Automated Personalization experiences are best used when you have variants that can speak to different individuals and when you want to optimize a specific metric. Here are some best practices to consider when you create an Automated Personalization experience and decide to iterate on it.
Differentiating Variants
When you look at the variants in an Automated Personalization experience, consider who would respond to each variant. Are they truly different people, or is there a lot of overlap among them? The bolder and more differentiated the content is, the easier it is for the engine to detect the differences. If you think that the variants are similar and speak to similar people, then Monetate's personalization engine will think the same.
Here are some tactics you can use to help differentiate variants:
- Look through your site to see if other pages have creative elements that you can repurpose for this experience.
- If you cannot change the creative, consider changing the copy.
Making Content More Discoverable
Automated Personalization works best when content is easily discoverable by your site visitors. Discoverability relates to where the experience is placed on a page, how frequently visitors interact with that content, or the traffic volume for the page in the experience. All these factors work together for discoverability.
When you create an Automated Personalization experience, aim for a high level of discoverability so that Monetate's personalization engine has many meaningful sessions to learn and act on rather than sessions that may not have seen the experience.
Here are some tactics you can use to help make variants or an experience more discoverable:
- Run the experience on high-traffic pages or high-traffic categories of pages.
- Include the experience in either the main call to action on the page or close to it.
Selecting the Goal Metric
Monetate's personalization engine learns what works when visitors achieve the goal metric. It also learns when they don't, but you need a balance.
The closer the goal metric is to 50%, the faster Monetate's personalization engine can learn from it. If a low percentage of traffic achieves the goal metric, then the engine learns less. Therefore, keep this guideline in mind when you select a goal metric for an Automated Personalization experience. If you're looking for ways to iterate on an Automated Personalization experience, selecting the goal metric is a good place to start.
Here are some tactics you can use when selecting the goal metric:
- Think about the next logical step in a visitor's journey and what behavior the engine can optimize to get them there.
- Consider how often visitors complete the goal metric that you want to use. Refer to previous experiences or your internal analytics to help inform your decision.