Discover why the data used as intent proxies falls short, and how real-time intent predictions reveal the true quality, preferences, and progression of your ecommerce visitors.
If you’ve read our original piece on Predictions, Not Proxies, you’ll already understand why ecommerce teams need to move beyond outdated signals like traffic source and funnel stage.
To recap, it’s time for a mindset shift in ecommerce. To go from using surface-level proxies to using real-time intent predictions based on actual behaviour. This follow-up brings data to back up that claim.
What is the quality of a visitor? What are their preferences? And are they progressing towards a purchase?
These are critical questions in ecommerce. They underpin everything from targeting and messaging to optimisation and conversion. And yet, most teams still rely on proxies to answer them. Proxies that are easy to measure, but misleading. Easy to action, but often off the mark.
Proxies became popular not because they were particularly predictive, but because they were easy. They were what was available. And in the absence of better tools, convenience often beat accuracy.
In this article, we explore three key areas where Intent-proxy metrics lead to incorrect assumptions about our visitors.
Visitor Quality: Why source-based assumptions break down the deeper a visitor engages
Visitor Preference: Why relying on add-to-cart ignores 6.6x more signals of interest
Visitor Progression: Why real journeys aren’t linear and what that means for timing
It shows where proxies lead teams astray, what gets missed, and what becomes possible when you see the real story underneath.
Visitor Quality: The Proxy vs The Prediction
Proxy: Conversion by Source: Channel | Device | New/Existing
Prediction: Intent to Purchase
Assumption: The average performance of my traffic sources indicates the intent of the visitor.
Reality: Every visitor has their own level of intent. It’s not pre-determined by origin. Intent builds over time and should be treated as such.
Proxy Scenario: A New-Social-Mobile visitor lands on a PDP, adds to cart and exits after entering checkout. The data only recognises them by their initial source and as a non-converter.
Prediction Scenario: A New-Social-Mobile visitor lands on a PDP with low intent. After interacting with the site, they leave with high intent to purchase.
One of the most ingrained habits in ecommerce is defining visitor quality by how they arrive. PPC traffic is high intent. Social traffic is low intent. Mobile users convert worse. Returning visitors convert better.
These assumptions are so common they’ve become unquestioned. But they’re all based on aggregate averages. And averages flatten nuance.
When we analysed session-level intent across millions of visits, we saw a different story. Yes, there are differences at the top of the funnel. But as users engage more deeply, the source matters less. What matters is what they do now.
The difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ quality traffic almost disappears when we look at visitors by their 46th event, rather than their 1st.
PPC vs Social visitor intent distribution by 46th event compared to entry source
Our data shows that the gap between “low” quality traffic and “high” quality traffic closes the deeper they engage. Due to lower intent visitors progressively dropping off over the course of a journey, the remaining visitors will have a naturally higher intent.
We looked at how quality changes over time. Early on, yes, traffic source matters. But by the 30th, 40th, 50th event, it flattens out. The intent is shaped more by what visitors do than where they came from.
Social traffic looks low intent at first glance, but the ones who engage actually build really strong purchase intent.
But knowing which visitors have potential is only half the story. To personalise effectively, you also need to understand what they actually care about.
Visitor Preference: The Proxy vs The Prediction
Proxy: Add to Carts | Product Views | Recency
Prediction: Product Affinity
Assumption: Adding to carts and product views signals what visitors like and want to buy.
Reality: Visitor preferences show in behaviours, not just CTAs. Interactions that increase add-to-cart intent reliably indicate interest.
Proxy Scenario: A visitor spends 10 minutes on a £100 hairdryer, doesn’t add to cart, then browses 10+ shampoos in a 3-for-2 deal. Data logs shampoo as the focus.
Prediction Scenario: The same visitor shows strong affinity for £50–£100 hairdryers, then later for shampoo in the £5–£10 range.
It’s easy to think we know what visitors want. Add-to-cart events, product views and recency are the typical signals we treat as indicators of preference. But they’re all blunt. They assume interest based on the most trackable action, not the most telling one.
When we analysed onsite behaviour, we saw that affinity builds well before someone clicks ‘add to cart’. And in many cases, people never reach that point, even when they’re highly interested.
In our data, we identify a product affinity in 6.6x more visitors than we see actually add to cart.
Product affinity is visible in 6.6x more visitors than those who add to cart
Tracking the movement of a visitor’s intent to add to cart reliably indicates their affinities to products and attributes.
Only a small number of online shoppers add to cart, but many more show product interest through how they browse. Through scrolls, hesitations, returns and comparisons, we can see strong signals of affinity well before any CTA click.
In fact, we see product affinity in over 6 times more sessions than we see add-to-cart events. That’s a huge chunk of opportunity that goes unnoticed if you’re stuck with proxies.
Put another way, if you’re only reacting to add to cart events, you’re often too late to really influence what matters. You’ve missed the moment they started to care.
And once you understand what they want, there’s one final question: are they getting closer to buying, or drifting away?
