Optimizely Launches Adaptive Audiences

Optimizely today introduced Adaptive Audiences, a machine learning-powered capability that aims to help brands provide personalized experiences for their customers at scale.

“Adaptive Audiences is the next in a long line of technology we’ve released around making it easier for marketers to do personalization,” says Jon Noronha, director of product at Optimizely.

Adaptive Audiences automates the processes involved in audience segmentation to deliver personalized experiences while simultaneously saving its customers time and resources. Additionally, it leverages real-time browsing behavior and natural language processing to determine visitor intent and match users with relevant experiences.

To illustrate how Adaptive Audiences works, Noronha uses the example of a media organization seeking to create audience segments, such as “sports fan” or “parent” or “technology enthusiast.” But instead of being a rules-based system, Adaptive Audiences employs machine learning and natural language processing to segment customers  based on browsing behavior and keywords.

“So for sports fan you might provide us with a couple suggestions like ‘tennis,’ ‘soccer,’ ‘football,’ ‘basketball,’ and then based on that we’re using natural language processing to find all of the other related words and concepts,” he says. “Maybe you didn’t say ‘baseball,’ but we know based on the words you used that that’s also pretty related. We’ll pull in all that related content, and then we’ll use that to cluster your user base. We’ll start to break up users into clusters of people who tend to read articles in that sports category, people who tend to read articles in that technology category, and use that to build up these different audiences.

“We serve a whole range of different industries…all based on this insight that we can cluster people into these different audiences based on their overall interest category,” he adds.