HOW TO GUIDE
How to create campaign
based personalizers
Personalized experiences are everywhere. Major platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and TikTok have set a high bar by tailoring their content to individual users’ preferences and behaviors. This level of personalization is proven to significantly increase engagement, leading to more meaningful interactions.
But you don’t have to be a tech giant to provide your website visitors with powerful personalized experiences. With dozens of visitor signals to choose from, the personalizer tool on your Dealer Inspire website can be used to build seamless, personalized experiences that’ll resonate with each unique visitor.
One of our very first partners, Cox Chevy, has been optimizing their website experience for over a decade to provide customized shopping experiences that dramatically increase engagement and conversions.
While the options to create personalized experiences are limitless, this guide will walk you through setting up campaign-based personalizers to ensure seamless messaging from your digital advertisements to your website. But first, let’s get refreshed on how personalizer works, and where your custom messages can appear.
Personalizer 101: understanding placements and visitor signals
You can deliver personalized messages to your visitors in the two most visited areas on your website: the Homepage and the Vehicle Results Pages (VRP).
For both placements, you can mix and match from a list of 35 unique visitor signals to build a highly granular personalized experience. Since you can have as many personalizers as you want, the only limit is your creativity and how specific you want to get with your messaging to your shoppers.
Some of the most frequently used visitor signals include:
- Location: “You’re close! Swing by for an oil change!”
- Previous shopping activity: “Still got your eyes on that Bronco? It’s yours for $399 /month!!”
- Referral source: “Mention Cars.com when you come in and get a free gift!”
- Time of day: “Stop in for a free car wash today from 2-5pm”
- Local weather: Local weather: “Stay dry inside while we replace your wiper blades”
All of these can be utilized and customized alongside the other rulesets to suit your needs.
Connecting the dots with UTM campaign personalizers
One of the most effective ways to utilize personalization is by creating a connected experience across your advertising campaigns and your website. This can be achieved using our UTM based rulesets.
What is UTM?
UTM parameters are tags added to URLs that help track the performance of marketing campaigns. These parameters include information about an ad’s:
Source (where the traffic is coming from)
Medium (the type of marketing channel)
Campaign (the specific marketing effort)
Content (specifies the ad creative)
Since UTM parameters provide valuable data about a shopper’s journey to your website, the source, medium, or campaign information in the URL can be used to determine which personalized messages that shopper will see once your landing page loads.
Strategic use cases for campaign-based personalizers
Before we get into how to build a personalized experience on your website, let’s cover three real examples of how to leverage UTM-based visitor signals to provide a personalized experience from the click of an ad to the destination landing page.
1. Build a consistent experience from ad to landing page
Imagine this: a customer who has recently visited your website is retargeted with a display ad featuring a special offer for the vehicle they were shopping for. They click the ad and are taken to a VRP that not only contains available inventory, but also prominently showcases the same messaging from the ad.
Using the UTM Campaign variable to create VRP personalizers ensures that your website content matches your ad’s messaging. This reassures customers that they are in the right place, guides them to the right information, and builds trust in your dealership.
2. Tailor-made creative for diverse audiences
Not every ad will resonate with your entire audience. Even if your vehicle offer is the same for everyone, tailoring your ad creative to different audience segments makes a lot of sense. But how do you carry that distinct creative through to your website? By building a personalized experience that presents matching website creative based on the UTM Content visitor signal.
For instance, let’s imagine your dealership is trying to reach younger, Gen Z buyers with your most affordable offers. You could tailor your ad creative to connect with that segment of the audience and engage them with your brand. When they tap through to your site, they will see matching creative and style, strengthening the connection between the experience they just left and that of your dealership.
Now let’s say you want to promote the exact same offer to a broader audience on Facebook. For that, you want to present compelling yet more straightforward creative. Then for those you engage, when they arrive on your VRP, they’ll see the same creative that matches the ad they clicked on.
By connecting the ad-to-website experience based on personalized campaign parameters, you can significantly enhance the relevance and appeal of the offer to each specific audience segment as they continue to shop on your website.
3. Audience specific offers in search ads
You can also make your search ads more effective by personalizing your ad-to-website experience for different audience segments using UTM parameters.
For instance, let’s say you’re running dynamic search ad campaigns for your inventory, and have different incentives for various audience segments: a loyalty incentive for current owners, and a conquest incentive for those who own a competitive make. By building personalized experiences, you can run distinct versions of the search ad to target those segments specifically.
By using the UTM Campaign visitor signal to personalize the VRP messaging based on the ad content, you create a seamless journey that enhances the relevance and appeal of your offers, and increases the likelihood of converting visitors into customers.
Step-by-Step guide to creating personalized campaigns
Ready to start crafting your own campaign-based personalizers on your Dealer Inspire website? Let’s dive in! Follow these steps to create a VRP personalizer using UTM parameters.
1 From the backend of your website, select Personalizer → Add New
2 Set where you want your personalizer to appear: Homepage USP or VRP Personalization
3 Click Add Media to upload your creative asset (recommended banner size is 1400 x 150)
4 Create a tag for your personalizer so you can track and measure its performance.
5 Click and drag your preferred UTM visitor signals for your personalized experience.
6 Publish your personalizer
7 To test your personalizer, visit your VRP and append the URL with ?utm_campaign=insert-name
Start creating the personalized experience shoppers want
Creating campaign-based personalizers on your Dealer Inspire website allows you to deliver highly targeted and engaging experiences similar to those offered by major platforms. With a strategic approach and creative use of Dealer Inspire’s personalizer technology, you can transform your website into a dynamic and responsive platform that resonates with your shoppers and drives meaningful results.