Success Stories

Driving up to 477% Higher Onboarding Engagement for a Global Digital Library

Perlego

Perlego is a digital learning library offering access to over 1.5 million academic, professional, and non-fiction books through a single subscription. Serving students, researchers, and lifelong learners worldwide, the platform helps users discover relevant educational content across a vast and continuously growing catalogue.

To boost early activation and long-term retention, Perlego partnered with Recombee to deliver reliable, personalized recommendations across key user journeys.

+477%
in 2+ book saves
during onboarding
+90%
in books saved through homepage
recommendation carousels

Situation

  • A large and diverse academic content catalog made personalized discovery increasingly difficult to deliver effectively to students and institutions
  • Existing recommendation system had reliability issues and limited scalability
  • Heavy engineering dependency slowed iteration and blocked broader use across teams
  • Need to support multiple personalization use cases across the user journey

Objectives

  • Improve reliability and scalability of recommendations
  • Enable self-serve control for product, marketing, and publisher-driven promotion
  • Support personalization across key journeys, from onboarding to homepage discovery
  • Increase early engagement and book-saving behavior as a driver of retention

Solution

Recombee supports personalized content recommendations across Perlego’s digital library. Personalization influences which titles are shown across key touchpoints, from onboarding to homepage discovery, adapting in real time as users interact with the platform.

Fast implementation across key user journeys

A flexible recommendation setup enabled rapid deployment across the sign-up funnel and personalized homepage discovery. Self-serve capabilities reduced engineering dependency and allowed multiple teams to iterate independently across use cases.

Reliable personalization at scale

A robust recommendation engine ensured consistent performance across a large and diverse academic content catalog, eliminating missing or failed recommendations and improving discovery reliability.

Context-aware recommendations from first session

Recommendations use contextual signals such as entry points and early user behavior to deliver relevant suggestions from the first interaction, directly supporting early activation and the key behavior of book saving.

Full control for product, marketing, and publisher-driven promotion

A self-serve setup enables teams to manage filtering, boosting, and experimentation independently. This includes publisher boosting capabilities, allowing strategic promotion of new or priority titles within the library experience while preserving recommendation relevance.

Analytics and performance visibility

Built-in reporting provides visibility into recommendation performance, helping teams understand impact, track engagement and activation metrics, and continuously optimize strategies over time.

Benefits & Results

Sign-Up Funnel

  • +3% overall conversion rate
  • +283% users saving at least 1 book
  • +477% users saving at least 2 books
  • +375% users saving 3+ books

Library Homepage

  • +45% CTR
  • +40% book opens
  • +90% books saved

Recombee’s Solution in Action

perlego

Sign-up Funnel Personalization

Similar Books

One of the most important early personalization touchpoints within the sign-up flow, where users are prompted to build their first bookshelf.

Recommendations are generated based on contextual signals such as the entry book page and early user intent, ensuring highly relevant suggestions from the first interaction.

As users engage, recommendations adapt based on behavioral signals and interaction history, becoming increasingly tailored to their interests.

Key Benefits

  • Increase early activation through first-session book saves
  • Improve onboarding conversion with relevant, contextual recommendations
  • Strengthen long-term retention by driving early engagement behaviors
perlego

Homepage Personalization

Recommended for You

A core discovery surface within the library experience, delivering personalized recommendation carousels on the homepage.

This scenario combines collaborative filtering with behavioral signals to surface relevant academic content across a large and diverse catalog, helping users continue discovery after login.

It also supports controlled content promotion through publisher boosting, enabling selected titles and new releases to be surfaced within the library experience while maintaining relevance.

Key Benefits

  • Improve content discovery across a broad catalog
  • Increase engagement through personalized browsing experiences
  • Enable controlled content promotion via publisher boosting
  • Drive ongoing content consumption beyond initial session entry

“With Recombee, we were able to roll out personalized recommendations quickly across key journeys like the sign-up funnel and homepage discovery experience. What stood out immediately was how fast we started seeing impact.”

Julia Unite
Julia Unite
Product Manager
Perlego

About Perlego

Perlego is a global digital learning library offering access to over 1.5 million academic, professional, and non-fiction books through a single subscription. Serving students, researchers, and lifelong learners worldwide, the platform helps users discover relevant educational content across a vast and continuously growing catalogue.

Visit Perlego