Personalization
Managing adaptive content

Managing adaptive content

This guide shows you how to personalize your website to improve engagement and user experience.

This guide is focused on the typical activities of a marketer. Check out the personalization guide for developers for the one-time setup in the front-end app.

Introduction

Prepr lets you create personalized experiences with Adaptive content. With Adaptive content, you can make different versions of content for various visitor segments. You can then show the right content to each visitor based on their segment giving them a personalized experience.

Use case

Let's look at an everyday use case. You want to improve user experience and the click-through rate of the home page. You decide to group customers by those who want to lease electric cars. Based on this segment you add adaptive content to the home page to target these customers.

General website visitors
When customers navigate to the Acme Lease home page, they see a generic page like in the image below.

Acme lease home page

Visitors interested in leasing an electric car
When a potential customer searches for an electric lease car and clicks an Acme Lease ad, they are directed to the electric lease landing page on the Acme Lease website. If they visit the home page again later, they'll see content focused on electric lease cars instead of the generic home page above.

Personalized home page

For this use case, the front-end application tracks each visitor's behavior based on their interests. When a visitor views a the Electric Lease Landing Page, Prepr places them in the Electric Car Buyers segment.

This is just one way to set up adaptive content. You could also set up adaptive content based on other characteristics such as location or device. You could even add adaptive content based on criteria outside of the web app, for example, when a user visits your web app from a social media link. Check out the Managing segments doc for more details.

Prerequisites

To add adaptive content to your website like in the above example, you need to have the following set up in Prepr:

This guide uses the Acme Lease demo data as an example.

Personalize your website

To personalize your website, you need to complete the following steps:

  1. Set up segments based on specific visitor interaction on the content. These segments are the groups of visitors for whom you want to deliver a personalized experience.
  2. Add an adaptive content element. For each segment, create content specifically aimed at those groups of visitors.
  3. Manage the adaptive content by updating the adaptive content settings, if necessary.
  4. Evaluate the adaptive content variants. Prepr collects metrics on the performance of the pages with adaptive content. You can use this data to adjust the content in these pages or the segments' criteria.

Set up segments

Before adding adaptive content you need to choose different target segments for your web app. Using the Acme Lease demo content example, you can set up a segment for visitors who are interested in leasing electric cars with the following steps.

  1. Go to the Segments tab and click the + Add segment link.

  2. Set up the segment conditions. For the Electric Car Buyers segment, the condition is Customers who did view specific items, Electric Lease Landing Page, at least once, in the last quarter.

    segment builder

  3. Click the Save button, enter the segment name and click Save.

By completing this step, you've grouped your web app visitors based on their viewing behavior. For more options on how to manage segments, check out the segments doc.

Add an adaptive content element

Now that you know for which visitors you want to personalize the experience, it's time to create specific content for each segment.

You can add adaptive content to a content item by following the steps below.

  1. Go to the Content tab, and click to open the content item where you want to add the adaptive content, such as a Homepage.
  2. In the Stack field, in our example it's called Content, go to a specific section like the Hero and click the icon to personalize the element.

personalization

  1. In the Adaptive content box, duplicate the section. The original section will automatically be used as the fallback content and linked to All other customers.
  2. Update the text and or images to match the context of the segment you created in the previous step. Check out the Acme Lease demo Homepage content item for an example.
  3. Click the Add segment link and choose your segment for the section you adapted.
  4. You can also drag and drop another content item or component into the adaptive content block. This feature gives you a wide array of options when adapting your content to a specific segment.

Home page content item

At this point, you have successfully added adaptive content.

When you add first personalize an element, you won't see any metrics data initially (Awaiting data) until a developer adds the one-time setup and web app visitors start interacting with your adaptive content.

Manage the adaptive content

You can update settings for your adaptive content, for example, if you want to change the name of the adaptive content group to distinguish it from others in the same content item. Click the icon in your adaptive content group to see the options detailed below.

manage adaptive content options

  • Manage settings
    Choose Manage settings to change the name of the adaptive content group or to show all matched elements instead of just the first matched element in the front end.

Manage settings

  • Reset data
    After some time, your live adaptive content will accumulate some data and these give you insights into how the variants perform against each other. It's possible that from these insights you want to make adjustments to the variants and re-evaluate the adjusted variants instead of creating new adaptive content. In this case you can reset the metrics data. When you do this Prepr starts tracking and collecting data from scratch as if it's new adaptive content.

Note that if you reset the metrics data, you can no longer view the previously tracked metrics.

  • Remove adaptive content
    You can also remove the adaptive content element at any time by clicking the Remove adaptive content option. If you choose to do this, all variants will be available as separate elements in the Stack field and it's up to you to decide if you want to keep all, or delete some or all of them.

Evaluate the personalized variants

After a developer has done the one-time setup for Personalization and the adaptive content has been active for some time, you'll see some metrics data.

Click the Metrics link to open the Metrics modal. If your personalization has been running for a while, you should see some significant results like in the image below:

Adaptive content metrics

The metrics data can be filtered by a Date range (Maximum 90 days, defaulted to the start of the experiment). You can also choose to view the metrics data by a specific Conversion event. The color marker at the beginning of each variant indicates if the metrics are significant (green) or not (orange). Whether the metrics are significant is based on the probability and a minimum sample size.

See the list below for the metrics available in Prepr.

  • Dwell time - The average amount of time in seconds that customers view this element.
  • Impressions (IMPR) - These are the number of times that the element is viewed by visitors. The developer sets this element during the Personalization setup.
  • Conversions (CONV) - The number of times that a desired action is performed on the element by visitors, such as a click. The developer sets this element during the Personalization setup.
  • Conversion rate - A percentage based on the conversions and the impressions. It is calculated as (Impressions/Conversions)×100.
  • Standard deviation - You'll notice a +/- percentage value next to the conversion rate. This value tells you how much the conversion rates vary from the mean.
  • Uplift - The increase in the conversion rate for the variant (B) compared to the control (A). It is calculated as: (Conversion Rate (B) − Conversion Rate (A)) / Conversion Rate (A) × 100
  • Probability (PROB) - This is the probability that this variant will outperform the control.

Congratulations, you have successfully personalized your website.

Other use cases

This guide explains just one use case for personalization. Below we list a few more common options.

Segments from external CRM/CDP systems

It's possible to personalize Prepr content based on segments maintained in other CDP/CRM systems. In this case, you need to reference these external segments from within Prepr using the segment unique identifier from that system.

Your personalization flow will look like this:

  1. Create a new segment in Prepr and set the ID value to the segment unique identifier copied from your CRM/CDP system.

  2. Add an adaptive content element.

  3. The developer then retrieves adaptive content using the API with one difference — they pass the Prepr-Segments header instead of the Prepr-Customer-Id.

Call-to-actions

Personalizing call-to-actions can significantly increase conversion rates. Offer each segment the call-to-action that fits best. For example, show a relevant whitepaper to first-time visitors and offer a demo to returning visitors.

Categories

Do you have content or products in different categories? Capture which categories your visitors view and display them on the homepage on their next visit.

Want to learn more?

Check out the following guides:

Schedule a free consultation

Do you want to get started with personalization but still have questions or want a demo?

Schedule a free call (opens in a new tab) with a Prepr solution engineer.

Managing segmentsA/B testing

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