Many organisations want to improve conversion and user experience, but often find it difficult when their digital platforms cannot adapt to user behaviour or provide meaningful insight.
Umbraco Engage introduces first-party data collection, real-time analytics, A/B testing and personalised content experiences within the Umbraco CMS. With a suitable implementation, these features can help teams understand user behaviour and create more relevant journeys.
If you would like a broader introduction to what personalisation means for websites and how Umbraco Engage works at a high level, you can read our earlier article, Unlocking the power of personalisation with Umbraco Engage.
Why organisations struggle with personalisation
If your team is facing any of the following challenges, you are not alone:
- High traffic but low conversions
- Limited visibility of visitor behaviour
- Difficulty tailoring content for different audiences
- Fragmented journeys across digital touchpoints
- Unclear insight into what content performs well
These issues often stem from a lack of clear behavioural data and the tools to act on it. This is where Engage offers practical support.
What Umbraco Engage actually enables
Drawing on Engage’s built-in capabilities, we focus on features that make the biggest difference to user experience and performance:
Behaviour-based personalisation
Deliver tailored experiences to each visitor based on their behaviour. This means content can adapt according to the user’s actions, such as the pages they browse or the sections they return to.
Real-time visitor profiling
Engage captures interactions as they happen, giving editors and marketers a clearer view of how people use the site.
A/B testing
The platform supports experimenting with different versions of a page or component so you can understand what performs best.
Analytics and insights
Engage offers built-in reporting that helps you understand content performance and visitor patterns, which can support more informed decisions.
First-party data approach
Engage uses first-party behavioural data rather than relying on third-party cookies.
All of these features depend on configuration, data maturity and your overall content strategy. However, they provide a strong foundation for creating experiences that react to user behaviour.
How Engage can support a better customer journey
With the right setup, Engage can support improvements such as:
- Showing different content to returning visitors
- Adjusting messaging or layout based on previous interactions
- Displaying relevant case studies or pages linked to user behaviour
- Testing variations to improve the performance of key pages
These are all practical applications of Engage’s feature set and can be scaled gradually as confidence grows.
Building towards more tailored experiences: a crawl–walk–run approach
Teams do not need to personalise everything at once. Gradual improvement usually produces better long-term results.
1. Crawl: understand the current journey
Identify friction points, high-value pages and opportunities to improve relevance. To support this stage, our blog Do you really know your customers? explores how customer journey maps and insight work to uncover gaps and assumptions:
2. Walk: personalise key touchpoints
Use Engage’s behaviour rules and A/B testing to shape important moments, such as service pages or calls to action.
3. Run: build more adaptive journeys
With a suitable strategy and implementation, Engage can help create experiences that evolve as users interact with your site over time. Find out more about our Umbraco Engage services.
This approach keeps improvements manageable and tied to measurable outcomes.
Why personalisation matters (industry research)
Industry research consistently shows that personalisation has a measurable impact on engagement, satisfaction and revenue:
- McKinsey reports that companies that excel at personalisation generate 40% more revenue from those activities than their competitors.
- According to Gartner, real-time personalisation improves customer experience outcomes and is a key driver of stronger retention and loyalty.
- The Content Marketing Institute found that personalised content significantly increases relevance and user engagement, helping brands maintain attention in crowded markets.
These sources provide context but do not change Umbraco’s stated feature set.
Final thought: personalisation begins with understanding behaviour
Umbraco Engage provides tools for behaviour-based personalisation, A/B testing and real-time insight. The impact will depend on how these tools are used, how well the data is interpreted and how your wider digital ecosystem is structured.
With the right foundations, Engage can help organisations:
- Understand their users more clearly
- Tailor content more effectively
- Improve engagement over time
- Make better decisions about their digital experience
If your goal is to create more relevant and effective user journeys, Engage offers a practical starting point within the Umbraco CMS.
