You can show or hide blocks on a page based on what you know about your site visitors. Learn how to personalize a page using conditional display blocks.
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Home > Ontraport for marketing > Pages > Personalizing with conditional display blocks
Personalizing with conditional display blocks
You'll learn:
- How to adjust your block display settings
- How to choose who can see your block
- Options for conditions you could create, such as location, custom interest field or products ordered
- The way to publish and testing your page
Sam Flegal
Personalizing with conditional display blocks
You can show or hide blocks on a page based on what you know about your site visitors. Learn how to personalize a page using conditional display blocks.
- How to adjust your block display settings
- How to choose who can see your block
- Options for conditions you could create, such as location, custom interest field or products ordered
- The way to publish and testing your page
Course Instructor
Sam Flegal
Related resources
[Block//Author//First Name] [Block//Author//Last Name] on [Block//Date Added %F j, Y g:i a%+0d0h0m]
[Block//Comment]
Transcript
Merge fields are great for grabbing people’s attention and doing some basic personalization. But let’s take things up a notch with conditional display blocks!
The idea behind conditional display blocks is that when a page ‘knows’ who a site visitor is it can show or hide certain blocks based on what you know about that visitor.
So you can show different content based on each contact’s specific interests. For example, you might show some meatless recipes to vegetarians on your site and protein-packed ones to the meat-eaters. Or you show people who have bought something from you before a related item or an upsell, while showing non-buyers an entry-level offer. Maybe you show information about a local event only to people in a certain couple of states. The possibilities are unlimited here and this kind of hyper-targeted personalization is actually really easy to set up in Ontraport. I’ll show you how to do it in three steps.
First, we’ll find your block display settings,
Then we’ll decide who gets to see your block
and third, we’ll publish and test your page.
Let’s dive in!
First, go to your Block display settings.
Your “Display Settings” determine who gets to see a particular block. You’ll find the “Display Settings” by first clicking into layout mode on the block you want to work with, then looking in the block settings palette editor on the left here.
There are three settings:
Device display: This lets you choose which devices can view your landing page block. You’ll pick between “All Devices,” “Desktop Only” or “Mobile Only.”
When should this block be displayed?: You’ll typically use this to show an offer to leads after they’ve been on your page for a certain amount of time.
And Display this block to whom?: This is the one we’re looking for, which determines who can see this particular block
Now choose Who can see your block.
Choosing ‘Everyone’ makes this just a normal block that everyone can see.
Select “Anonymous visitors only” if you just want to show a block to visitors who are, well.. Anonymous.
Most of the time this will be people whose contact information you don’t yet have, but sometimes it’ll be people that may be on your list but are using a new device or have changed browsers or deleted their cookies.
You’ll use this setting, for example, when you want to create a lead capture form that only new visitors can see, and to hide it from people already on your list
Let's say you want to offer new leads a free download in exchange for their email address. You’d set up your form block so that it only shows up for anonymous visitors. This will make sure that your lead magnet only brings in fresh leads.
Choose "Identified visitors only" if you want only contacts that are already in your account to see your block. This kind of personalization is helpful for making offers that nudge your existing leads towards a sale. For example, you might give identified contacts a coupon for one of your products or invite them to a webinar.
Choosing “Some identified visitors” is where things get real. This setting allows you to use the information in each contact’s record to decide if they should see this block.
You have a ton of opportunities here, so let’s check out a few of them.
If you have information stored about your contacts’ past purchases and want to show them other similar products, this is what you’ll do:
Select “Some identified visitors” from the “Display this block to whom?” dropdown.
Click “+ Add Condition” and then “Has ordered a certain amount of a product.”
Add a condition, like “Has ordered Greater than or equal to 1” of the product of your choice. This will show your block to anyone who has purchased that product, like my delicious raspberry jam.
Or add the condition “Is subscribed to product” to show your block to customers who have an active subscription with you. Maybe they belong to my jam-of-the-month club.
You can also create conditions around any custom field you have set up in your account.
Let’s say you have a sign-up form asking leads about their favorite outdoor activity. You’d give them different choices like hiking, surfing or kayaking. Based on the interests your contacts choose, show them blocks with more info about their favorite activities.
Choose “Field is this value” and pick your custom interest field to create a condition like “Favorite outdoor activity equal to hiking.”
This will show contacts who are interested in hiking more information about your favorite trails or the hiking poles you sell.
We can also use information about your contacts’ location to show them certain blocks.
