Optimizely 101 with Robert McGovern

This article was written for the Remarkable blog.

The DXP ecosystem is constantly moving with the main players always evolving their products and expanding their feature sets. 

Optimizely One was launched in 2023 and is Optimizely’s big play in the DXP space. It is comprised of a robust set of interconnected composable products for marketers covering the full content lifecycle from planning, creation, publishing, and analysis. Optimizely describes it as “the world’s first operating system for marketing”. 

Below we explain how each of the products and tools features in the content lifecycle stages outlined below. 

Content Marketing Platform (CMP) 

Optimizely One’s CMP is where content is Planned and Created using campaign and task workspaces to facilitate collaborative content creation. Visual calendars let every stakeholder see what work is planned and in progress, and work requests let editors submit requests for marketing materials or assets. The Idea Lab uses SEO and social share data to help you create and discover content that resonates with your audience. 

Digital Asset Management (DAM) 

Optimizely One’s DAM system is where content and assets are Stored. Content can be tagged to make it easier to find and use. Different versions and renditions can be created of a master asset. Folders and Collections can be used to manage assets, and an expiry date can be selected to control when assets can be removed from use.

Content Management System (CMS) 

The CMS is where the bulk of the action happens, where the web content is created, published, and adapted. Drag and Drop Authoring lets you create pages easily along with a Visual Editor and In Context Editing lets you adapt it. You can manage your content in multiple languages and create different versions of it for personalisation. You can control who has access to what sections and the Reporting tools tell you what’s happening and when.

Personalisation 

Create Customer Profiles and Real-Time Segments to show Personalisation Campaigns to. Use Experience Templates to make creating experiences easy and use the Visual Editor to manage personalised content. Reporting and Analytics shows which experiences are working and which aren’t. 

Experimentation 

Flexible testing lets you test components and experiences with real-time segments. Like with personalisation, use Experience Templates to create experiences and use the Visual Editor to manage content to be tested. 

Analyse 

Track performance and optimize for what works with unified reporting dashboards that offer a single hub to visualize your analytics across customer data, operational reporting, analytics and more. 

We are in the early stages of planning an Optimizely CMP project for a client and are currently looking into the best way to roll it out and the different stages involved. 

A typical a project like this comprises two aspects: 

• Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to store the assets and content. 
• Content Marketing Platform (CMP) to create the content and manage workflow and approvals. 

These are two sides to the same coin. In most similar projects we’ve worked on we have set up the DAM (and all the taxonomies and schema that it entails) and have it open to receive assets before setting up the CMP. 

Below is a general phasing model that we typically use, depending on the client’s needs.

The categories that Optimizely talk about with regards to the CMP / DAM combo are as follows. 

• Library – the DAM, managing assets, versions, folders, collections etc. 
• Taxonomy – setting up the information that can be applied to the assets and content in the system. 
• User and Team settings – Managing users and teams, as well as the roles and permissions related to them. 
• Tasks and Workflows – Mange content creation and approval workflows, and all the tasks and stages that are involved. 
• Plan – Manage resources, budgeting, campaigns, events and calendars. 
• Content – Create, edit, and manage content, templates, renditions etc. 
• Marketplace – using licensed content. 
• Idea Lab – get help with generating ideas. 
• Analytics – Look at the stats around the content in play. 
• Publishing – publishing assets and content, including to third-party platforms. 
• Integrate other products – from Adobe Creative Cloud to SharePoint and HootSuite to JIRA, the list of possible integrations is long. 

NOTE: Here is a very useful link to all the support content that Optimizely has for these different sections. 

The DAM Library in the Optimizely CMP consists of a page where you can filter between the Assets, Collections, Templates, and Saved Views.

I just watched an interesting webinar from Optimizely’s Joey Moore and Simon Chapman covering the pitch around migrating Sitecore customers to Optimizely. 

This seems to have been a hot topic over the last couple of years with some Sitecore customers looking into other options for their DXPs. 

Some of the high-level pain points around Sitecore that were mentioned were: 

• Some customers have felt pressure to migrate to newer versions of Sitecore XP (Experience Platform) or even from XP to the recently launched Sitecore XM Cloud. 
• What some see as a higher cost for Sitecore licenses. 
• When Sitecore XM Cloud was launched there was somewhat of a suggestion of SaaS cloud-based platforms were the way forward and that PaaS was a thing of the past. This left some XP customers that were happy with a PaaS solution disillusioned.

Some of the similarities that were mentioned that would make switching from Sitecore to Optimizely PaaS CMS easy were: 

• Content Architecture – similar conceptual architecture behind their content models.
• Programming Architecture – Both created on the ASP.NET MVC tech stack. 
• Templates / Rendering – Both inject a single operative content object into a templating context.

The Optimizely benefits that were highlighted were: 

• Faster time to value – Get up and running creating content and experiences twice as fast. 
• Great for both marketers and developers – easier to create content and launch pages.
• Support – 24/7/365 customer support, professional training, and expert services. 
• Reduced cost of ownership – ROI of almost 300% within 3 years makes it worth your while .
• Upward DXP trajectory – Market leading DXP across many categories.