Visitor Progression: The Proxy vs The Prediction
Proxy: Page Views | Page Funnels
Prediction: Intent to Purchase Movement
Assumption: Milestones like viewing a PDP or adding to cart indicate progress toward purchase.
Reality: No interaction is meaningful in isolation. Every journey is unique and includes intent fluctuations.
Proxy Scenario: A visitor adds to cart, enters the basket, then shops for 30 more minutes. Data still classifies them as high intent.
Prediction Scenario: This visitor showed early intent, but their behaviour declined significantly after backtracking from the cart.
Most ecommerce sites still treat the typical page funnel as a reliable guide. Homepage to PLP to PDP to cart to checkout. And on paper, it works. But real journeys don’t follow that script. They loop. They stall. They rewind.
And yet, many personalisation and performance decisions still hinge on page depth. Someone in checkout must be ready to buy. Someone on PDP must be evaluating. Someone who’s viewed 10 pages must be high intent.
Not quite.
Intent declines in over 65% of journeys at some point. It’s the norm, not the exception.
Around 65% of journeys show a drop in intent at some point. It is a natural part of visitor behaviour
It’s very common for visitor journeys to fluctuate as they engage. This graph demonstrates that the rate of visitors that indicated a drop in intent to purchase at some point increases the longer they shop. On average, 65% of visitors will lose intent at some point, with converting visitors showing a clear divergence from the typical visitor.
We found that intent doesn’t just rise as sessions go on. It’s not that people always leave with less intent, but that there are points within most sessions where the intent dips. That fluctuation is what matters.
Even among converters, a good chunk of them show a dip somewhere mid-journey. So if you’re only acting on high-intent signals, you’re missing the nuance.
If ecommerce journeys are this non-linear and you want to optimise experiences as much as possible, then real-time prediction isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.
The Real Opportunity
The previous Predictions, Not Proxies article made the case for change. I hope this one validates it, and shows what happens when you make it.
The truth is, ecommerce teams aren’t misreading intent because they’re careless. They’re misreading it because proxies were the only thing available for a long time. They were measurable. They were familiar. And they made things feel predictable.
But customer behaviour isn’t predictable. Not through proxies. Not in the way we’d like it to be as ecommerce teams. It’s dynamic, contextual and deeply individual.
And that’s the good news. Because once you stop relying on proxies, and start responding to predictions, everything sharpens. Personalisation becomes meaningful. Experiences become appropriate. And performance follows.
You can’t scale personalisation on proxies. But you can scale it by predicting intent.
If you’ve read our original piece on Predictions, Not Proxies, you’ll already understand why ecommerce teams need to move beyond outdated signals like traffic source and funnel stage.
To recap, it’s time for a mindset shift in ecommerce. To go from using surface-level proxies to using real-time intent predictions based on actual behaviour. This follow-up brings data to back up that claim.
What is the quality of a visitor? What are their preferences? And are they progressing towards a purchase?
These are critical questions in ecommerce. They underpin everything from targeting and messaging to optimisation and conversion. And yet, most teams still rely on proxies to answer them. Proxies that are easy to measure, but misleading. Easy to action, but often off the mark.
Proxies became popular not because they were particularly predictive, but because they were easy. They were what was available. And in the absence of better tools, convenience often beat accuracy.
In this article, we explore three key areas where Intent-proxy metrics lead to incorrect assumptions about our visitors.
Visitor Quality: Why source-based assumptions break down the deeper a visitor engages
Visitor Preference: Why relying on add-to-cart ignores 6.6x more signals of interest
Visitor Progression: Why real journeys aren’t linear and what that means for timing
It shows where proxies lead teams astray, what gets missed, and what becomes possible when you see the real story underneath.
Visitor Quality: The Proxy vs The Prediction
Proxy: Conversion by Source: Channel | Device | New/Existing
Prediction: Intent to Purchase
Assumption: The average performance of my traffic sources indicates the intent of the visitor.
Reality: Every visitor has their own level of intent. It’s not pre-determined by origin. Intent builds over time and should be treated as such.
Proxy Scenario: A New-Social-Mobile visitor lands on a PDP, adds to cart and exits after entering checkout. The data only recognises them by their initial source and as a non-converter.
Prediction Scenario: A New-Social-Mobile visitor lands on a PDP with low intent. After interacting with the site, they leave with high intent to purchase.
One of the most ingrained habits in ecommerce is defining visitor quality by how they arrive. PPC traffic is high intent. Social traffic is low intent. Mobile users convert worse. Returning visitors convert better.
These assumptions are so common they’ve become unquestioned. But they’re all based on aggregate averages. And averages flatten nuance.
When we analysed session-level intent across millions of visits, we saw a different story. Yes, there are differences at the top of the funnel. But as users engage more deeply, the source matters less. What matters is what they do now.
The difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ quality traffic almost disappears when we look at visitors by their 46th event, rather than their 1st.
PPC vs Social visitor intent distribution by 46th event compared to entry source
Our data shows that the gap between “low” quality traffic and “high” quality traffic closes the deeper they engage. Due to lower intent visitors progressively dropping off over the course of a journey, the remaining visitors will have a naturally higher intent.
