Personalize FAQs

Contentstack Personalize is a marketing solution that empowers organizations to effectively tailor their content, enabling them to tell the right stories to the right people at the right time. This sophisticated engine offers segmentation and A/B testing capabilities to streamline content optimization, ensuring maximum engagement and impact.

Segmentation: Users can easily segment their visitors into audiences based on various criteria, such as location, interests, purchase history, and more. Then segmented experiences use these audiences to target specific content to the desired audiences.

A/B Testing: The A/B testing experiences allow users to experiment with different variants of their content to optimize performance. Users can create the variants, distribute them, and measure conversion metrics to determine which performs best.

The traffic split remains locked while the test is running or paused. To update the distribution, create a new draft of the experience and direct traffic to your preferred variant. This restriction ensures content consistency while a specific version of the A/B test is running and maintains the statistical accuracy of your test results.

A user’s variant assignment remains consistent for the entire duration of the test. Each user is assigned to a variant based on their unique identifier (UID), stored as a cookie by the Personalize Edge SDK. This ensures that every user sees the same variant each time they visit, keeping test data accurate and results reliable. The assignment remains fixed unless the cookie is deleted, reset, or expires. If the cookie is cleared or expires, the user may be re-assigned to a variant during their next session. This design prevents re-bucketing and ensures precise conversion tracking throughout the A/B test.

Here are some possible use cases for Contentstack Personalize:

• Visitor Authentication: Showing different cards based on whether the visitor is an authenticated user or not.
• Product Promotion: Displaying promotional material for a product an existing customer has not purchased before.
• Geolocation: Showing different shipping options via cards depending on which is offered by the visitor's current selected store.
• A/B Testing: Testing different layouts, text, graphics, etc. for a campaign landing page to measure lead generation effectiveness.
• Device Recognition: Changing graphics displayed based on the device used by the visitor (mobile vs. web).
• UTM Parameters: Personalizing content for marketing campaigns to identify specific channels and content that drive the most engagement.

Content editors need a straightforward way to manage the nuanced and tailored experiences Personalize is designed to enable. Variants lays a foundational framework for Personalize to drive testing and personalization for different needs and use cases – ensuring you deliver the right story to the right audience at the right time. Variants enable content editors to intuitively access and edit all content variants directly within the entry editor of the CMS, minimizing content duplication and maximizing content reuse.

Pricing for Personalize is based on Data & Insights (Lytics) events, not on the number of personalization experiences or variants delivered.

What counts as an event:

• Each page view or tracked user action (such as clicks, form submissions, or video plays) generates an event.
• These events are stored in Lytics and form the basis for usage measurement.

How pricing is calculated:

• Your cost depends on the number of Data & Insights (Lytics) events collected, regardless of how many personalization rules or variants you use.
• The number of variants delivered does not impact pricing.

For GA, Personalize customers will have the Variants feature enabled in their CMS by default.

Personalize relies on our customers' data collection, so if they can track their visitors (as we can), then you can use Personalize. We drop a first-party cookie. So if the user clears their cookies and our customers are not specifically identifying the visitors, their audience will be reset to the base entry. If they fully block cookies, then they’ll only get base content, but they will always get something.

Variants are available out of the box for customers using our headless CMS and leveraging Personalize as well. Customers using our headless CMS but leveraging another personalization tool will still be able to leverage Variants with additional setup involved.

Variants are stack-specific. A Personalize project can connect to one stack at a time.

You can use the CLI or Personalize Management API to duplicate key components of a project, such as attributes, audiences, and experience data across stacks. Full project duplication without CMS stacks can be achieved by combining available API endpoints and custom scripts.

Attributes and Audiences
You can copy these programmatically using the Personalize Management API.

Experiences and Variants

• Use the Get All Experience Versions endpoint to retrieve detailed experience and variant data.
• Use the Get a Single Experience endpoint to return metadata such as the name, description, and type.
• Recreate experiences and variants in your target stack using the retrieved data.

Yes, you can create variants of a locale for all locales. Variants are per locale - a variant in one locale does not exist in another.

One-time setup of Personalize Edge SDK snippet on the front-end. Once the snippet is in place, marketers can set up personalization experiences without developers. It’s like no-code personalization.

When a user qualifies for more than one audience, content priority is determined by experience order and variant hierarchy.

Within an experience:

• Variants are mutually exclusive, so only one variant is displayed.
• The variant order determines which variant is selected if a user matches multiple variants.

Across experiences:

• Experiences are prioritized based on their order in the Experiences list (via Prioritize Experiences).
• If multiple experiences apply, all variant fields are applied unless there’s a conflict.
• When conflicts occur, the highest-priority experience (listed first) takes precedence.
  This design ensures users receive consistent and predictable content, even when they belong to multiple audiences.

Customers who purchase Personalize gain access to the Data & Insights (Lytics) dashboard and audience builder, but with a narrower feature set compared to the full DXP/CDP plan.

Personalize (Web Personalization plan)

• Includes the Data & Insights (Lytics) audience builder, attributes, behavioral scores, and content affinities collected through the JavaScript tag. Designed for web personalization.
• Limited to one Cloud Connect integration and no Flows or external data integrations.

DXP/CDP (Full plan)

• Provides advanced audience-building capabilities using multiple data sources, behavioral scoring, complex segmentation logic, and omnichannel activation.
• Enables cross-channel experiences that extend beyond the web.

Personalize offers a strong foundation for audience targeting and web personalization. Teams can later upgrade to DXP for advanced, multi-channel personalization.

Multi-Armed Bandit is an adaptive traffic distribution strategy for A/B Test experiences. It automatically adjusts how traffic is allocated across variants based on real-time conversion performance, instead of keeping traffic split fixed for the entire test duration.

In a standard A/B test, traffic distribution remains fixed, either equally split or custom, until the test ends.
With Multi-Armed Bandit:
• All variants start with equal traffic.
• Traffic is continuously optimized toward better-performing variants.
• Underperforming variants are gradually shown less often, but are not fully excluded.

• At least 1,000 total impressions, or
• At least 30 total conversions.

Until one of these thresholds is met, all variants continue to receive equal traffic. Once redistribution begins, Personalize continuously optimizes traffic allocation based on real-time performance.

To ensure ongoing learning, every Multi-Armed Bandit test reserves a minimum exploratory traffic share of 1%, which is split equally across all variants. This guarantees that each variant continues to receive a small amount of traffic, even if it is underperforming.

Once the threshold is met, traffic redistribution occurs every minute, as long as the system continues to receive impression and conversion events.

• All variants continue to collect data.
• Variants that initially perform poorly still have an opportunity to improve over time.

Multi-Armed Bandit optimizes traffic while the test is running, but it does not automatically stop or end an experience. You must manually manage the lifecycle of the experience, just like any other A/B Test experience.