How to Use Custom Experiences

While we will try to keep this guide simple, our suggestion is before you go any further, we would highly suggest watching the video above and reading the blog post.. 

Custom Experiences is a new and very powerful tool we include in OptimizePress so you can show different content based on a wide range of triggers. This means your site visitors and users can have a more personalized experience while navigating throughout your site as you could use Custom Experiences to show different headlines, images, buttons, sections, as well as other elements.

• User roles – Is logged in, is not logged in, role, registration date, name, number of comments.
• Post or Page – Control which pages, title, category tag, status, author and more.
• Time & Date – Set dates, times, days of the week, days of the month and month.
• Request data – Cookie, post variable, URL query string.
• Referral – URL, domain, post, page, category, tag.

The default experience is what shows if the person viewing your page does not meet any of the criteria that you set for the custom expereience. Whenever you load the OptimizeBuilder, all elements will show the default experience until you click the element and choose the experience you want to edit. 

First, click on the element you want to edit. Then go to Advanced Options by clicking the gear icon and clicking the blue “Advanced Options” button. In the left sidebar click on “Custom Experiences” and then to add a new one, click “Create new experience”

Now click the edit icon (pencil icon) to change the name.

Once you name the Custom Experience, click the Gear icon there to setup the criteria.

Or, you can go to the element and click the little arrow to choose the custom experience, and then click the gear icon to open the wizard.

Now you’ll see a wizard where you can select the options for the Custom Experience. 

The first option is to choose whether to Show Content, or Hide Content.

In the below example, I have selected to Show Content, and now I’ll click on “Add New Condition Set” in order to setup the criteria.

If I wanted to show an alternate version of this headline between 0200 UTC and 1400 UTC I would set it up like this:

Now just click the green Save button.

You can see here that I used a different text for Headline 1 than the default experience. 

This example was with using a date/time trigger, but you can use any triggers there that you want. You can have multiple custom experiences as well. You can even show a different headline if someone is logged in to your site as a member, or if a specific URL Parameter exists. 

Another example is if I wanted to use a URL Parameter in my marketing. If the parameter city=london was in the URL then I could show visitors with that a completely differernt headline. 

Here is how I set that up.

Then when someone visits my page with that parameter city=london in the URL it will show that headline to them

Since I used the date/time trigger, I noticed I had to re-arrange the order for the Custom Experiences to set the priority. The higher up on the list, the higher the priority. So the first one to meet the criteria determines what will show. Since the date/time experience was on the top first, the city=london parameter didn’t show and instead I was shown the headline for the date/time since it was between the 0200 and 1400 UTC time.  When I moved the London visitors custom experience to the top of the list, then it showed me the correct headline for that parameter. 

Here is how to re-arange the order of the custom experiences to set the priority (just drag and drop)

Show or Hide content based on if a user is logged in or logged out

You can also choose to show/hide content if a user is logged into your site or logged out. For this, I set the Experiences on the Section. 

Logged out users would see a login form.

Logged in users would see the access links to their courses. 

Here is how I set that up in the Section Element’s Custom Experience Wizard for the “Logged in” custom experience. Note that the default experience would be for those who don’t meet the logged in criteria, so that would mean they would have to be logged out in order to see the login form. 

Saving & Using Global Conditions

This section is a work in progress and will be released soon.

Conclusion

Wow! Wasn’t that awesome!! 🙂

While we showed you the basics here of how to use Custom Experiences, there are many different setups you can use for Custom Experiences.

If you need any help with finding the right setup for what you want to do, just reach out ot us in support and we’ll be more than happy to help.