We looked at how quality changes over time. Early on, yes, traffic source matters. But by the 30th, 40th, 50th event, it flattens out. The intent is shaped more by what visitors do than where they came from.
Social traffic looks low intent at first glance, but the ones who engage actually build really strong purchase intent.
But knowing which visitors have potential is only half the story. To personalise effectively, you also need to understand what they actually care about.
Visitor Preference: The Proxy vs The Prediction
Proxy: Add to Carts | Product Views | Recency
Prediction: Product Affinity
Assumption: Adding to carts and product views signals what visitors like and want to buy.
Reality: Visitor preferences show in behaviours, not just CTAs. Interactions that increase add-to-cart intent reliably indicate interest.
Proxy Scenario: A visitor spends 10 minutes on a £100 hairdryer, doesn’t add to cart, then browses 10+ shampoos in a 3-for-2 deal. Data logs shampoo as the focus.
Prediction Scenario: The same visitor shows strong affinity for £50–£100 hairdryers, then later for shampoo in the £5–£10 range.
It’s easy to think we know what visitors want. Add-to-cart events, product views and recency are the typical signals we treat as indicators of preference. But they’re all blunt. They assume interest based on the most trackable action, not the most telling one.
When we analysed onsite behaviour, we saw that affinity builds well before someone clicks ‘add to cart’. And in many cases, people never reach that point, even when they’re highly interested.
In our data, we identify a product affinity in 6.6x more visitors than we see actually add to cart.
Product affinity is visible in 6.6x more visitors than those who add to cart
Tracking the movement of a visitor’s intent to add to cart reliably indicates their affinities to products and attributes.
Only a small number of online shoppers add to cart, but many more show product interest through how they browse. Through scrolls, hesitations, returns and comparisons, we can see strong signals of affinity well before any CTA click.
In fact, we see product affinity in over 6 times more sessions than we see add-to-cart events. That’s a huge chunk of opportunity that goes unnoticed if you’re stuck with proxies.
Put another way, if you’re only reacting to add to cart events, you’re often too late to really influence what matters. You’ve missed the moment they started to care.
And once you understand what they want, there’s one final question: are they getting closer to buying, or drifting away?
Visitor Progression: The Proxy vs The Prediction
Proxy: Page Views | Page Funnels
Prediction: Intent to Purchase Movement
Assumption: Milestones like viewing a PDP or adding to cart indicate progress toward purchase.
Reality: No interaction is meaningful in isolation. Every journey is unique and includes intent fluctuations.
Proxy Scenario: A visitor adds to cart, enters the basket, then shops for 30 more minutes. Data still classifies them as high intent.
Prediction Scenario: This visitor showed early intent, but their behaviour declined significantly after backtracking from the cart.
Most ecommerce sites still treat the typical page funnel as a reliable guide. Homepage to PLP to PDP to cart to checkout. And on paper, it works. But real journeys don’t follow that script. They loop. They stall. They rewind.
And yet, many personalisation and performance decisions still hinge on page depth. Someone in checkout must be ready to buy. Someone on PDP must be evaluating. Someone who’s viewed 10 pages must be high intent.
Not quite.
Intent declines in over 65% of journeys at some point. It’s the norm, not the exception.
Around 65% of journeys show a drop in intent at some point. It is a natural part of visitor behaviour
It’s very common for visitor journeys to fluctuate as they engage. This graph demonstrates that the rate of visitors that indicated a drop in intent to purchase at some point increases the longer they shop. On average, 65% of visitors will lose intent at some point, with converting visitors showing a clear divergence from the typical visitor.
We found that intent doesn’t just rise as sessions go on. It’s not that people always leave with less intent, but that there are points within most sessions where the intent dips. That fluctuation is what matters.
Even among converters, a good chunk of them show a dip somewhere mid-journey. So if you’re only acting on high-intent signals, you’re missing the nuance.
If ecommerce journeys are this non-linear and you want to optimise experiences as much as possible, then real-time prediction isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.
The Real Opportunity
The previous Predictions, Not Proxies article made the case for change. I hope this one validates it, and shows what happens when you make it.
The truth is, ecommerce teams aren’t misreading intent because they’re careless. They’re misreading it because proxies were the only thing available for a long time. They were measurable. They were familiar. And they made things feel predictable.
But customer behaviour isn’t predictable. Not through proxies. Not in the way we’d like it to be as ecommerce teams. It’s dynamic, contextual and deeply individual.
And that’s the good news. Because once you stop relying on proxies, and start responding to predictions, everything sharpens. Personalisation becomes meaningful. Experiences become appropriate. And performance follows.
You can’t scale personalisation on proxies. But you can scale it by predicting intent.
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Made With Intent is an on-site intent engine for eCommerce businesses. It reads buying intent in real time and decides which experiences go to which visitors, and when.
Dynamic Yield is an experience optimization and personalization platform. It helps businesses tailor digital customer journeys across websites, mobile apps, and email.
