I want to build a site that "target" the user and show them relevant information thats target on the user age, sex and so on.
for example. I want to show a slide show if the user is male and over 30 years old and lives in a special city (I have the data) and then I want to show an extra box with some information if the person is female and between 16-20 years old.
I also think it is called CRM.
Are there any of you who have tried to make such a site before / has some good experience how to put it up in the smartest way.
I hope some one can help me in the right direction.
Simon, CRM are Customer Relationship Management solution often used by sales for forecasting and customer management. The systems that do what you talking about are called MRM system, Marketing Resource Management, they are used by marketing to align segmentation with a companies digital experiences. Solutions like this include, Aprimo, Salesforce.com, Marketo, Eloqua to name a few. As a side note both these systems are connected to ERP applications in larger companies which are then in turn connected to SCM, Supply Chain Management apps. So you have them connected all along a companies value chain ... customer > marketing > employees > suppliers. Theer are also PRM solutions out there Partner Relationship Management (Salesforce.com).
I have spent much of my life working for fortune 500 software companies working mostly in country management and marketing operations. Nolan is correct in mentioning these suppliers. They will endeavour to persuade you that they optimise their message according to the customer being targeted. However, their software offerings are all predicated on the target giving some information about themselves. Ok, you can establish where they live through the IP and make some reasonable guesses as to their language preferences, sex and interests. But to really have accurate targeting you need some reliable information about them. There are only 2 sources for that: research agencies or they volunteer it themselves. I never found research agencies good value. So .... summing up, any software you build needs to include a method for farming that personal data. Hence retailers have loyalty programmes. Airlines have reward programmes. The essential secret sauce in these software products is to incentivise the customer to give you his data in exchange for something they value. The outcome is the now famous example of a well known British supermarket placed diapers next to the beer and wine section ..... to serve the guys coming home from the office and had to "pick up a few things". True story !
Building a rewards programme is quite involved and too big a conversation for this post. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.
The user have "told" us a lot about themself so i can target them right.
My biggest problem is how to "setup" it with laravel the best way.
Like, do i have a table with all my segments and every time the user log in i do a foreach on all my segments to see if the user match one of my segments (i think it will slow down the server because of all that foreach check) and do i need to do a foreach on every site request etc.
So if i have 100+ segments it will take forever to load the page.
So it would be nice to have some real world examples how to tackle this :)
or is there some web service i can integrate with?
Take a look at ACLs. You would need to do something like that with bitmasks. Dont try to build version 10, start with simple and see how it works. The optimization algorithm will need to be created as it grows. You can store a crap load of segments in one byte using bitmasks so the operation along with caching would be very fast and low on CPU resources. Example, you can score 8 demographics attributes and start the mapping that way, btw 8 will be 80% of all demographic segmentation. Then move to behavioral, psychographics, firmographic, geographic, etc, but start with a simple demographic matching bitmask process.
