Experiences
Microtarget your audiences and customize messages to each segment within the same campaign.
Experiences is an OptiMonk feature that lets you deliver different campaign messages to different visitor segments — all within a single campaign. Instead of creating a separate campaign for every audience variation you want to serve, you build one campaign and add multiple Experiences to it, each with its own design variant and its own segment-level targeting rules. When a visitor qualifies for a campaign, OptiMonk evaluates each Experience in priority order and shows the first one whose targeting rules match that visitor — a returning customer from Germany sees a loyalty-themed variant in German, a first-time visitor from the US sees a welcome discount in English, and a visitor arriving from a Facebook ad sees a message that mirrors the ad's creative — all driven by the same campaign. If no Experience-level rule matches the visitor, they see the default variant. Experiences combine two inputs: the campaign variant (what the visitor sees) and the Experience targeting rules (who sees it). These Experience-level rules are applied on top of the campaign's global targeting conditions, which apply to all Experiences simultaneously. Performance data is tracked per Experience and per variant, and Control Variant A/B tests can be added to individual Experiences independently.
Key benefits
- One campaign manages all your segment variations instead of many separate campaigns. Without Experiences, personalizing a campaign for five different audience segments means creating, managing, and monitoring five separate campaigns — five sets of targeting rules, five sets of analytics, five things to update when the offer changes. With Experiences, all five variations live inside one campaign. When you update the offer, you update it once. When you analyze performance, you see all segments in one place. Campaign management overhead scales with number of campaigns, not number of segments.
- Segment-level targeting without losing campaign-level coherence. Experiences apply targeting at the variant level rather than the campaign level, which means you can micro-target individual segments while maintaining shared campaign infrastructure — shared triggers, shared frequency settings, shared global targeting conditions. A campaign-wide rule that applies to all Experiences (such as "only show to visitors who have been on the site for at least 10 seconds") sits at the campaign level, while segment-specific rules (such as "this variant shows only to returning visitors from France") sit at the Experience level.
- Full A/B testing support per Experience. Each individual Experience can have its own Control Variant A/B test — meaning you can simultaneously test whether the personalized variant outperforms a no-campaign control for multiple audience segments independently. This lets you validate whether personalizing for a specific segment actually produces a measurable lift, rather than assuming personalization is always better than no campaign.
How it works
Select the campaign you want to add Experiences to and navigate to the Experience editor. You will see your default variant listed as Experience A — the version shown to any visitor who does not match a more specific Experience rule. Click Add Variant to create your first personalized Experience.
For each new Experience, customize the campaign design — change the headline, swap the image, translate the copy, modify the offer — to match the specific segment this Experience is for. Then add targeting rules to the Experience: choose from any of OptiMonk's standard conditions (country, traffic source, returning visitor, custom attribute, cart contents, visited URL, and more) to define exactly which visitors this Experience applies to. Name the Experience descriptively so it is easy to identify.
Arrange your Experiences in priority order using the up/down arrows — OptiMonk evaluates them top-to-bottom and shows the first one that matches the visitor. Place the most specific segment rules at the top and leave the default (no additional rules) as the last Experience, which catches all visitors who did not match any specific variant. Global targeting and trigger rules that apply to all Experiences are set in the Settings summary at the campaign level. Once the hierarchy is correct, publish the campaign.
Frequently asked questions
What is Experiences in OptiMonk?+
Experiences is an OptiMonk feature that allows you to show different campaign messages to different visitor segments within a single campaign. Each Experience consists of a campaign design variant and a set of segment-targeting rules that define which visitors see it. OptiMonk evaluates Experiences in priority order and shows the first matching one to each visitor. This eliminates the need to create separate campaigns for every audience segment you want to personalize for.
What is the difference between Experience-level rules and campaign-level targeting?+
Campaign-level targeting rules apply to all Experiences equally — they define the overall audience that can ever see the campaign. Experience-level rules are applied within that audience to determine which specific variant a qualifying visitor sees. For example, a campaign-level rule might restrict all Experiences to returning visitors only, while Experience-level rules differentiate between returning visitors from Germany (who see the German variant) and returning visitors from the US (who see the English variant).
What happens if a visitor does not match any Experience's targeting rules?+
If a visitor matches the campaign's global targeting conditions but does not match the rules of any specific Experience, they are shown the default variant — typically the last Experience in the hierarchy, which should be set up without additional targeting rules as a catch-all. This ensures every qualifying visitor sees some version of the campaign, even if they do not fit neatly into any of the defined micro-segments.
Can I A/B test within individual Experiences?+
Yes. Each Experience supports its own Control Variant A/B test — you can add a Control variant (no campaign) to any individual Experience and measure whether showing the personalized variant produces a statistically meaningful lift over showing no campaign for that specific segment. This allows you to test the value of personalization independently for each audience, rather than assuming all personalized segments benefit equally from the campaign.
How is the Experience hierarchy determined and why does it matter?+
Experiences are evaluated in the order they appear in the editor — from top to bottom — and the first Experience whose targeting rules match the current visitor is the one that is shown. This means more specific, narrow rules should be placed higher in the hierarchy, and the default (broadest) Experience should be last. If a broad rule is placed above a narrow one, the broad Experience will match first and the narrow one will never be reached for overlapping visitors.
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