How to Use Custom Experiences

Contents

Check out our blog post for more information

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..

What Are Custom Experiences

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.

The starting criteria will begin the trigger to complete an action. These are based on how WordPress manages its content. Each trigger will run on the different conditions you set for that particular Custom Experience.

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.

What is a Default Experience

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.

How to Create a Custom Experience

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.

URL Parameter Example

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

Set the Priority of the Custom Experience

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 Global Conditions

You can save your Custom Experiences Conditions as Global Conditions, to be used on other elements, sections, rows if you want.

To save a Global Condition, just click the gear icon on your Custom Experience.

Now, a very important step in this process is to give the Condition Set a name other than the default (if you use the default name more than once then you won’t be able to save it). Hover your mouse over “New custom experience condition set” and you’ll see a pencil icon

Click the pencil icon to change the name to something else. See below I have changed the name from the above (Tip: once you click away from naming the condition set then it saves that name).

Now, to save the condition set as a Global Condition Set, we are going to click “Save as Global” like you see below:

Once you save it, you’ll see the blue Global icon on the right side, and the condition set is no longer editable (for now)

Editing Global Conditions

To edit a global condition, open the Custom Experiences Criteria Wizard, and click the icon next to the blue Globe (3 horizontal lines). Select “Edit global conditions set”

When you are done editing, make sure to click the “Save” link below the rule. Any updates made will also impact any other elements where you have used the same Global Condition Set

Using Global Conditions

Now that you have saved a Global Condition Set and know how to edit them, lets see how we can use this with another Custom Experience. Once you add the Custom Experience (see beginning of article on how to do that) then you can choose the Global Condition Set.

Click “Select a global condition”

Then select the Global Condition you wish to use

Once you selected the Global Condition Set to use, then make sure to save the Custom Experiences Criteria

That’s all there is to using your saved Global Condition Set

Deleting Global Conditions

If you want to delete a Global Condition Set, just go into the custom experience condition set and click the icon next to the globe element (3 horizontal lines icon) and then select “Delete global condition set”

If you are sure you want to delete it, then click “yes” on the warning about deleting the Global Condition Set

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 to us in support and we’ll be more than happy to help.

Troubleshooting Tips

Error when trying to save Global Conditions

If you get the following error while trying to save a Global Condition Set, you’ll need to ensure that you are not re-using the same name or re-using the default name for the Global Conditions as you can not use the same name twice. You can see in the example below that the error message indicates that I basically already have one saved with the same name.

The solution is to hover over the name, and click the pencil icon to rename it.

Once you give it a new name then try to re-save the condition as global and it should work.

I deleted a Custom Experience. Why did my content disappear?

When you created the custom experience, you could modify the content for it. Without the custom experience, there is no way for that content to exist anymore. Before you delete any Custom Experience, if you want to save the content, then you should try to save the content by either exporting it, or marking it as a global element.

Updated on February 25, 2023

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