Managing visitor groups

Personalization in Optimizely lets you target website content to selected visitor groups Site visitors with something in common, such as age, geographic location, and so on. Used in the personalization feature of Optimizely CMS. (See Personalizing Content.). The personalization feature is based on customized visitor groups that you create based on a set of personalization criteria. Optimizely provides a set of basic criteria such as geographic location, number of visits, and referring search phrase. You can also develop customized criteria.

If you are using Optimizely Visitor Intelligence, you can use a segment as a criterion in a visitor group and then personalize your website specifically for visitors included in the segment. See Creating a marketing segment in the Optimizely Visitor Intelligence section.

See Working with visitor groups for personalization and segments for different user scenarios when working with visitor groups.

Managing visitor groups

Visitor groups are managed from the Visitor Group option in the top menu. When creating a new visitor group, you select one or more criteria and define appropriate settings. Those criteria are used to determine whether a user visiting the website is a part of that visitor group.

From CMS 12, this user interface has changed noticeably. To see documentation for CMS 11 and lower, please refer to an older version of this user guide, for example version 21-2.

CMS 12 and later:	CMS 11 and lower

Creating a visitor group

1. From the top menu, select CMS > Visitor Groups.
2. Click Create Visitor Group. The Create Visitor Group view appears.
3. Give the visitor group a unique name to separate it from other visitor groups.
4. In Name, name the visitor group you are creating. This name appears in the personalized content box when you select the content on a page.
5. In Notes, type a descriptive text about the visitor group you have created, for example, its purpose. This description appears as a tooltip when the editor is adding a visitor group to the content on a page.
6. Select the Enable statistics for this visitor group check box to enable statistics for the visitor group (this check box is selected by default). When enabled, you can use the Visitor Group Statistics gadget to see statistics from this visitor group, see Viewing and clearing statistics.
7. Select the Make this visitor group available when setting access rights for pages and files check box if you want this visitor group to be available when setting access rights for pages and files in admin view.

   Visitor groups only have read access.

8. Click Add criteria to see a drop-down menu with available criteria.
9. From the drop-down menu, select a criteria and adjust its settings as necessary. Add more than one criteria if needed. See examples described in Examples of creating visitor groups.
10.  In the Match drop-down list, select one of the following.
• All. Select this if you want all criteria to be met for a visitor to be included in the visitor group.
• Any. Select this if it is enough that only one of the criteria is met for a visitor to be included in the visitor group.
• Points. Use points if you want to set that some criteria are more important that others.
11. Click Save Visitor Group.

Editing a visitor group

1. Select Visitor Groups from the top menu.
2. Click the name of the visitor group you want to change.
3. Add a new criterion for the visitor group, change the value for an existing criterion, or click to delete an existing criterion.

   

4. Click Save Visitor Group.

Copying a visitor group

1. Select Visitor Groups from the top menu.
2. Click the context menu on the visitor group you want to copy and click Duplicate.
   
3. Confirm the copy action. The new copy has the same name as the original but with the extension - Copy.
4. Rename and change criteria for the new visitor group you have copied.

Deleting a visitor group

1. From the top menu, select CMS > Visitor Groups.
2. Click the context menu on the visitor group you want to delete and click Delete.
   
3. Confirm the deletion.

Using a visitor group to personalize content

When you have created a visitor group, you can use it to personalize content, target a discount, create Optimizely Visitor Intelligence segments and so on. See Using visitor groups in the Personalization section.

Examples of creating visitor groups

• Site criteria and points
• Geographic location
• Geographic coordinate
• Referrer
• Form and form values

Site criteria and points

By using Points, you can set a value for how much an action is worth, for example, a visited campaign page. In this example, a visitor who visits the page on a certain date matches the visitor group criteria.

1. In the Match drop-down list, select the criteria to match Point.
2. Drag and drop the Visited Page criterion, and select page. Drag and drop the criteria again to add several pages.
3. Drag and drop the Number of Visits criterion, and select More than > 1 > Since [date]. (To create a visitor group for visitors who have never visited the page, select Less than > 1 > Since [date].)

   

4. Enter the number of points each criterion is worth, and select whether or not the criterion is required.
5. Select Threshold for the criteria you added in your visitor group. For example, the visitor must fulfill 1 of 3 criteria to be included in the visitor group.
6. Click Save.

Geographic location

You can direct content to visitors from a specific country and specific days. For example, people from Sweden visiting your website on weekdays. You can show these visitors a clickable banner to sign up for a conference.

1. Drag and drop the Geographic Location criteria, and select Continent, Country and/or Region. Use drag and drop of the criteria again to add several countries.

   

2. Drag and drop the Time of Day criteria, and select [weekday]. You can also select the personalization to start and end at a specific time.
3. Click Save.

Geographic coordinate

You can direct your content to visitors from a specific part of a city, for example, People from Upplandsgatan, Stockholm.

1. Drag and drop the Geographic Coordinate criteria, and click Select Location.
2. Click Select location to display a map that you click to set a location. You can zoom in the map for more precise locations.
3. Select the Radius [number of kilometers or miles].

   

4. Click Save.

Referrer

The HTTP Referrer is based on pages, such as those used in a campaign. For example, you can target content to visitors who

• search for optimizely and cms on Google.com
• from the search result page, click the Optimizely landing page link

1. Drag and drop the Referrer criteria, and select URL > Equals > the URL of the search engine result page, for example, https://www.google.se/#hl=sv&source=hp&biw=1338&bih=790&q=optimizely+cms.

   

2. You can also add the Geographic Location to select a country.
3. Click Save.

Form and form values

You can base a visitor group on whether the visitor has (or has not) submitted a particular form or form value. For example, you can target content to visitors who submit a Job Application form:

You can target content to visitors that give you a low rating on a Satisfaction Survey.

Additional visitor group criteria

You can extend the built-in visitor group criteria as follows:

Optimizely Commerce criteria

Visitor group criteria specific for e-commerce, such as customer properties, markets, and order frequency criteria. See Personalization for Commerce.

Optimizely Marketing Automation

Visitor group criteria specifically designed for marketing automation.