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What is Personalisation in Contensis?

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Personalisation enables you to show the right content to the right people at the right time. It’s about tailoring your website so that different visitors see content that’s most relevant to them — based on things like where they are, what they’re interested in, or how they’ve interacted with your site before.

Example: On a university website, you might want prospective students from different countries to see course information that applies to them. Or you could highlight alumni stories for returning graduates.

Contensis makes this possible by helping you define groups of visitors (called audiences) and show them content that matches their needs.

How personalisation works

When someone visits your site:

  1. Contensis looks at their signals (clues about who they are — like their location or device).
  2. It matches them to an audience based on these signals.
  3. It shows them the version of your content that’s designed for that audience.

You can manage and preview all of this through tools built right into Contensis.

The six building blocks of personalisation in Contensis

Audiences

Audiences are groups of visitors who share something in common — like first-time visitors, returning users, or people from a certain region. Each audience represents a segment you want to target with specific content.

For example, you might have an audience for “New Visitors from the UK” or “Mobile Users in Europe.”

Signals

Signals are the characteristics Contensis uses to decide whether a visitor belongs to a particular audience.

Think of them as the clues Contensis looks for, like:

  • What type of device they’re using
  • Where they’re located
  • Which site they came from (referrer)

You can combine these signals to create precise audiences.

Custom attributes

Sometimes the standard signals aren’t enough. Custom attributes let you define your own characteristics to use in personalisation.

Example: You could create a custom attribute for a visitor’s preferred language, course of study, or membership level.

Manifest

The manifest is like the master plan for your personalisation setup. It defines and manages your audiences, signals, and custom attributes, and controls when those settings are published to your live site.

It also keeps track of changes, so you can see what’s changed over time or compare versions.

Personalisation preview toolbar

Before publishing, you’ll want to check what different visitors will see. The preview toolbar makes that easy. You can simulate different audiences and see exactly what content they’d get — no need to actually be in their location or use their device.

Audience picker

When creating or editing content, you can use the audience picker field to choose which audience should see a particular version of your content. This brings personalisation into your day-to-day workflow, making it easy for editors to decide who sees what.

Why use personalisation?

Personalisation helps you:

  • Increase engagement by showing visitors content that’s relevant to them
  • Improve user satisfaction and conversions
  • Make your site feel more welcoming and useful

Still need help?

If you still need help after reading this article, don't hesitate to reach out to the Contensis community on Slack or raise a support ticket to get help from our team.
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