The “Field is this value” condition on your “Some identified visitors” block display is really powerful. It lets you show or hide content based on the custom and default fields in your account.
Let’s say you’re running a workshop in multiple locations and you want to make sure your contacts know about the event that’s closest to them.
Set up a condition, like “State equal to Alabama” to share more information about your Alabama workshop. Do the same for “State equal to Colorado” for your Colorado event.
The possibilities here are basically endless, and you’ll keep finding more as you get deeper into marketing and optimizing your website.
Moving on to the next option here, Choose “All logged in members” to make sure that only your website members who are currently logged in can see a block.
Then, last, we have “Some logged in members” which is like ‘some identified visitors’ where you can use the contact’s information to determine who sees the block
You might have an event that only your Gold members are invited to, or maybe you want to show an upsell offer only to your Silver members. Again, the sky’s the limit here.
Finally, we have one more option to cover, which is to show your block if your page’s URL contains a specific text.
This is useful, for example, if you’re driving traffic to a page from several different ad campaigns. Maybe each campaign is testing a separate offer, so you could use this feature to show the correct offer to each person.
So Let’s say you’re testing offers and you have an offer for 1st month free and another for 20% off. You’ve set up UTM links for all of your ads and one has “freemonth” for the campaign UTM value and the other has “20off” and you want to show the right offer to each visitor.
To make this work in Pages toggle on “Only show this block if the page URL contains specific text.”
Create your condition based on the text in your URL, such as “This page’s URL contains ‘freemonth’.”
Then, do the same thing in another block for the 20off UTM value.
And that’s all there is to it.
For our final step, let’s Publish and test your page.
When you set up conditional blocks, test them to be sure your conditions are working just right.
To test it, you need to publish your page. Use an Ontraport domain to make your page live while you’re testing so none of your actual visitors can land on it. Check out the “Publishing your pages” video for more info on this.
To test your page, you’ll need:
Since all your Ontraport forms merge contacts based on their email address, your testing form really only needs an email address field.
Enter the email address of a contact who fits your conditions — like a contact who has “Colorado” selected as their state — onto your form. Now Ontraport thinks you’re that contact and since the contact fits your conditions, you should be able to see your block.
Submit your form again using the email address of a contact who doesn’t fit your conditions to make sure that your block isn’t visible when you see the page.
To test display conditions based on your URL’s text, all you need to do is publish your page, then go to it using a URL that contains the text you’re using on your display condition.
Great job! You just learned how to set up some pretty powerful page personalization in Ontraport.
So start showing visitors more of what matters to them — and less of what doesn’t.
Stay tuned for a few more videos on pages, and then we’ll get into membership sites.
The idea behind conditional display blocks is that when a page ‘knows’ who a site visitor is it can show or hide certain blocks based on what you know about that visitor.
So you can show different content based on each contact’s specific interests. For example, you might show some meatless recipes to vegetarians on your site and protein-packed ones to the meat-eaters. Or you show people who have bought something from you before a related item or an upsell, while showing non-buyers an entry-level offer. Maybe you show information about a local event only to people in a certain couple of states. The possibilities are unlimited here and this kind of hyper-targeted personalization is actually really easy to set up in Ontraport. I’ll show you how to do it in three steps.
First, we’ll find your block display settings,
Then we’ll decide who gets to see your block
and third, we’ll publish and test your page.
Let’s dive in!
First, go to your Block display settings.
Your “Display Settings” determine who gets to see a particular block. You’ll find the “Display Settings” by first clicking into layout mode on the block you want to work with, then looking in the block settings palette editor on the left here.
There are three settings:
Device display: This lets you choose which devices can view your landing page block. You’ll pick between “All Devices,” “Desktop Only” or “Mobile Only.”
When should this block be displayed?: You’ll typically use this to show an offer to leads after they’ve been on your page for a certain amount of time.
And Display this block to whom?: This is the one we’re looking for, which determines who can see this particular block
Now choose Who can see your block.
Choosing ‘Everyone’ makes this just a normal block that everyone can see.
Select “Anonymous visitors only” if you just want to show a block to visitors who are, well.. Anonymous.
Most of the time this will be people whose contact information you don’t yet have, but sometimes it’ll be people that may be on your list but are using a new device or have changed browsers or deleted their cookies.
