Personalization overview

In this Article

• Defining personalization
• How it works

Personalization is a handy way to target information on your site directly to the users who will be interested in it the most. Creating personalized content starts with creating the “segments” of your user population that you will be showing customized content to.

The Personalization element makes it easy to dynamically change how users view and interact with your school’s website through targeted, personalized content that increases engagement, time spent on the website, and conversions through inquiries and donations.

Personalization is the process of creating customized user experiences tailored to specific visitors, instead of a single, all-encompassing website that every visitor sees. Specific visitors can be defined by a country or continent, a state/province, or a specific language.

Defining personalization

Here are some keywords related to Finalsite’s Personalization software that you should know.

• Personalization: Customized, tailored online content for a specific user or groups of users based on language and/or location.
• Elements: The Personalization element is added to the page in Composer, and works like a content element to display personalized content.
• Panels: Panels are added to elements, and are only visible on the website on the creator’s end. Panels organize and group content that elements will then display for the different groups of website visitors.
• Segments: Segments are built within Composer, and are what tag the personalized content that gets served up to your users. Segments split your website visitors into different groups with shared similarities, such as a shared location and/or language. Each segment will see content unique to them.

How it works

Personalization works in tandem with Composer to change elements on a website such as headers, calls-to-action, images and videos, paragraph content, and more.

1. Once Personalization is enabled, create a personalized segment through Composer’s Personalization menu under New Segment. These segments work by splitting your website visitors into groups based on locations and languages that you specify.
2. One or more rules can then be applied to each segment through AND and OR statements. These statements further customize a webpage to ultra-specific demographics. Schools can create a personalization element not only specific to the United States, but also to specific states.
3. Then add a Personalization element, which contains panels, to a Composer page. Panels group all content relevant to each segment. Anything that you want a specific segment to see will be placed into a single panel.
4. To establish default content for all users who do not see targeted content, always create a No Segment panel in addition to the target panels. This No Segment panel ensures that visitors still reach your school’s website and view the default content.
5. Finally, once all elements, panels, and segments have been created, click the Segment Preview icon to see what your website looks like to specific visitors. This preview mode allows you to make sure each targeted page works correctly and accurately reflects the targeted demographic. 

Note: The Personalization element does not do translation. If you would like to display your content in different languages, then you will need to translate the copy into the appropriate language prior to placing it in the element and set the appropriate segment.

For more information, refer to the Personalization section of the Knowledge Base