People pay attention to what's relevant to them. Ontraport lets you personalize your pages, so each visitor sees content that fits who they are and what they've done. This lesson covers the groundwork: how Ontraport knows who's visiting, and what's safe to show them.
Personalization can be small, like greeting someone by name. Or it can change most of the page. You might mention a product they bought, repeat something they told you on a form, or show an offer that only makes sense for them. Here's one page, as two different contacts see it.
You have two tools. Merge fields are placeholders that fill in values from the visitor's contact record, like their first name. Conditional display blocks show or hide whole blocks depending on who's visiting. The next two lessons cover each one. But both depend on one thing: your page has to know who's visiting.
Ontraport recognizes visitors with a cookie in their browser. A contact gets cookied when they click a link in one of your emails, fill out a form, log in to a membership site, or click a tracked link. When they come back, your page knows who they are.
A cookie isn't permanent. If a visitor clears their cookies, or visits in a browser that was never cookied, Ontraport can't tell who they are. They're recognized again the next time they click an email link or fill out a form.
So every visitor is one of three kinds. Anonymous visitors don't have the Ontraport cookie. Identified visitors do. Logged-in members have signed in to your membership site. In a block's display settings, Display this block to whom lets you target each group, and narrow it further with conditions like a tag, a field value or a past purchase.
Even anonymous visitors can get a personalized page. A block can show only when the page URL contains certain text, like a UTM value from the ad they clicked.
Here's the rule. Cookie identification is great for personalization, but it isn't proof of who's at the keyboard. The most reliable way to identify a contact is a membership site login. New members get a registration email with a link to create their password, so you know the person signing in is them.
Use identified visitors for low-risk content, where a wrong guess does no harm. Like showing a returning-customer offer, or a different block based on the contact's state. Anything private, like purchase history or account details, belongs only in front of logged-in members.
You can protect an entire page the same way. In the page's Settings tab, open Display Settings and choose all logged-in members. Add a redirect for everyone else, like your sales page. If you leave it blank, they'll see an access denied message.
So: personalization starts with knowing who's visiting. Use identified visitors for low-risk content, and keep anything private behind a membership login. Next up: personalizing with merge fields, where you'll put contact details right on the page.