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:

1. An enterprise campaign
2. 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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ready to continue?

Continue on to the next lesson where you’ll see how AI Optimize can change variation delivery for both tests and personalizations.