Personalization
Personalization enables you to deliver targeted, relevant content to your site visitors. By setting personalization rules that check for various details about your visitors, such as location and their visit to your website, you can ensure that the right content reaches the right visitors in real time by showing, hiding, or adjusting specific content.
You assign personalization rules and conditions to specific items in the Experience Editor.
Rule-based personalization
Rule-based personalization uses logic-based rules to determine the content that is displayed on a webpage. For example, you can set rules based on the IP address or physical location of your visitors, the keywords they use to reach your site, their mobile device, or the goals that they achieve on your website to determine the content that is displayed.
Personalized content is also called conditional rendering.
Adaptive personalization
Adaptive personalization is a feature that dynamically changes the content of your website based on the visitor’s behavior during a visit. Adaptive personalization uses visitor profiles and pattern-card matching to dynamically adapt the content shown to visitors in real time. You can set adaptive personalization rules in the Rules Set Editor.
Historical personalization
You can use rules that personalize content based on a contact's historical or past behavior, rather than their actions from the current session. The Key Behavior Cache contains information about a contact's recent activities across all channels. The Contact Behavior Profile contains information about a contact's past profile matches.
You can create and implement personalization rules based on the information in the Key Behavior Cache and Contact Behavior Profile, enabling you to provide contacts with content that is relevant based on their past behavior, rather than just their current interaction with your brand.
Using personalization in testing
You can use A/B and multivariate testing to test your content and then use the results of the test to achieve optimal conversion rates on your site's goals. Testing gives you immediate feedback on what works on your site and what you can improve. You can also use testing to assess which type of content works best with certain segments of your visitors.
To learn more about personalization best practices and Sitecore's digital marketing resources, see the Sitecore Knowledge Center.