Getting Started – Personalization & Google Optimize

Jason Brewster - June 6, 2018

Personalization occurs when marketing and content are tailored to an individual’s needs. In an ideal world an organization would have ads targeted to relevant, well organized demographics and their content would change in response to the channel they arrived from. The user experience would change to better suit every aspect of a user’s journey. When done correctly, personalization will achieve results. Users will be more satisfied with their experience, they will convert more often and add more value to each of their conversions.

What is Personalization?

Perfect personalization at scale is complicated and requires deep knowledge about your user and a number of tools.

Below are some examples of personalization:

• Mass personalization is leveraged to accommodate large groups like new users, subscribers, high value users, users that like apparel, etc.
• The marketing is targeted to the right audience (age, demographic, interests)
• The on-site experience matches the marketing message (creative, copy, CTAs)
• Users are tracked across device (desktop & mobile) and they can be served content based on their location
• Information about users is collected in analytics and impacts the UX immediately without them needing to specify via form
• Users are served recommendations based on their previous preferences and logical additions for their cart

There are various platforms that can help with anticipating customer needs and serving personalized results. Google Optimize is unique among them in that it can be used with very little training to make changes easily. In addition to being able to quickly personalize content, Google Optimize is an exceptional testing tool. Optimize can test the effectiveness of your other platforms by AB/MVT testing different configurations and styles of elements like merchandising, targeted emails or product sorting.

What Does Google Optimize Offer?

Google Optimize has two versions, free and 360. Both versions are feature rich but as you would expect the paid version is better.

Google Optimize – Help 

The targeting features, deep integration with Google Analytics and the ability to run multiple AB/MVT tests concurrently make Google Optimize the clear winner for businesses that are just getting started with testing and personalization.

New Feature Offering – Direct AdWords Integration

As of June 1^st 2018 Google announced the integration of AdWords with Optimize (free and 360) and provided a set of instructions to target users by campaign, ad group or keyword. The ability to optimize your conversion rate based on user’s search intention is powerful and unique to this platform (Google AdWords uses a coded parameter called a “gclid” which replaces the paid search keyword in the URL. This makes it difficult for non-Google platforms to key in on high value searches).

To see the value that keyword targeting brings, we invite you to watch Spotify’s case study. They leveraged the Google Optimize platform to combine their local knowledge and behavioral targeting to drive a 24% improvement in audiobook subscriptions in their German market using geo targeting and AdWords keyword targeting concurrently.

The Cost of Testing

Unlike many other platforms, there are no costs based on monthly unique visitors or hit counts – you can deploy tests right now for free. If you have Google Tag Manager on your site you can deploy Google Optimize in a couple steps. Weighing the cost of zero against the potential incremental gains in conversion rate, revenue and engagement your business can achieve in a couple weeks, makes testing with Google Optimize an obvious choice.

If you want to start testing but need professional assistance crafting impactful tests, then reach out to MoreVisibility using our contact form or email us directly at info@MoreVisibility.com. We are Google Analytics Certified Partners and hold product certifications on Google Optimize, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio.