Key Concepts

Welcome to Contentstack Personalize! This document is designed to familiarize you with essential terms, features, and functionalities. This page covers the key core concepts you will need to understand while working with Personalize.

An Experience is the top-level configuration where you define variants, associate them with specific audiences, or manage traffic distribution in case of A/B tests. Each Experience directly represents a personalization setup configured for your digital property.

Experiences enable you to deliver personalized content to specific audience segments using predefined conditions. They include A/B testing, audience segmentation, and other personalization strategies designed to boost engagement, increase conversions, and enhance the overall performance of your digital experience.

Segmented Experiences enable you to deliver precisely targeted, personalized content to specific audience groups. By dynamically showcasing tailored content variations based on demographics, referral sources, behaviors, and other key attributes, you can:

• Drive higher engagement
• Increase conversions
• Improve overall customer satisfaction

Example: A "New Visitors" segment might see a welcome banner, while a "Returning Customers" segment is shown a loyalty offer.

Variant Prioritization resolves conflicts when audience conditions match multiple variants. It ensures the most relevant variant takes precedence by defining a hierarchy.

If multiple variants are active for an experience as the user qualifies for the audience conditions defined for variants, the variant which is prioritised will be considered as active.

Example: Imagine an experience targeting a hero banner.

• Variant A targets "All Visitors from the UK."
• Variant B targets "VIP Customers" (a more specific, high-value segment).

  A visitor who is both a VIP and located in the UK qualifies for both variants. By prioritizing “VIP Customers” above “UK Visitors,” the user sees the VIP version.

Additional Resource: For more information, refer to Create a Segmented Experience.

An A/B test experience is a controlled experiment that allows you to present two or more content variants of a webpage or app to different user groups simultaneously, helping you evaluate which version performs best.

In Contentstack Personalize, A/B Testing enables data-driven decision-making and helps you optimize content strategy by testing and comparing multiple content variations.

Through these experiments, you can:

• Identify the most effective content
• Optimize for higher conversions
• Deliver more personalized experiences
• Reduce bounce rates
• Enhance overall customer satisfaction

In an A/B test, you can control how traffic is split among different variants. You can choose to split the traffic equally among all variants or set a custom distribution to direct a larger percentage of users to a specific variant.

Equally Split: This is standard for a fair A/B test to see which variant performs best with an equal audience size.

Custom Split: This is useful for "soft launching" a new design. You can show a radically new homepage design (20% variant) to a small subset of your traffic to gather data and feedback without risking a negative impact on the majority of your users (80% control).
Additional Resource: For more information, refer to Create an A/B Test Experience.

• Impressions

  Impressions track how often personalized content is displayed to users.

  Each time a user encounters personalized content, it is recorded as a single unique impression, meaning that even if the same user views that content multiple times, it is only counted once.

  Tracking impressions helps you determine how effectively your personalized content is reaching its audience.

  Example:

  If two different sale banners are shown to users in different locations, impressions reveal how often each banner is viewed, helping you measure visibility and engagement.

• Conversions and Metrics

  A conversion represents a meaningful user action (event), such as adding an item to the cart, completing a purchase, or reaching the end of a page.

  These events serve as metrics to evaluate variant performance. When a visitor completes an action, metrics track unique conversions per user.

  In A/B Test experiences, conversions help identify which variant performs better, with a higher number of conversions.

  Example:

  Testing two “Buy Now” buttons can show which design generates more clicks.

When multiple experiences are active on a page, layering and prioritization of experiences ensure optimal personalization for your users as it helps reflect the whole visitor context on the content.

1. Scenario 1: Multiple experiences target different contents on the page.

   Personalize automatically layers these experiences, optimizing each section based on the respective active variant.

2. Scenario 2: Multiple experiences target the same content on the page.

   Personalize uses experience prioritization set by the customer, so the variant from the higher-priority experience is displayed. You can manually adjust the order of experiences in Personalize to better control which content is shown when an experience is activated.

In Contentstack Personalize, Audiences are dynamic groups of users defined by shared attributes, behaviors, and contextual data, enabling you to deliver truly personalized experiences.

Alternatively, you can also use Data & Insights (Lytics) Audiences, which serve as a central repository for audience data pulled from various sources to create rich, unified customer profiles.

