Personalize content

There are different ways of applying personalization to content on your website. You can use the simple built-in visitor group functionality or add the sophisticated machine-learning recommendation capabilities of Optimizely Content Recommendations, part of the Optimizely Personalization product suite.

Options

Through personalization, you can individualize content displayed to online visitors instead of showing the same message to everyone. You can apply personalization for an individual visitor or for a segment of visitors. You can configure personalization manually from the user interface or automate intelligent algorithms.

Visitor groups: manual personalization

Using visitor group-based criteria, you can manually target content. For example, you can design a product banner, landing page, or registration form specifically for first-time visitors or visitors from a geographic region or market.

Visitor group personalization (rule-based personalization) uses incoming HTTP request data from visitors to identify, for example, device, location, and number of page visits. You create visitor groups based on desired criteria and use these to target content for visitor segments. You can also use visitor groups with Marketing Automation systems.

Many predefined visitor group criteria are available, and you can also develop your own criteria. See Develop custom visitor group criteria.

Optimizely Content Recommendations: automated personalization

For large and complex websites, managing visitor group-based personalization may become difficult. You can use Optimizely Content Recommendations to apply automatic content recommendations based on individual or group website behavior. Content Recommendations uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand the meaning of each piece of content at a granular level and builds a real-time interest profile for each visitor based on their interactions with the NLP-generated topics.