Evaluate contextual personalization

After running contextual personalization, use this guide to measure its impact and select a winner.

Before evaluating, make sure you enabled the Comparative A/B test toggle and set traffic distribution to 80% contextual personalization and 20% comparative A/B test when configuring your campaign.

Evaluate results

Use the variant_type property to split your audience into three segments — contextual personalization, Variant A, and Variant B — and compare their performance.

Where to find variant_type:

• Weblayers: Tracked in the banner event as banner.variant_type. Note that variant_type is stored in the standard action=show event.
• Scenarios and email campaigns: Tracked in the campaign event as campaign.variant_type. Note that variant_type is stored in the standard action_type=split event.

All predefined weblayer templates include variant_type automatically. If you build a weblayer from scratch, add it manually in the tracking JavaScript:

function getEventProperties (action, interactive) {
    return {
        action: action,
        banner_id: self.data.banner_id,
        banner_name: self.data.banner_name,
        banner_type: self.data.banner_type,
        variant_id: self.data.variant_id,
        variant_name: self.data.variant_name,
        variant_type: self.data.contextual_personalization != null ? 'contextual personalisation' : 'ABtest',
        interaction: interactive !== false,
    };
}

Contextual personalization typically outperforms individual variants — but this isn't guaranteed. Unpredictable customer behavior and feature selection can affect results. The algorithm also intentionally serves a small range of randomized options as part of its learning process. In cases where one variant works better for every context, a simpler single-variant setup may perform better overall.

Finish the test and select a winner

Once you've reviewed your results, go to the Finish A/B test section of the contextual personalization settings and select a winner — either contextual personalization or one of the individual variants. After confirmation, all traffic is served the selected variant. This section is only visible for weblayers with less than 100% of traffic sent to contextual personalization.

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Important

Selecting a winner and clicking Finish A/B test cannot be undone.

Next steps

• Contextual personalization use cases — explore examples by industry and channel.
• Configure contextual personalization — revisit your setup to adjust features, goals, or values.