I'm Jon, a Product Manager on the Personalization team at Optimizely. Ask me about the new product!

[#1]

Hi, I'm Jon Noronha, and I'm the Product Manager at Optimizely on the personalization team.

Today, we announced that Optimizely Personalization, our second product to help enable you to turn data into action, is generally available. We want to ensure your questions get answered, so we'll be online all week responding to your questions and discussing new opportunities.

Just post your question or feedback in this discussion! I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

[#2]

Just out of curiosity, what are some of the different dimensions/attributes that Personalization can operate out of?

For instance, being able to personalize experience by zip/postal code would be appealing to our business, however we've been a bit turned off by the lack of accuracy that most systems can accurately resolve zip/postal codes, so I'm curious how the personalization data is sourced.

[#3]

My understanding is that Optimizely takes multiple tags / cookies from the page and can connect that information to a databse to personalize. What steps is Optimizley taking to protect PII data? Do we upload our database to Optimizely's servers? What are steps that are being taken to secure this information? 

[#4]

I'm wondering how using personalization might affect Google rankings. If Google ignores pages that are being A/B tested, will it also ignore pages that are being personalized? And since personalization may be more of a long-term thing, will that make pages less visible to Google for search rankings?

[#5]

Which are going to be the feeds for Optimizely to identify a user? Are you going to need some sort of unique users id implemented on our code page? 

Also, in terms of List Targeting and Optimizely Personalization how are they going to live? Are they going to be complementary? different product? can join together?

[#6]

@JonN - I'd love to know...what single piece of the new product are you most excited about? Improved user experience, suggested audiences, etc. 

[#7]

Thanks for the questions so far!

@Russell_Lee, Personalization has several different condiitons you can use for targeting. Here's a list of all the audience conditions from Testing, which work in both products. On top of those, Personalization adds Visitor Behavior targeting. This lets you track actions like buying a product or viewing a page, then target people who've done those in a certain time range. For location targeting specifically, we have geotargeting in both Testing and Personalization, and a new capability in Personalization called Uploaded Audiences that lets you upload (among other things) a list of zip codes.

[#8]

@Debra great question. The short answer is that if personalization is done in good faith and improves the user’s experience, your SEO ranking will likely be unaffected. You can learn more about the SEO implications of testing and personalization in this Optiverse post.

[#9]

@c5wales the answer varies for different kinds of targeting.

A big part of the new product is Behavioral Targeting, which allows you to tag content on your site and then target off of it. The main use case here is for non personally identifying information, like the price of a product or the genre of an article, rather than personal information like a name or email.

A second big part of Personalization is connecting your own data from a database. You can learn more about that in our article on Uploaded Audiences, which includes some information on what kinds of data you can upload. In short, we don't encourage uploading PII directly to Optimizely. Instead, we recommend using non-identifying data or hashing PII for use in targeting.

[#10]

@juliofarfan a logged-in user ID isn't required to use Optimizely Personalization. You can target off of visitor behavior, location, traffic source, and several other properties anyonmously. However, you have the option of identifying a user using any ID you like, and then uploading lists of user IDs to target. This is referred to as Uploaded Audiences, and formerly known as List Targeting. Going forward, Uploaded Audiences will be a feature of the Personalization product.

[#11]

@JohnH thanks for asking I'm most excited about the new user experience, particularly around the workflow for creating campaigns and visually editing. My favorite part: you can preview changes instantly in "draft mode", then publish them when you're ready to go live.

[#12]

Thanks @JonN

[#13]

Hi Jon,

Exciting news! Could you let me know how Personalization is factored into StatEngine's False Discovery Rate adjustment?

[#14]

@brianlang Personalization won't impact the FDR adjustments on experiments running in Optimizely Testing.

Currently there is no False Discovery Rate adjustment in Personalization. We are holding off until we better understand the way customers will interpret Personalization results to incorporate a multiple testing solution.

[#15]

Hello Jon,

I am very excited about personalisation! but when is it likely to land in the UK by? do you have any timescales you can give me?

Thanks,

Heather 

[#16]

@HeatherMiller so glad to hear you're excited! We're planning to roll out the product in Europe the week of October 19th, but feel free to get in touch sooner. Do you already have a contact at Optimizely? If not, you can send me a private message on here and I'll put you in touch.

[#17]

When will pricing be posted for existing optimizely subscribers?

[#18]

@alzamez if you're an existing Optimizely customer, you can learn more about pricing for Personalization visting optimizely.com/personalization and pressing the Contact Sales button. They can give you a quote specific to your site.

[#19]

Hi @Debra,

To emphasize on what @JonN said, one key element of SEO rankings is relevancy of the website vs the specific keyword or query string typed by the customer. One element that Google take into consideration for this, is the propensity of customers going to this website, engaging with it and ultimately converting. If you tailor your website to what the customer needs specifically, you are more likely to improve the customer journey and have a higher likely hood to improve conversion and lifetime value. So in essence, Google may or may not crawl your personalized version of that specific page but it will still analyze the customer behavior. So if your primary goal is probably not SEO, CRO can influence it. I experienced it myself in my previous job in ecommerce.

[#20]

Hi @JonN

Any way to test this new product?

Would be keen to discuss and have a PoC.

Thank you

[#21]

@StevenC - I am going to reach out with an email to get you more information to test out Personalization. I'm so glad to hear you are excited about it.