This post explains where the two platforms work together, and where you'd still use Dynamic Yield instead.
If you can't wait until the end, here's a TLDR;
Pick Dynamic Yield if:
• Your priority is consistent personalisation across web, mobile app, email, and in-store kiosk
• You've got the team and budget to do a weeks long enterprise deployment
• Recommendation capabilities matters more than first-page view intent coverage.
Made With Intent is for you if:
• You want to read buying intent in real-time
◦ Then, serve the right content, the right experience at the appropriate moment
• Want to benefit from a 30-60 minute install time
And when we're thinking about Made With Intent and Dynamic Yield working together, here's how we recommend thinking about it:
Made With Intent decides what experiences you should serve, to who and when, and Dynamic Yield delivers those experiences.
How Made With Intent is different to Dynamic Yield
There's three things that Made With Intent does different to Dynamic Yield. Let's dig into them below:
1. Made With Intent reads intent in real time
Dynamic Yield's intent workflow utilises two routes. First, Empathic Personalization classifies visitors into four inferred states, which are Curious, Interested, Focused and Satisfied.
Its Audience Hub lets teams hand-build "low / medium / high intent" audiences from rules. Dynamic Yield's Primary Audiences framework shows a leading golf retailer defining low intent as fewer than 12 page views per session and high intent as more than 24.
That's a useful starting estimate, but page views aren't intent. A hesitant shopper racks up more pages than a decisive one. A high-intent visitor often converts inside three.
The more common version isn't pageview counts — it's event proxies. Add to cart equals high intent. Wishlist equals consideration. But an add to cart is as often a price check, a size comparison or a shipping-cost probe as it is a purchase signal. The event tells you what happened. It doesn't tell you what it meant.
Now, this is pretty fundamental: Dynamic Yield's model relies on behaviours your shoppers have already exhibited. It's a snapshot backwards in time, and like many what we call "rules-based" personalisation tools, you're reacting to things that have already have happened. Unlike Made With Intent.
We break downs shopper behaviour into six stages, and these are: Intent stage. Intent signals. Intent trends. Purchase confidence. Abandon risk. Shopper mindset.
All updated every three–five seconds during a live session, on a model trained across 150+ retailers and 50 billion+ events.
2. Allocation across hundreds of intent combinations and not post-test segmentation
It takes eCommerce teams considerable time to build and maintain audience rules in Dynamic Yield. For instance, coding things such as "low intent equals fewer than 12 page views, high intent equals more than 24," then QA-ing those cohorts and redesigning them after each test.
Made With Intent replaces that with continuous intent prediction and delivery. The model decides who sees what, in real time, across hundreds of intent combinations. The actual grunt work is handled by our agent. Your team focuses on strategy, creative, and proof.
Our agent retrains daily, so the experience keeps allocating toward the intent combinations where impact is actually felt. Always on, always learning, always improving on where it started.
3. First-pageview coverage — no fallback needed
Behavioural data takes time to accrue; for anonymous or first-time visitors, Dynamic Yield falls back to geo-based predictive targeting and contextual signals.
Made With Intent has no fallback by design. It doesn't need one. We've trained it across 50bn+ events, in a range of contexts, giving the model day-one predictive power on every visitor, anonymous, identified, first-time, returning.
Made With Intent and Dynamic Yield: In depth
There are lots of areas of cross-over between Made With Intent and Dynamic Yield. The way our technologies work is similar in principle, but different in its practical implementation.
Let's start first with how Dynamic Yield's prediction capabilities work:
Predictions update every 3–5 seconds during a live session; model retrains nightly
Training data
Per-merchant historical patterns
50bn+ events across 150+ retailers
Validation
DY-published — confident but not externally benchmarked
AUC ~0.83–0.84 on conversion/exit/return/add-to-cart heads, calibrated probabilities
While we're talking about AdaptML, we have to say, it's a really sophisticated bit of engineering. It utilises recurrent neural networks and NLP models to get smarter and smarter as it consume more data its got on a specific retailer's visitors.
However, it predicts what you'd expect (affinity and relevance), not what's happening in a visitor's decision right now.
Our model is a driven by a single purpose: it reads buying intent. Sure, it's a narrower job, but it's the one that determines whether a visitor converts, hesitates, or leaves.
Light: agentic campaigns reduce manual segmentation work after setup
Agentic campaigns
No agentic layer
Yes — strategy + tactics in, agent allocates dynamically
When you should pick Dynamic Yield
Hey, we're not here to blindly sell you Made With Intent. Sometimes, our tool just isn't right for your business. So, unlike loads of other SaaS vendors, let us tell you when we wouldn't be a good fit:
• If you're trying to do cross-channel, Dynamic Yield is the right choice versus Made With Intent. We're web-first, and for multi-channel personalisation programmes Dynamic Yield is the right option.
• Recommendations: NextML and AffinityML are purpose built models for product and content recommendations. Made With Intent adds an intent decison later but it is not a replacement for NextML or AffinityML.
