Personalization is such a buzz word in digital marketing and advertising that it can be difficult to know what to personalize in campaigns and which software to use. Comparing the landing page software for personalization can also be overwhelming as more companies enter the market. And maybe the most top-of-mind solution in the market is Optimizely.
One question we often get asked by prospects and digital marketers is:
I already use Optimizely for personalization, why would I need another solution or Instapage to personalize the post-click landing page?
Just because Optimizely is a leading experimentation platform, doesn’t mean it’s best for all customer use cases.
Before we compare Instapage to Optimizely, let’s briefly define what personalization software helps marketers accomplish.
What is personalization software?
Personalization software allows you to customize online experiences and micro-target audiences based on user behavior and data points collected from ad platforms such as Google and Facebook.
Optimizely is one solution used by many marketers and agencies for website personalization. To succeed in digital marketing and advertising though, your campaigns deserve more than just website personalization.
What does Optimizely personalization offer marketers?
Optimizely offers both client-side and server-side personalization/experimentation. However, choosing between the two options means having to choose between more relevant personalized page experiences with slower page loads or relevant experiences that require significant developer resources:
When you choose client-side personalization, you risk creating slow loading pages, which have proven to increase bounce rates and decrease user engagement.
According to Google, when page load time increases from one to three seconds, the probability of a mobile visitor bouncing jumps to 32% and as the page load time increases the bounce rate is even more drastic:
Personalizing your post-click landing pages won’t do you any good if visitors just keep bouncing because of slow load times.
A few drawbacks with Optimizely
Even if you invest the resources and have a developer set up your personalization every time to avoid slow loading pages, you still won’t be able to use Optimizely’s “stats engine” (aka analytics) without purchasing their X Full Stack engineering product that requires even more development resources.
Moreover, Optimizely does not offer a custom design solution and therefore limits personalization to basic content swapping or deletion. For example, with Optimizely, if you want to change page layout, which has shown to have a significant impact on conversion, you will run into serious multi-device responsiveness issues, unless you have a front-end engineer custom code these layout changes.
At this point, it’s not wrong to wonder why you shouldn’t just engineer your own platform based on the number of developers you’re going to need.
Optimizely was not built for focusing primarily on facilitating advertising conversion and therefore has taken too broad of an approach to facilitating conversion across web apps, mobile apps, and websites.
How Instapage personalization differs from Optimizely
Instapage was purpose-built to facilitate and streamline conversion from your advertising traffic. Our platform was created to optimize, personalize, and scale post-click landing pages, so it focuses entirely on advertising conversion.
Not only that, we provide page experience creation capabilities that allow for robust design changes at the speed of design, not engineering. We believe personalization should not require a developer at all. Our Personalization solution allows 1:1 ad-to-page personalization unlike any other product on the market:
With Instapage Personalization, you can add unique experiences for new audiences to an existing page. Simply identify the new sub-segment with a new set of UTM parameters, create a new experience, and attach it to the audience. Visitors in that segment will then start seeing the experience in real-time. Your other experiences will remain untouched:
What else is different?
Every ad deserves its own post-click landing page so we help you personalize your advertising campaigns by personalizing that experience. To do this we offer custom design features such as Instablocks™, and Global Blocks to help you not only create but scale your personalized post-click landing pages. While Optimizely’s ability to change content is powerful, being able to do things like injecting custom designed and audience-specific content blocks goes far beyond this:
Other custom design and testing features that we offer include:
- Responsive Page Experiences: post-click landing pages automatically respond to fit the screen and browser it’s being viewed.
- AMP Builder: Build lightening-fast, AMP-compliant pages in minutes to increase mobile conversions.
- Heatmaps and A/B testing: Easily optimize conversions by analyzing visitor actions and split testing without needing a developer.
- Real-time collaboration: Speed up design reviews with your clients and internal teams by collaborating in a single, unified location.
An analogy: Comparing Optimizely to Instapage
Consider this analogy when you compare the Optimizely personalization experiences to Instapage… Optimizely built a car whereas Instapage built a train.
A car can choose many routes to get to a destination. Yet they can be very inefficient because it can run into traffic that slows the time to arrival (client-side personalization and experimentation) and requires finding parking (needing a developer). Meanwhile, a train is built to take you to your exact location as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Understand the differences in personalization software
Comparing Optimizely personalization to Instapage isn’t as clear-cut as it may seem. The solutions are just… different… because each platform is designed for different purposes.
Optimizely is an effective tool if you’re looking to optimize your website, web apps, or mobile apps. However, Instapage is best suited when your goal is to personalize your post-click landing page experiences and streamline conversions from your advertising traffic.
To see the Instapage personalization solution in action, get a Personalization demo here.