Prioritization of Experiments and Personalization Campaigns
Problem Statement (The "Why"):
I need an easy way to manage the hierarchy of experience delivery across overlapping audiences. Currently, Optimizely allows for experience prioritization within a specific Personalization Campaign, but it lacks a "Global Air Traffic Control" for the entire Web project.
When I have multiple experiments or personalizations live on the same page (e.g., the Homepage), there is no native way to ensure that a high-value visitor (like Enterprise or Mid-Market) is prioritized into a specific experiment before being eligible for a general "All Traffic" A/B test.
Current Workaround (The Pain Point):
To achieve this today, I have to:
Manually create Exclusion Groups, which are randomized and don't allow for "if this, then that" priority.
Or, manually edit the audience of the "All Traffic" test to explicitly exclude Enterprise and Mid-Market segments.
This adds significant operational overhead, increases the risk of setup errors, and makes it difficult to scale a complex experimentation roadmap.
Proposed Solution (The "What"):
I am looking for a Prioritization Layer (similar to Mutiny’s "Prioritization" feature) where I can drag and drop all active experiments and personalizations into a master list.
Logic: When a visitor hits a page, Optimizely should check the priority list from top to bottom. The visitor is bucketed into the first experience they qualify for.
Outcome: If I have a homepage test for Enterprise, Mid-Market, and All Traffic, I want to ensure the Enterprise visitor sees the high-intent Enterprise experiment 100% of the time, rather than being "cannibalized" by a general A/B test just because it was launched first or has a broader audience.
Business Value / Outcome
Accuracy: Ensures the most relevant message reaches the most valuable audience without manual "audience-math."
Velocity: Reduces the time spent QA’ing overlapping audiences and managing exclusion groups.
Revenue Impact: Maximizes the conversion of high-intent segments by ensuring they always see their tailored experience first.
Roger Juang
shared this idea
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Darren Bonnici
commented
Thanks for taking the time to respond Dejan.
My concern with the approach below is the grouping of related pages belonging to a campaign being placed in a different activity to the rest of the campaign. For example, if we're building a journey based personalisation activity, that might span a few pages, most of the pages would be under the Journey campaign personalisation activity for logical grouping, however there would be one or more placed into the Bucketing Personalisation Campaign activity to deal with the prioritisation challenge.
I can see how we could use this functionality, and would be better than creating exclusion audiences, which is unscalable and prone to error. For the time being it's better than what we have, and I'll have a go at utilising it, to see how it plays out in the real world.
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Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the requirement.
But why not leverage a "Bucketing Personalization Campaign"?
For the experiments you want to choose that should be prioritized and then the others not evaluated.
1. You create a personalization campaign. Call it "Bucketing campaign" or whatever you prefer.
2. You create several pages (activations) that are set to manual.
3. Within the "experiences" of the "Bucketing campaign" you can decide what the priorities are of those experiences and their audiences
4. All that "Bucketing campaign" does is activate the AB experiments or campaigns you want based on priority of order.Don't get me wrong, this is a "workaround" but does exactly what you need if I'm understanding correctly.
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Kristian Reich
commented
Isn't this a 'personalization campaign'? I can have multiple experiences there and the first one I match audience for is triggered.
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Darren Bonnici
commented
Adobe Target also have a feature along these lines. Everything you said here Roger, I second. This would be an extremely valuable feature, especially as we start scaling up our personalisation activities, and focusing more on journeys.