• Sophisticated email personalisation: Klaviyo-grade dynamic content across email and ad placements out of the box. If email is a key part of what you do, Dynamic Yield is a top choice.
• Security of a big vendor: Dynamic Yield is an eight-time Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for personalisation engines. If you're enterprise org and need to run a formal RFP, this helps your procurement team make a decision.
• Strong experience builder. Sections, Page Contexts, and Selectors give users very fine control. But only after you've climbed the initial learning curve.
Where Made With Intent wins
Of course, this is an article designed to help you pick between Dynamic Yield and Made With Intent. From our table above, it's clear there's plenty of areas of overlap, but there's some stuff we do that, we don't mind saying, makes us a better choice. Have a read:
• Acts on the anonymous majority: Every visitor gets a multi-dimensional intent read from the first pageview. No prior data, no behavioural accrual, no geo fallback.
• Multi-dimensional intent prediction: The way we predict intent is comprehensive. We use six measures: stage, signals, trends, purchase confidence, abandon risk and shopper mindset. These are all updated every three-five seconds, unlike Dynamic Yield.
• Autonomously runs campaigns and makes decisions under directives:Agentic Campaigns can dynamically allocate experiences across hundreds of intent combinations during a campaign you'll run. Dynamic Yields's models are sophisticated. The targeting layer above them is still rule-driven. That's simply how the tool is built. But it means what experiences are served is decided before the campaign runs, and not during it.
• Cross-merchant model: 50 billion+ events across 150+ retailers. Day-one predictive power for our customers.
• Start within 30 minutes: Single 7kb GTM tag, no PII and we're ISO 27001 accredited.
So, it's time to make a decision: Let's pick one. Or both?
It's crunch time. We've given you all the facts, but it's time to wrap up and make a judgment call.
Pick Dynamic Yield if the you want consistent cross-channel personalisation — content and recommendations spanning web, mobile app, email, and kiosk. And if you have the technical resources to operate it.
Dynamic Yield's breadth and recommendation algorithm depth is class-leading, and trying to replicate the scale of that capability with Made With intent, plus some integrations would be a worse outcome for you.
Choose Made With Intent if you want a on-site decisioning, intent-driven experiences, and proven incrementality. Our tool delivers experiences natively, allocates them dynamically across hundreds of intent combinations, and proves causal lift on every one.
Now, something to think about. If you're an enterprise customer, you actually could consider both. And here's why:
• Dynamic Yield gives you the breadth and means of channels and mediums to serve personalised content to
• Made With Intent helps you accurately decide who, and when that content should be served
That's brought us to the end of the comparison blog post. If you're still unsure of the differences between Dynamic Yield and Made With Intent, the best thing for you to do is talk with one of our team.
Disclaimer: This comparison is based on publicly available information from Dynamic Yield's documentation, marketing site, and customer reviews as of April 2026. Both products evolve continuously. If anything looks out of date, get in touch and we'll sort it.
Your A/B testing programme just found a winner. A new discount banner lifted conversion by a healthy margin, the test ran long enough to be statistically significant, and the result is sitting in a dashboard somewhere with a green checkmark next to it. Mission accomplished, right?
For most eCommerce teams, the default answer is the same: roll it out to 100% of visitors.
That decision gets made without a second thought, because it doesn't feel like a decision at all. It feels like the natural conclusion of a successful test. You've gone and validated your hypothesis. And when you've got a winner, there's a paper trail to an uplift.
It isn't. It's a choice, and for most brands it's the wrong one.
A/B testing tells you which experience wins across your traffic as a whole. It doesn't tell you which specific visitor should see that winner, or when. That's a different question, that's answered in an entirely different way. It's a decision that requires you needing to know something about the person you're serving an experience to in the first place.
Let's be clear — A/B testing definitely has a place
A/B testing tools do exactly what they're built to do, and they do it well. They replace opinion with evidence. A test that runs to statistical significance tells you, with confidence, that variant B outperforms variant A on your website or mobile app.
Made With Intent customers continue to use tools like Convert, VWO, and AB Tasty alongside our tool, because testing answers a question nothing else can: does this specific change move the number we care about?
Think about what a test actually proves. It proves that, across hundreds or thousands of visitors, variant B beat variant A. It says nothing about any single visitor in front of you right now. Statistical significance is for large volumes of people not a prediction about the individual standing at your checkout, which is a limitation CRO metrics share more broadly.
The difference between A/B testing tools and Made With Intent
AB Testing Tools
Made With Intent
Primary job
Find what works
Deploys experiences intelligently
When decisions are made
At page load
Throughout the session in real time
Who sees the experience
Everyone (or a broad segment)
The right person, at the right moment
What it responds to
Aggregate performance data
Individual behaviour signals
What it optimises for
Statistical significance
Commercial goals per individual
Should 100% of people get your A/B test winner?
Once a test determines a winner, most teams roll that experience out broadly, often to every visitor who fits the original test's targeting. Many testing tools do offer segment targeting: device type, geography, new versus returning.
