Personalization - creating personalized experiences for different audiences

This article is about a feature that allows you to create personalized experiences for your audiences. If you are looking to learn more about experiments, not experiences, please refer to our article about A/B testing: https://d.pr/TCdKBs. 

NOTE: This feature is only available for some of our subscriptions. If that is the case, you will see an upgrade prompt when attempting to access it. More information about our currently available subscriptions can be found here: https://instapage.com/plans 

How does it work?

You can use this feature if you have multiple audiences in your target market and you want each of them to see a personalized experience when they land on your page. The experiences can be edited individually and they can be as different or as similar as you want them to be. You can change only a couple of words or the background image, or you can change entire Instablocks. The experience that will be shown to the page visitor is determined by a combination of parameters after the page's base URL, which you choose. 

For example, your page is published at subdomain.mydomain.com/page and you have two additional audiences, for which you create the experiences subdomain.mydomain.com/page?utm_source=google and subdomain.mydomain.com/page?utm_source=facebook&utm_content=house.

If the URL placed in the ad matches those parameters exactly, then that experience will be shown to the visitor. The default experience (subdomain.mydomain.com/page) will be shown to everyone that does not have the exact matching parameters or does not have any parameters at all.

The steps to creating personalized experiences for different audiences

1. Click on Optimize and choose Personalize in the left-side menu of the main application after logging in.

3. Click on Create Experience to get started. You will be asked to choose the page that you want to personalize and to name this new experience that you are adding to the page.

We recommend that you name the experience something relevant to the characteristics of the audience that it will be served to.

4. Once you click Create, the list of all the experiences for the selected page will come up on the screen and you can start editing and personalizing them.

NOTE: Every new experience you add to a page starts off as a copy of the existing design of the default experience. You can then manually make the desired modifications to it.

5. To start editing an experience, click on its name, and the slideout will open.

Click on Edit Design to open the builder or on any of the other sections to start editing their respective settings, such as Integrations. 

6. When you have finished editing the experience to match your target audience, you can publish it by clicking on Publish Page.

The experience will be published on the same URL of the main page, but using parameters. The added parameters are what will differentiate between which experience the visitor will see.

There are two options that you can use: an automatic parameter and UTM parameters.

You can choose the first option if you don't need the parameters for anything else except the experience having a unique URL. You can choose the second option if you need the UTM parameters in your integrations and data analysis.

The automatic parameter option also contains an optional ID parameter checkbox.

This option can be used if you need a human-readable parameter in order to quickly identify your experiences in Google Analytics, for example. If you check the box, the name of the landing page and the name of the experience will be appended automatically as a parameter, but you can also write anything else that helps you identify the experience.

For example, below the page is named 'anchor' and the experience is named 'Copy second', so the parameter that is added is called id-param=anchor-Copy%20second.

If you want to learn more about UTM parameters and how to use them, as well as how they interact with our experiences, check out this blog article here: https://d.pr/YQSZkV. 

Once the experience is published, you will see the final URL under its name and you can use that URL in your campaigns. To change this URL or further edit the experience, click on its name and the editing slideout will open.

When one of your landing pages has multiple experiences, you will be able to see that in a column in the main view, as seen below. Clicking on that information will take you to the Personalization tab for that particular landing page, where you can see the experiences.