You’ll use this setting, for example, when you want to create a lead capture form that only new visitors can see, and to hide it from people already on your list
Let's say you want to offer new leads a free download in exchange for their email address. You’d set up your form block so that it only shows up for anonymous visitors. This will make sure that your lead magnet only brings in fresh leads.
Choose "Identified visitors only" if you want only contacts that are already in your account to see your block. This kind of personalization is helpful for making offers that nudge your existing leads towards a sale. For example, you might give identified contacts a coupon for one of your products or invite them to a webinar.
Choosing “Some identified visitors” is where things get real. This setting allows you to use the information in each contact’s record to decide if they should see this block.
You have a ton of opportunities here, so let’s check out a few of them.
If you have information stored about your contacts’ past purchases and want to show them other similar products, this is what you’ll do:
Select “Some identified visitors” from the “Display this block to whom?” dropdown.
Click “+ Add Condition” and then “Has ordered a certain amount of a product.”
Add a condition, like “Has ordered Greater than or equal to 1” of the product of your choice. This will show your block to anyone who has purchased that product, like my delicious raspberry jam.
Or add the condition “Is subscribed to product” to show your block to customers who have an active subscription with you. Maybe they belong to my jam-of-the-month club.
You can also create conditions around any custom field you have set up in your account.
Let’s say you have a sign-up form asking leads about their favorite outdoor activity. You’d give them different choices like hiking, surfing or kayaking. Based on the interests your contacts choose, show them blocks with more info about their favorite activities.
Choose “Field is this value” and pick your custom interest field to create a condition like “Favorite outdoor activity equal to hiking.”
This will show contacts who are interested in hiking more information about your favorite trails or the hiking poles you sell.
We can also use information about your contacts’ location to show them certain blocks.
The “Field is this value” condition on your “Some identified visitors” block display is really powerful. It lets you show or hide content based on the custom and default fields in your account.
Let’s say you’re running a workshop in multiple locations and you want to make sure your contacts know about the event that’s closest to them.
Set up a condition, like “State equal to Alabama” to share more information about your Alabama workshop. Do the same for “State equal to Colorado” for your Colorado event.
The possibilities here are basically endless, and you’ll keep finding more as you get deeper into marketing and optimizing your website.
Moving on to the next option here, Choose “All logged in members” to make sure that only your website members who are currently logged in can see a block.
Then, last, we have “Some logged in members” which is like ‘some identified visitors’ where you can use the contact’s information to determine who sees the block
You might have an event that only your Gold members are invited to, or maybe you want to show an upsell offer only to your Silver members. Again, the sky’s the limit here.
Finally, we have one more option to cover, which is to show your block if your page’s URL contains a specific text.
This is useful, for example, if you’re driving traffic to a page from several different ad campaigns. Maybe each campaign is testing a separate offer, so you could use this feature to show the correct offer to each person.
So Let’s say you’re testing offers and you have an offer for 1st month free and another for 20% off. You’ve set up UTM links for all of your ads and one has “freemonth” for the campaign UTM value and the other has “20off” and you want to show the right offer to each visitor.
To make this work in Pages toggle on “Only show this block if the page URL contains specific text.”
Create your condition based on the text in your URL, such as “This page’s URL contains ‘freemonth’.”
Then, do the same thing in another block for the 20off UTM value.
And that’s all there is to it.
For our final step, let’s Publish and test your page.
When you set up conditional blocks, test them to be sure your conditions are working just right.
To test it, you need to publish your page. Use an Ontraport domain to make your page live while you’re testing so none of your actual visitors can land on it. Check out the “Publishing your pages” video for more info on this.
To test your page, you’ll need:
- A test contact that fits your conditions
- A test contact that doesn’t fit your conditions
- A published version of your page
- A form that has your published version of your page set as the thank you page
Since all your Ontraport forms merge contacts based on their email address, your testing form really only needs an email address field.
Enter the email address of a contact who fits your conditions — like a contact who has “Colorado” selected as their state — onto your form. Now Ontraport thinks you’re that contact and since the contact fits your conditions, you should be able to see your block.
Submit your form again using the email address of a contact who doesn’t fit your conditions to make sure that your block isn’t visible when you see the page.
To test display conditions based on your URL’s text, all you need to do is publish your page, then go to it using a URL that contains the text you’re using on your display condition.
Great job! You just learned how to set up some pretty powerful page personalization in Ontraport.
So start showing visitors more of what matters to them — and less of what doesn’t.
Stay tuned for a few more videos on pages, and then we’ll get into membership sites.
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