Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Optimize (GO), when combined, form a powerful and free personalization engine. They also overcome several challenges that, according to Gartner, could lead to the abandonment of personalization efforts by 80 percent of marketers by 2025.
In short, this is an opportunity to test a personalization pilot program and determine whether this combo deserves further investment!
How to Identify Personalization Opportunities
Personalization cannot be limited to users or customers. It should also be tailored to your company’s needs.
This means you can’t simply copy and paste other people’s solutions – what worked for others may be completely unnecessary for your business.
The best way to get started with great personalization is to ask yourself, « What am I really trying to achieve? » After all, personalization is all about making your content (copy, images, videos, or anything else) more relevant to your website visitors!
How do you achieve that level of relevance? First and foremost, use common sense. What really matters to people who are interested in your product or service?
Are you a local company that serves multiple regions? Consider localizing the experience based on the visitor’s location. The same is true if you serve multiple international markets: display content to visitors based on their location and language.
Are you a marketplace with offers based on demand and supply? To increase relevance, try segmenting your visitors. Do you run a slew of paid acquisition campaigns with varying benefits, or do you promote a variety of products? You can use personalization to align posts across all relevant pages, not just the landing page.
Do you have an eCommerce site where you offer discounts for specific campaigns? Attempt to apply these discounts directly on the site so that visitors are aware of the final price!
Are you getting a lot of traffic from email newsletters? Stop bothering these visitors with « subscription » banners; they’re already subscribed! Instead, change the messaging to encourage them to refer friends.
Do you have a platform-specific application or software? Display only download buttons for the affected platform, such as the App Store for iPhone users or a Windows download for PC users.
Don’t forget to check your data in Google Analytics after you’ve considered these questions.
Are the segments you’ve identified large enough to warrant the effort? Remember: All optimization efforts come with opportunity costs. We forego further optimization opportunities if we choose to personalize based on a certain audience.
That being said, begin with the most obvious opportunity and simplest personalization. If it works, you can always move on to more complex experiments. Begin with a simple idea, test its impact, and then repeat. Don’t aspire to be perfect!
Personalization limits in Google Optimize
Google prioritizes usability over sophistication, making it an excellent tool for those new to this type of optimization.
Understanding the limitations will assist you in determining whether it is worthwhile to invest in a different tool from the start. Here are some of the most important ones:
Personalization rules are very simple. Each personalization experience must be configured separately. If you want to greet visitors with « Hello, » « Good afternoon, » or « Good evening » depending on their time zone, you must create a separate personalization experience with separate rules for each. Managing and quantifying these configurations can be the stuff of nightmares! (Spoiler alert: However, this is also something that GTM can help you with 🙂 )
You can only have 10 personalization experiences at once. Given the first limitation, you will most likely reach this limit quickly. However, by using GTM, you can group together different experiences, making throttling much less of an issue!
3 examples Personalization
1. Personalize based on your visitor’s geographic location.
Segmenting your traffic based on its location is a great place to start when it comes to personalization!
The ability to determine a visitor’s location based on their IP address has limitations, though. Some visitors may be able to use a VPN, which allows them to be located anywhere in the world, regardless of their physical location.
For others, the location-based IP address is simply wrong, especially when it comes down to a visitor’s city. Make certain that the localization is not forced and that visitors can manually change it if necessary (for example for country, language and currency).
Google optimizes different types of targeting.
To make this work, you must create a separate experience for each country or region you wish to target.
For example, if you have an online store and want to display your prices in three currencies (for example, EUR, USD, and GBP), you can create country groups with that currency, and then change the currency accordingly.
1. Personalization through data use
First and foremost, we must decide how we want to customize. There are millions of things we could do, and you must choose what is best for your company.
To demonstrate the logic of a use case, For example, you have a product or service and are using a similar module that includes testimonials from previous customers as a form of social proof. Why not include the visitor’s country in the title to make it more relevant and showcase local expertise? Instead of « Trusted by 50+ companies of all sizes, » try this headline: « Trusted by 50+ companies in the visitor’s country and the rest of the world. »
Isn’t that cool?
You must make a minor change to your WordPress page (or post) before proceeding to Google Optimize. Just wrap a <span> tag around the text that needs to change and you’re good to go!
Also, make sure to give this range a unique ID. You can use « visitorsCountry » in this case, but you can make it as long and descriptive as you want. This ID is critical because it identifies the span element you want to modify.
2. Personalization based on channel, campaign, or referral.
You can also tailor the experience based on the campaign from which your visitor came to your website. You will target users based on UTM parameters for this. These can be used on any channel as long as the link can be controlled.
3. Personalization based on previous behavior (eg, existing users, previous purchases, content consumed)
In this final example, we want to personalize something on our website based on previous visitors’ behavior. This can be challenging for two reasons:
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Google Tag Manager operates in a « stateless » environment, which means it does not save any data.
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The free version of Google Optimize does not give us access to Google Analytics audiences, which would make things easier.
You can get around these restrictions (for free) by using cookies or localStorage. The only thing you need to ensure is that your visitors accept these cookies – so ask nicely 🙂
Here’s an example of what it looks like:
A visitor expresses an intention based on where a particular campaign originates, whether they visit a specific page or take an action.
This behavior is saved in the visitor’s localStorage.
When the visitor returns, you use simple JavaScript to collect this information and pass it to the dataLayer.
There are numerous applications for this personalization:
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If you have a conversion funnel, direct visitors to the next step after they have completed an initial action, such as downloading a white paper;
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Visitors who have visited your pricing page should go further down in the funnel and see different content on your home page;
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You can hide your email capture field from those who have already provided you with their contact information;
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In the case of ecommerce, you can show a different homepage post to previous buyers;
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When users add items to their cart but do not complete their order, a chat pop-up can appear to improve your chances of conversion.
Conclusion
Google Optimize, in conjunction with Google Tag Manager, is a great combo that can be used to make changes to your website based on the following criteria:
Location of the user;
Channel of acquisition;
Previous behavior.
Any marketer can create sophisticated personalization experiences with a little JavaScript, allowing you to test more targeted, intention-based posts and site elements!
These tools and examples are completely free to use and make use of non-identifiable (i.e. legal) data, so there are no compliance risks.
