The future of data-driven personas: A marriage of online analytics numbers and human attributes

The massive volume of online analytics data about customers has led to novel opportunities for user segmentation. However, getting real value from data remains challenging for many organizations. One of the recent innovations in online analytics is data-driven persona generation that can be used to create high-quality human representations from online analytics data. This manuscript (a) summarizes the potential of data-driven persona generation for online analytics, (b) characterizes nine open research questions for data-driven persona generation, and (c) outlines a research agenda for making persona analytics more useful for decision makers.