How to evaluate the effectiveness of your personalization efforts

Hey, it's Csaba, and welcome to the final module of OptiMonk's website personalization course! Over the next lessons, we'll talk about measuring the performance of your messages and optimizing them to achieve even better results. First, let's dive into the question of how to evaluate whether your personalization efforts are effective. Let's get right into it! For any kind of marketing activity you undertake, there should be a measurable way of deciding whether or not the time and money you put into it were worth it. Measuring the results of personalization efforts is equally as important as measuring the ROI of a Facebook ad campaign. So how do you go about it? First of all, you need to decide what numbers you are going to use to measure success. These will be your KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. You can choose to use any of the leading indicators, like click-throughs or signups (which are based on actions someone takes immediately upon seeing a personalized message), or lagging indicators like revenue or customer lifetime value (which can take some time to show up). Once you've decided what to measure, you need to find the right tools to measure your KPIs. For leading indicators like click-throughs and signups, the personalization platform you use will often provide a decent reporting and analytics system. For more complex lagging indicators, you'll probably need additional analytics solutions, such as Google Analytics. But the problem here is that Google Analytics and similar tools are only able to measure anonymous visitor activity over the course of one session. That's why having a personalization platform like OptiMonk makes sense. It keeps a complete overview of each customer's journey from the very beginning to the end, which means you can attribute outcomes like revenue to personalized campaigns over longer periods. Given that you're tracking the right KPIs with the right tools, how can you actually measure the extra revenue that your personalization efforts have generated? By running experiments, which are often called A/B tests. In the next lesson I'll introduce you to the world of A/B testing, and teach you how to run successful experiments. I'll see you in the next lesson!