Some brands go further and layer in basic rules, like showing a winning banner only after 30 seconds on site, or only to visitors on their third page view. These rules feel like personalisation. They're really just a slightly more granular version of the same default: a fixed condition, checked once, applied broadly.
But look closely at how it gets set up. Teams choose segments once, at test design time, and then leave them alone. Even a well-built intent-based segmentation programme needs continuous application, not just at launch, or it drifts back into the same static-rule problem.
A rule that says "show this to returning visitors" doesn't change three minutes later when a returning visitor starts behaving like someone about to abandon their basket, or like someone who was going to buy anyway with or without an incentive.
The real problem is narrower and more difficult to solve. The targeting decision is frozen at the moment the test launches, while the person in front of it keeps changing their mind. (Their intent)
A discount that lifts conversion in aggregate can still be the wrong call for two specific people in your test group. A first-time visitor who's price-sensitive and hesitating needs it. A loyal customer who's already three products deep into checkout, on their fourth order this year, does not.
How reading intent allows you to respond immediately to changing demands
A/B testing tools make their decision once, when the page loads or the session starts. Whatever segment a visitor falls into at that moment determines what they see for the rest of that test.
But purchase intent isn't fixed at page load. A visitor can arrive browsing casually, spend four minutes comparing two products, add one to their basket, then hesitate at the price for 30 seconds before starting to type a discount code into Google in another tab. That's not a static segment. That's a person, moving in real time, and most testing infrastructure was never built to react to this situation as it unfolds.
Some testing and CRO tools react to single behavioural triggers: an exit-intent popup fired on mouse movement toward the browser bar, a scroll-based banner, a basic engagement score. We think those are great, and definitely worth using. However, they're single-trigger rules, checked once a condition is met, and not a continuous read on a person as they use your website and apps.
What real-time behavioural data adds
Made With Intent's platform tracks over 900+ behavioural signals through each visitor's session, including scroll speed, click sequences, time spent, and product comparison patterns, updating its prediction of purchase intent continuously rather than once. When intent shifts, the response can shift with it.
None of this means every session tells a dramatic story. Plenty of visitors browse, leave, and never come close to converting in that session, and no amount of real-time signal turns a casual browser into a buyer. The claim isn't that every visitor is secretly ready to buy. It's that the visitors who are ready look different from the ones who aren't, and a rule set once at test launch can't tell the difference between them three minutes into the session.
What real-time intent-based deployment looks like
Picture the same winning discount from earlier. Instead of firing it to every visitor who matches a fixed segment, an intent-based system asks a narrower question: Is this specific visitor showing signals of hesitation or exit risk right now, or are they already moving smoothly toward checkout?
Made With Intent's Intent Scoring analyses those signals continuously and its Timing Engine decides the moment to act, rather than firing on a page-load rule or a fixed timer. A hesitant first-time visitor comparing prices across tabs might see the discount. A returning customer already at the payment page, showing no hesitation signals at all, doesn't need it, and doesn't get it. This is what discounting with intent looks like in practice: the same offer, reserved for the visitors who actually need it to convert.
The winning experience from your test doesn't change. Who receives it, and when, does.
Take a product page test that proved a scarcity message ("only 3 left") increased add-to-basket rate. Fired at everyone, it also lands on a loyal customer who's bought the same product line four times before and knows exactly what they want. To that visitor, it reads as pressure, not information. Deployed by intent, the same message is reserved for the visitors actually showing comparison and hesitation behaviour, the ones it was designed to nudge in the first place.
How an actual company used Made With Intent alongside A/B testing
Appliances Direct, a UK home appliances retailer, ran into a version of this problem. Their discounting was broad and largely untargeted; offers went out early in the visitor journey, without real-time context, regardless of whether a given shopper actually needed the incentive to convert.
Using Made With Intent, they began reserving discounts for visitors showing genuine exit and abandonment signals, rather than firing them to everyone who matched a static segment. They left everyone else to convert at full price, as they were always going to.
In the end, they made a 42% saving in margin previously given away to visitors who would have converted regardless, without a drop in conversions from the visitors who needed the discount to purchase.
But don't take our word for it. Take a look at our Appliances Direct case study and make up your mind yourself.
That figure lines up with a broader pattern. Made With Intent's own Intent Gap research found that 83% of shoppers have used a discount code despite being ready to pay full price.
Why new test winners are rare
That scarcity of new winners isn't unique to Appliances Direct. Research from Microsoft's own experimentation team, drawn from thousands of controlled experiments at Bing and elsewhere, found that only 10 to 20% of test ideas move the metric they were designed to move, and that a genuine breakthrough, the kind of result that reshapes a programme rather than nudging it, shows up in roughly one in 500 experiments. The findings come from Kohavi et al.'s Seven Rules of Thumb for Web Site Experimenters (2014). Most of what a mature testing programme finds after the early wins are used up is small, single-digit-percentage gains, not new step changes.
Testing tells you what works. Intent tells you for whom, right now.
