Personalize a digital experience with audiences

One way to personalize a digital experience in Optimizely is to create an audience (formerly called a visitor group) with criteria for that group. For example, you can design a product banner specifically for first-time visitors or for visitors from a geographic region or market. See Audience criteria.

You can create an audience based on many types of criteria such as number of visits to a specific page. Optimizely CMS includes several criteria by default, see Audiences. Developers can also create their criteria through code, see Create custom audience criteria.

In Optimizely Content Management System (CMS), you can personalize any type of content in the rich-text editor. You can personalize part of a text, an image, or a block in the CMS rich-text editor, or personalize an image, a block, or a page in a content area if these are in your web pages.

If you have multiple audiences, a visitor may match more than one. You then use recommendation groups to group content to avoid displaying the same content twice and display fallback content to visitors who match no audiences.

The preview option lets you preview the personalized content, as the audiences see it before publishing.

You can apply audiences to content, such as a block, which then displays only to visitors matching the criteria you define. For example, you can show one price for visitors browsing to your website from the UK, another price for visitors from the US, and a third price for other visitors:

You can preview your page as it looks to different audiences.

You can also use audiences for targeted discounts in Optimizely Commerce campaigns. Create an audience called Returning customers, and set the audience criteria to Order Frequency: Ordered at least 2 times within the last 45 days.

You can then use this audience in the Personalization part of the Edit Campaign view when creating a campaign. This makes the campaign only available to customers who have made purchases at least twice within the last 45 days.

Click Edit for the personalized content, update the personalized recommendations settings, or select Remove Personalization.

Expand the desired Personalized Group section and click the desired audience link to edit the settings. To exclude content from personalized recommendations, drag it outside the group or select Move Outside Group in the context menu.

Rich-text editor example: Display content to multiple audiences without a fallback. The non-personalized text at the top of the rich-text editor in this example displays. The personalized text displays only to visitors matching any of the audiences UK Audiences and US Audiences.

In the content area, UK Audiences see the Recipe Block, and US Audiences see the Event List. An audience that does not match any group does not see content in this content area.

To display specific information to visitors from the UK and US and other information to visitors from other countries, use a personalized recommendations group for fallback content. This avoids displaying information twice for UK and US visitors.

The order in which the personalized content is placed within a personalized recommendations group is not important, but placing the fallback content at the end simplifies following the personalized recommendations flow.

In the rich-text editor

Select the fallback price information text and personalize it without selecting an audience. Instead, create a Pricing personalized recommendations group and apply the group.

Personalize the price information texts for the UK and US audiences and include them in the Pricing personalized recommendations group. The personalized recommendations group displays to the right.

The personalized recommendations for this content match within the same personalized recommendations group.

In the content area

The following example shows information as individual blocks, and the Default pricing displays as the fallback content to visitors from countries other than the UK and the US.

Select Personalization in the context menu for a block to create a personalized recommendations group, and drag the other blocks into the group.

Personalize each block within the group by applying the appropriate audience. Use the Everyone option to display the fallback content that displays to visitors who do not match any audience.

Search engines crawl your website to index your content. If you personalize your content through audiences, what does the search engine crawler see? It depends on how Optimizely assesses the audience at the point of crawl. If you have an audience Visitors from the UK, the crawler indexes the content personalized for the UK if the crawler's IP is in the United Kingdom. Otherwise, the crawler does not index that content.

Another example is when you apply date/time audience criteria. If you have a weekend-only audience, the crawler indexes the content if it comes along at the weekend; otherwise, it does not.

If something needs to display (or be crawled) in an area of the page, have Everyone content in a group.

Administrators can grant access to specific content using audiences. For example, the administrator can make a page or a block accessible only to audiences from the UK. See Access rights.

If Optimizely Commerce Connect is active, it provides additional audience criteria for ecommerce scenarios. See Commerce Connect-specific criteria.

You can personalize content through marketing automation connectors, for example, if Marketo is active on your website. See examples in the following video tutorials.