  I haven't noticed Criteo showing up in my log files - if there's a way for them to redirect the referral clicks that a publisher gets through Criteo.com, it could go a long way towards proving the widget's merit to the widget host, and guaranteeing continued real estate on the sidebar.

Taking a look at the big picture here, I think what’s really neat about this widget is the fact that it’s contextually aware.  Presumably, no two AutoRolls are the same, and the widget adapts itself to the readers of each blog.  This is next generation kind of stuff.

It seems to me that MyBlogLog could provide this service as well with the massive amount of blog usage data that they have collected, so I would imagine that Criteo is pushing hard for distribution.

Going forward, I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to keep the AutoRoll on Sexy Widget.  Maybe it’s just the arrogant blogger in me, but I sort of feel that if there’s a blog worth reading in the widget space, I’m going to find out about it and drop it in the sidebar myself. 

That being said, automation is a big plus.  It’s conceivable that the “blogs about widgets” space will get so big as to become unmanageable.  In that case, an AutoRoll widget would be invaluable.

Comments

[Ming]

You beat us to the review...

We just installed AutoRoll a couple of days ago and were waiting on the recommendation engine to kick in.

Our experience is much like yours.

It does seem that the number of widget blogs in their network is small, but at least the recommendation engine appears to be working.

[lawrence]

So it looks like the AutoRoll recommendations go in order of strength. The ones at the top of the list are the strongest matches. Oddly, I was just checking Stickiwidget's out, and while SW and Widgets Lab are towards the top of your AutoRoll, Widgetoko is farther down. This may be because Widgetoko has a broader readership - what do you think?

[Ming]

I have no idea how their algorithm works and I doubt they would ever disclose the details (not that I would expect them to).

Based on the AutoRoll stats, Widgetoko actually ranks in the top 3 for both incoming and outgoing clicks so there must be other factors in recommendations. This is to be expected as clicks along don't determine relevance.

StickiWidgets also tends to deviate from widgets posts/links more often than other widget blogs so I'm sure that has an impact.

We really do have to wait and see before we can really assess the accuracy and effectiveness of their recommendation engine, as their network and data grows

[lawrence]

I think that's the rub - while we do have to wait and see, AutoRoll doesn't have that luxury. AutoRoll needs to show immediate results, or they won't cross the initial adoption hurdle. I think their initial recommendations are pretty darned good, considering the small sample size to date.

[Brandon Watts]

Thanks for the nice review! We're experiencing an influx of new bloggers, so the results will continue to become more varied and relevant as this rapid growth continues.

[Jean-Baptiste Rudelle]

Thanks for this great review.

"From a referral perspective, it's important that Criteo find a way to "get credit" for the referrals they are sending."
You can get this info in your private stat page. Just click on the link on the bottom of the widget to access it.