Peter Szalontay Calls Attention Data the Missing Piece for Creating a Perfectly Relevant Experience

what’s going on here

Datamilk founder and CEO Peter Szalontay created an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) user experience (UX) automation program that can produce A/B testing results in seconds with none of the headaches or costs previously associated with the option testing model.

What he crafted changed the face of e-commerce, letting companies using his software make ten times the profits with a fractional time and monetary investment. That’s how Datamilk quickly surpassed would-be competitors, and now its founder is turning his efforts toward attention data. 

Outdated Data

Anyone involved in e-commerce knows numerous things about how customers buy online could be improved. So many data collection models ignore 90% of the online behaviors of their customers. For example: how long users linger over a product, how quickly they swipe through the image carousel, and how they hover over available sizes or colors when scrolling through a product listing page.

Instead, they still rely on clicks only — whether a user clicks on a product, goes to its page, or adds it to their cart. To Szalontay, ecommerce stores are missing a lot of sales opportunities by not realizing the clear signals of user’s interests in the content in front of them.

For the level of experience today’s users are getting on popular platforms like TikTok — when everything they like is always on the surface for each of them, this data is not enough.

“Just like TikTok tracks every attention signal to create the perfect content feed for each user, e-commerce can and must react to all signals users give out when interacting with their favorite store. Then, they can use the information to deliver the most relevant content and experiences for each user in real-time. This is what makes a humanly empathic experience,” explained Szalontay.

Protecting Customer Privacy

He also explained that it’s a privacy-first model that lets e-commerce stores avoid collecting more private data — like locations obtained from third-party sources — to improve every experience. Instead, they just need to closely observe every movement their clients make when interacting with their online store.  

“People are more privacy aware than ever. Countless surveys show high numbers of respondents being concerned about how their personal data might be used,” said the founder. 

Szalontay explained that privacy laws and the industry are listening to users’ concerns. The legislation in this direction is strong, effective, and growing globally. For example, industry leaders are blocking third-party cookies; Apple, Firefox, and Brave have already turned down third-party cookies, and Google plans to follow suit in 2024.

Delivering Custom Experiences

At the same time, people are used to — and expect — a certain level of usability and personalization online and don’t want to sacrifice that experience to protect their privacy. In fact, according to Szalontay, they only want to see it continue to deliver ever more customized online experiences.  

DataMilk is responding by learning how to collect that essential shopping data while leaving all else behind. 

“We’ve learned that customers are giving attention signals while interacting with a store: when they swipe without clicking, browse sizes and colors, or linger over a product and scroll back to it,” he said. 

Today’s e-commerce relies only on the most apparent signals — what products customers actually click on and buy. Unfortunately, the rest of the signals go uncollected, and these are missed opportunities for sales. 

Tracking attention and reacting to it in real-time is the next great source for creating the most relevant experiences for today’s online shoppers — and increasing sales for e-commerce retailers. 

From Google to Ecommerce 

Szalontay was born in Budapest with a talent for math, so maybe it’s no surprise he loves the data collection connected to e-commerce. He won a spot at the University of California, LA (UCLA) and was one of the stars of their math department. After graduation, he went from a small startup gig to a dream job at Google as a search team project manager. 

He was promoted quickly and tasked to build and manage a team of 1,000 writers and programmers performing A/B testing ad automation. After six months, he delivered $100 million in new sales and shifted his model again from copywriters creating A/B testing ads to AI automated writers. 

Within four years, the whiz made Google billions of dollars and created the basis for what would be Google’s central advertising platform to this day, Responsive Search Ads. From there, the only place to go was out on his own to found DataMilk and drill down further on the e-commerce data that fascinated him. 

Here, the DataMilk founder explains how attention data is changing the e-commerce industry for the better.

About DataMilk

DataMilk is a team of data science and UX experts on a mission to empower e-commerce brands to build AI-powered UX on the level of Big Tech. Founded by Peter Szalontay, DataMilk’s smart UX suite enables fast, fluid, and predictive digital experiences that boost user engagement and gross profit. For more information on how to join and build the next generation of UX, please visit https://www.datamilk.ai/ 

This is a Contributor Post. Opinions expressed here are opinions of the Contributor. Influencive does not endorse or review brands mentioned; does not and cannot investigate relationships with brands, products, and people mentioned and is up to the Contributor to disclose. Contributors, amongst other accounts and articles may be professional fee-based.