None of this is an argument against testing. It's an argument for finishing the job testing starts.
Your A/B testing programme answers one question well: does this experience outperform the alternative? What it was never built to answer is a second, quieter question that gets decided by default instead of by design: who should see this winning experience, and at what moment in their session?
Testing finds your best experience. Making sure it reaches the right person, at the right moment, without giving away margin to people who didn't need it, is a different problem, and it needs a different kind of data to solve.
If you want to see what your existing winning experiences would look like deployed by real-time intent instead of a blanket rule, book a demo and we'll walk through it against your own traffic.
Made With Intent is an on-site decision engine for eCommerce businesses. It reads people's buying intent in real time and allocates experiences to the visitors most likely to respond to them
Optimizely is a digital experience platform. It does web and feature experimentation, rule-based personalisation, content recommendations. It's designed for teams running structured test-and-learn programmes at scale.
This blog post explains where the two platforms complement each other and when you would use both versus just one on its own. But if you're too impatient to read to the end, we've got you:
Made With Intent and Optimizely serve different functions. Optimizely handles experimentation and rule-based personalisation.
Made With Intent reads visitor intent in real time and decides who sees an experience and when. The two work really well together:
Optimizely executes what, Made with Intent decides who and when. We serve your Optimizely experiences when it matters (the right time within their session) and to whom, all based on what really matters; their intent.
How Made With Intent is different to Optimizely
1. Respond to users in real-time with experiences tailored to what their digital body language tells you
Optimizely's strongest targeting comes from rule-based audiences in Web Experimentation and Personalization, boolean logic on geo, device, behavioural events, URL targeting, and page Tags, plus optional machine learning (ML) layers:
Adaptive Audiences (interest categories inferred from content engagement)
Content Recommendations (NLP-driven topic affinity per visitor)
Optimizely Data Platform (ODP) real-time audiences
The Stats Engine inside experiments is genuinely best-in-class — sequential testing with always-valid p-values — but the targeting decision still asks the marketer to define which audience rule a visitor fits into.
Made With Intent flips the model. It reads buying intent in real-time from the first pageview. Stage, signals, trends, purchase confidence, abandon risk, shopper mindset, and re-scores every three-five seconds.
Targeting is driven by what's happening now, in real-time, by a human, not by which rule-defined audience or topic interest a visitor has been mapped into. Nor by behaviour that's already happened. This means you can respond to the signals that sit between events and pageviews; what we call moments that matter.
2. Segment the right experience to your customers automatically, without fiddling with rule trees manually
Your team currently builds and maintains audiences in Optimizely's Audience Builder, Dynamic Customer Profiles, Adaptive Audiences, and ODP. All with decision rule trees, content-tagging taxonomies, attribute conditions, event conditions.
Even with contextual bandits reallocating traffic within a defined audience, the audience definition itself stays manual: design the rules, QA the segments, redesign as the catalogue and content evolve. These segments are website-attributes, too. Not human attributes, not intent based (the most human of all attributes). That's where personalisation really succeeds.
Made With Intent replaces all of the above with continuous intent prediction and delivery.
Our agent decides who sees what, in real time, across hundreds of intent combinations. You'll focus on strategy, creative and proof, instead of tweaking and analysing rules or segments all the time.
The agent retrains daily, which means the experience compounds toward intent combinations where impact is seen and felt. In an always on state, always learning, always getting better.
Where Optimizely's multi-armed bandits (if used) allocate traffic across the variants of a single experiment to maximise one fixed metric within one defined audience, Made With Intent allocates across hundreds of audiences (intent combinations) — adding the layer of to whom and when an experience should be served, and measuring it against a holdback rather than just exploiting the winner.
Made With Intent and Optimizely: In depth
Here is how the two platforms compare on the things that matter most for eCommerce teams:
Dimension
Optimizely
Made With Intent
Core job
DXP suite — web and feature experimentation, rule-based personalisation, content recommendations, ODP, plus CMS/Commerce in the wider platform.
Audience Builder (boolean logic on attributes/events/Tags), Adaptive Audiences (content-interest categories), ODP real-time audiences (~2 min pipeline latency).
Live multi-dimensional intent read per visitor — stage, signals, trends, purchase confidence, abandon risk, shopper mindset. Updates every 3–5 seconds.
How fast it responds
Stats Engine and contextual bandits reallocate within a single experiment — optimising one fixed primary metric, from a 100% exploration cold start, across pre-declared attributes. ODP audience pipeline ~2 min. Personalization works once an audience rule matches.
Continuous re-scoring every 3–5 seconds during a live session. No audience-rule prerequisite — model is cross-merchant trained on 50bn+ events.
How it measures impact
Stats Engine: sequential testing with always-valid p-values, mSPRT, FDR control, CUPED, guardrail metrics. Holdout groups supported but positioned as a feature, not a default.
Bayesian A/B with a holdback group on every experience by default. Reports incremental orders/revenue against a true no-intervention baseline.
Platform reach
Web (JS snippet), server-side (19+ language SDKs), mobile apps, Edge Workers, CMS-native (CMS 13).