Imagine being able to tailor every piece of content to match each user’s interests and intent. With Audiences, you can:

1. Increase Engagement: Grab your user's attention with content that resonates, keeping them hooked and coming back for more.
2. Boost Conversions: Guide users toward the actions you want them to take, whether it's making a purchase, signing up, or exploring further.
3. Build Loyalty: Create experiences that feel tailor-made, fostering loyalty and turning casual visitors into raving fans.

Why use Data & Insights (Lytics) Audiences?

1. To Achieve a True 360-Degree Customer View

Data & Insights (Lytics) acts as your central data hub, unifying information from multiple sources like your CRM, email platform, mobile app, and sales tools. This creates a single, rich profile for each user, allowing you to personalize website content based on their entire relationship with your brand, not just their current web session.

2. To Unlock Advanced Behavioral and Predictive Segmentation

Data & Insights (Lytics) goes beyond simple rules to build audiences based on historical behavior, content affinities, and machine learning. You can create dynamic segments like "frequent buyers," "users at risk of churn," or "users likely to convert," allowing you to target users with incredible relevancy.

3. To Power Strategic, Journey-Based Personalization

By understanding a user's entire history, Data & Insights (Lytics) enables you to tailor experiences based on their stage in the customer lifecycle. This allows you to move beyond one-off promotions and guide users through a cohesive journey with your brand.

Personalize Audiences are best for first-page personalization, where speed and contextual accuracy matter most.

1. To Leverage Contextual Attributes for first page personalization

   Contextual attributes are pieces of information that are available directly from the user's browser in their very first request to your website. Because this data doesn't need to be looked up in a separate database, Personalize can act on it with zero latency at the edge. This makes it the perfect tool for making a strong first impression.

2. To use Custom Attributes for first page personalization

   When you want to use a custom attribute for personalization on the first render itself, use personalize audiences where the rules are defined based on attributes set up in Personalize. This could be useful when you don’t want to wait until syncing of the attributes are done at the edge, but rather reflect that user context on the page immediately.

Attributes are key-value pairs that define the characteristics, behaviors, or preferences of users interacting with your website or application. They form the foundation for building audience segments that enable targeted content delivery and personalized experiences.

Attributes can be applied across various use cases, including:

• User Attributes: Inherent visitor traits such as demographics (age, gender, location), firmographics (company size, industry), or technographics (browser type, device).
• Behavioral Attributes: User actions on your site, like pages visited, products purchased, or time spent browsing.
• Contextual Attributes: External factors that influence user behavior, such as time of day, weather, or referral source.

By combining preset (contextual) and custom attributes (defined by the user), you can create highly detailed audience segments and serve content that feels personally relevant, driving greater engagement, higher conversions, and improved customer satisfaction.

Events allow you to capture and track every interaction a user has with your website or application. In Contentstack Personalize, events play a vital role in evaluating the performance of your A/B tests.

By recording key user actions, such as clicks, form submissions, or video plays, as events, you can accurately assess which content variant delivers better results.

Contentstack Personalize supports tracking two primary types of user interaction events:

• Impressions: Track how many unique users see your personalized content.
• Conversions: Track how many users take a desired action, like clicking or purchasing.

These metrics together provide a clear picture of how users engage with your personalized experiences and which variations drive the most impact.

In Contentstack Personalize, Variants are alternative versions of content created to engage specific audience segments. Each experience you build within a Personalize project appears in the CMS as a Variant Group named after that experience, allowing you to create and manage individual entry variants directly from the Entry Editor.

Variant Groups and Variants are automatically created and synced for you based on the Experiences and Variants you define in Personalize. Once created, you can create entry variants by making changes to the content you want to be personalized. The entry editor will display content from the base entry by default. You can enter or edit content in the fields as per the variant you want the content to be personalized for.

By creating and managing variants, you can:

• Deliver dynamic personalized experiences: Serve real-time, tailored content to visitors based on their demographics, behaviors, and preferences.
• Enhance marketing performance: Experiment with different content versions to identify the most impactful ones and boost campaign results.
• Run A/B tests and optimize content: Compare multiple versions side by side, use performance data to determine the most effective variant, and continuously refine your personalization approach.
• Iterate and evolve: Monitor variant performance regularly and apply data-driven insights to improve user engagement and outcomes.
• Seamlessly integrate with your CMS: Utilize Entry Variants within Contentstack to efficiently create, organize, and manage all versions of your personalized content from one unified platform.