Launch Your First Personalization Campaign

What you will build

By the end of this tutorial, you will have:

• Identified an audience segment and a personalization opportunity
• Created a personalization campaign in Optimizely
• Built a personalized experience using the visual editor
• Defined the audience conditions
• Set a metric to measure impact
• Launched the campaign
• Understood how to read personalization results

No coding is required. This tutorial uses the visual editor and the built-in audience builder.

Before you start

Ensure you have:

• Optimizely Web Experimentation access — Ask your admin if you need an invitation
• The snippet installed — The Optimizely JavaScript snippet must be live on your website
• A personalization idea — You need a target audience and a content change that would resonate with them

Personalization vs. A/B testing: An A/B test splits all visitors randomly and measures which version wins. Personalization delivers a specific experience to a known audience segment without a random split — every qualifying visitor sees the personalized version.

Step 1: Define your personalization strategy

Before opening Optimizely, write down three things:

1. Who is the audience? — Describe the segment you want to target (e.g., “Returning visitors from the US on mobile devices”)
2. What will you change? — The content modification for this audience (e.g., “Show a welcome-back message with their last-viewed category”)
3. Why will this help? — The business rationale (e.g., “Returning visitors convert 2x higher when they see relevant content immediately”)

This clarity prevents scope creep and gives you a measurable goal.

Step 2: Create a personalization campaign

1. Log into Optimizely at app.optimizely.com
2. Navigate to Campaigns in the left sidebar (or Personalization depending on your UI version)
3. Click Create New > Personalization Campaign
4. Name the campaign descriptively (e.g., “Homepage — Returning US mobile visitors — Welcome back CTA”)
5. Enter the URL of the page to personalize
6. Click Create Campaign

The visual editor opens, showing your live page.

Step 3: Build the personalized experience

You are now in the visual editor. The changes you make will only appear for visitors who match your audience conditions.

1. Click the element you want to change (e.g., the hero headline)
2. Select Edit Text and type your personalized copy (e.g., “Welcome back! Continue exploring our latest arrivals”)
3. Modify other elements as needed:
   • Change a hero image to reflect the audience’s interests
   • Adjust a CTA button to match the audience’s stage in the funnel
   • Hide or show sections relevant to this audience
4. Keep changes focused — one to three modifications per campaign

Tip: Personalization works best when the change is genuinely relevant to the audience. A different headline for returning visitors is personalization. A random layout change is just a variant.

Step 4: Define the audience

1. In the campaign editor, click Audiences in the left panel
2. Click Create New Audience
3. Name the audience (e.g., “Returning US mobile visitors”)
4. Add conditions:
   • Visitor type — Select “Returning visitor”
   • Country — Select “United States”
   • Device type — Select “Mobile”
5. Conditions within the audience combine with AND logic — visitors must match all conditions
6. Click Save Audience

The audience builder shows an estimated percentage of your traffic that qualifies. For a first campaign, aim for at least 10% of traffic to accumulate meaningful data.

Step 5: Set a measurement metric

Even though personalization is not an A/B test, you still need to measure its impact. Optimizely compares the personalized audience’s behavior against a holdback group (a small percentage of qualifying visitors who see the default experience).

1. Click Metrics in the left panel
2. Click Add Metric
3. Choose a metric type:
   • Click — Track clicks on a specific CTA or link
   • Pageview — Track visits to a conversion page (e.g., /checkout)
   • Custom event — Track a business event (requires a developer to implement)
4. Name the metric (e.g., “Welcome CTA clicks”)
5. Set it as the primary metric

Step 6: Configure the holdback

The holdback is the percentage of qualifying visitors who see the default experience instead of the personalized one. This creates a baseline for comparison.

1. Click Traffic Allocation in the left panel
2. Set the holdback percentage — 10% is a good starting point
3. The remaining 90% of qualifying visitors see the personalized experience

A larger holdback gives you more statistical confidence but means fewer visitors get the personalization. For high-traffic sites, 5% is sufficient. For lower traffic, use 10-20%.

Step 7: Launch the campaign

Review your setup before launching:

• The personalized experience reflects your audience’s needs
• The audience conditions are accurate and not too narrow
• A primary metric is configured
• The holdback percentage is set

When ready:

1. Click Start Campaign
2. Confirm in the dialog
3. The campaign is now live — qualifying visitors begin seeing the personalized experience

Important: Unlike A/B tests, personalization campaigns can run indefinitely. There is no need to “call a winner” because you are not comparing random variants. However, continue monitoring to confirm the personalization is having a positive effect.

Step 8: Monitor your results

Check campaign performance regularly to ensure the personalization is working as expected.

1. Navigate to the campaign and click Results
2. Compare the personalized group against the holdback:
   • Improvement — The percentage difference in your primary metric
   • Significance — Whether the difference is statistically reliable
3. Look for:
   • Positive improvement with significance — The personalization is working. Keep it running.
   • No improvement after two weeks — The personalization may not resonate. Revise the content.
   • Negative improvement — Stop the campaign. The personalization is hurting performance.

What to do next

You have launched your first personalization campaign. Here is how to expand your program:

• Add more campaigns — Target different audiences with different experiences on the same page
• Layer with experiments — Run an A/B test on top of the personalized experience to optimize it further
• Connect to ODP — Use behavioral data from the Optimizely Data Platform to create richer audience segments
• Personalize across pages — Apply personalization to product pages, checkout, and email landing pages

Related content

Continue your journey with these related pages.

📖Understand the concepts

• Personalization in Optimizely
• Web Experimentation

🔧Follow a guide

• Set Up Audiences (Web)
• Set Up Metrics
• Interpret Results