Personalize content

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

Through personalization, you can individualize content displayed to online visitors instead of showing the same message to everyone. Personalization can be applied to an individual visitor or a segment of visitors. Personalization can be manually configured from the user interface, or it can be automatic using intelligent algorithms.

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

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

Many predefined audience criteria are available, and you can develop your criteria. See Develop custom audience criteria.

For large and complex websites, audience-based personalization may become difficult to manage. You can use Optimizely Content Recommendations to apply automatic content recommendations based on individual or group website behavior. Optimizely 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.