When to use a manual personalization

Use a personalization when you have a reason to believe different audiences should see different experiences.

Imagine your landing page receives visitors from two campaigns:

• An enterprise campaign
• A small-business campaign

Those visitors may care about different benefits. Instead of asking which message should win overall, you can match each audience to an experience designed for them.

[IMAGE: Enterprise campaign audience routed to enterprise messaging; small-business audience routed to small-business messaging.]

The question is: What experience should this audience see?

If you’re still trying to learn which version works best, that’s a test. A personalization is useful when you already have a clear reason to tailor the experience.

What goes into a manual personalization

A manual personalization has a few core parts:

• Base: The default experience visitors see when they don’t match a personalized audience.
• Variations: The experiences you want to serve.
• Audiences: The visitor groups matched to each variation.
• Audience priority: Determines what happens when a visitor matches more than one audience.
• Goals: Let you monitor how visitors respond to the personalized experiences.

[IMAGE: Base + Enterprise variation / Enterprise audience + Small-business variation / Small-business audience.]

The biggest difference from a traditional test is the role of the audience: In a test, the audience determines who can participate. In a manual personalization, audiences determine who sees what.

Build your personalization

Once you know which audiences need different experiences, the setup follows a simple sequence:

1. Create the personalization. Choose the page or experience you want to personalize.
2. Build your variations. Create an experience for each audience you want to serve.
3. Match each variation to an audience. Choose the audience that should receive each experience.
4. Set audience priority. Decide which experience should take precedence if a visitor matches more than one audience.
5. Check the base. Make sure visitors who don’t match an audience still see a complete, useful experience.
6. Attach your goals. Choose the outcomes you want to monitor.

Now that you know the pieces of a manual personalization, use the walkthrough below to practice building one from start to finish.

[ARCADE: Create a manual personalization, build variations, match each variation to an audience, set priority, and confirm the base.]

Make the base work on its own

Not every visitor will match one of your personalized audiences.

Visitors who don’t match one of the personalized audiences will see the base, so treat it as a real experience — not just a leftover version.

[IMAGE: Visitor arrives → Matches audience? → Yes: Personalized variation | No: Base.]

For example, your base homepage might use broad messaging that works for anyone, while enterprise and small-business visitors receive more specific versions.

That way, every visitor still gets a complete experience even when no personalization applies.

Best practice

Put more specific audiences first

If a visitor matches more than one audience, priority determines which variation they receive.

Put the more specific audience above the more general one.

For example:

Healthcare visitors from Campaign A → higher priority

Healthcare visitors → lower priority

If the broader audience comes first, visitors who also match the more specific audience may never receive its variation.

[IMAGE: Healthcare + Campaign A audience above broader Healthcare audience → overlapping visitor receives the more specific variation.]

QA before launch

Before the personalization reaches visitors, do a quick check that the matching works the way you expect. Make sure:

• Each variation looks right across the breakpoints that matter
• Each audience is matched to the intended variation
• Audience priority is set correctly
• The base works as a fallback for unmatched visitors
• The correct goals are attached
• Tracking is active on the domain where the personalization will run

A quick QA pass helps prevent the biggest personalization mistake: the right experience reaching the wrong audience.

Launch the personalization

Once everything checks out, it’s time to launch and start serving each audience its intended experience.

[IMAGE: Publishing or launching a manual personalization.]

When a visitor arrives, Optimize checks whether they match one of the audiences you defined. If they do, they receive the variation assigned to that audience. If they don’t, they see the base.

Unlike a traditional test, a manual personalization isn’t waiting to declare one overall winner. It can continue running as long as the audience-to-experience match remains useful.

Note: Later in the course, you’ll learn how to interpret personalization results and evaluate how each audience is performing. For now, the important thing is to make sure the right visitors are receiving the right experiences.

Ready to continue?

You now know how to build a manual personalization, match audiences to variations, handle overlaps, and provide a sensible fallback.

Next, you’ll see how AI Optimize can change variation delivery for both tests and personalizations.