Web only. Platform-agnostic via a single 7kb GTM tag. No PII. ISO 27001.
Team workload to run it
Steep learning curve per G2; “basic” visual editor, code editing in IDE then paste-back. Personalisation layered on Experimentation is repeatedly flagged as complex.
Light. 30–60 minute GTM install. Agentic campaigns reduce manual segmentation work after setup.
Where does Made With Intent integrate with Optimizely?
We've broken this section down into three parts. We want to be honest about where you'll gain functionality by utilising Made With Intent with Optimizely, where we augment it, and things we simply don't do, or Optimizely does better.
How Made With Intent adds new functionality to Optimizely
Understand and act on every visitor (including anonymous) from the first pageview. Optimizely's Personalization is rule-driven. It works once a visitor matches an audience rule. Content Recommendations builds a per-visitor interest profile from content engagement, which strengthens as the session progresses.
Made With Intent's model, which collates 50bn+ monthly events across 150+ retailers, reads continuous intent from pageview one, every few seconds. Anonymous, identified, first-time, returning. The opening moments of a session get the same intent read as the tenth pageview.
Automatically identify and serve the best experiences to people without guessing. Optimizely's contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB, powered by Opal) is the closest thing in their stack, and it's genuinely good, so it's worth being precise about what it does.
A CMAB picks the best-performing variation for each visitor based on context (device, geo, behavioural history) to maximise one primary metric, within a single experiment.
Three design choices define it: the context attributes are declared up front and can't be added or removed once it starts (even paused); it optimises exclusively to a single primary metric fixed at launch; and it begins with a 100% exploration phase, randomly serving variations until it has gathered enough data before it shifts to exploiting the winner.
It's a smarter way to split traffic across the variations you built for the audience you defined.
But we'd like to go into detail on what that context is.
Device, geo and behavioural history are proxies for a person. They describe who a visitor appears to be, not what they want or how close they are to buying. They're arbitrary website attributes that correlate with conversion only loosely, and a bandit optimising over them is tuning against a weak signal.
Intent — buying stage, momentum, hesitation, purchase confidence — is the proximate driver of what a visitor actually does next. The proxies describe identity; intent describes decision, and decision is what moves the metric. Optimising the allocation over the wrong variable caps how much a CMAB can ever find.
Rather than splitting traffic across the variations of one experiment to maximise one metric, it allocates across hundreds of intent combinations.
Diamonds Factory, a Made With Intent customer, ran 560+ on a single abandonment use case, where the 'context' is live, multi-dimensional intent (stage, signal, trend, purchase confidence, abandon risk, mindset) that updates every 3–5 seconds and is discovered by the agent, not enumerated by the team upfront. Learn more about basket abandonment here.
There's no per-experiment exploration tax, because the model is trained across 50bn+ events, 150+ retailers and live from page view one.
And because a bandit is built to shift traffic toward winners, it has no standing no-treatment baseline — Made With Intent keeps a holdback on every experience, so it can answer "did this cause incremental orders," the question a metric-maximising bandit structurally can't.
Causal incrementality on every experience. Optimizely's Stats Engine reports variant lift with always-valid p-values; genuinely strong for variant comparison.
Made With Intent runs a holdback group on every experience by default and reports incremental orders against a no-intervention baseline.
The difference is between "variant A beat variant B" and "this experience caused X orders that wouldn't have happened otherwise."
Where Made With Intent improves Optimizely
These are things Optimizely does that get better with Made With Intent on top:
Audience Builder and ODP audiences become intent-aware Instead of boolean rules on attributes and events, or content-engagement interest categories, Optimizely audiences can take Made With Intent's live intent attributes and target on signals that actually predict conversion. ODP's segment builder picks these up as attribute conditions; Web Experimentation picks them up as Tags.
Personalization variants get the right routing Made With Intent decides which Optimizely-created variant a visitor should see based on their current intent state, replacing rule-based audience routing. The marketer keeps the variant production; our agent handles the allocation.
Web Experimentation tests get causal lift on top of variant performance. Run Optimizely tests with Stats Engine as you do today. Add Made With Intent's holdback measurement on the experience itself to answer "would users have purchased regardless of any variant?"
Content Recommendations recommend to live intent, not just topic affinity. Made With Intent lets Content Recommendations reflect what's happening in this session, not just historical topic engagement. Particularly useful for anonymous visitors where you’re not sure what their behaviour is telling you.
What Made With Intent doesn't do
Feature flagging and server-side experimentation. Optimizely Feature Experimentation (SDKs in 19+ languages, Edge Workers, Agent microservice) is a category leader. We don’t offer anything here.
Sequential testing methodology for variant comparison. The Stats Engine's mSPRT-based always-valid p-values are best-in-class for inferring variant winners under continuous monitoring. Made With Intent uses Bayesian A/B with holdback.
CMS-native content personalisation across the wider DXP. Optimizely Content Cloud, Content Marketing Platform and the broader DXP integration are all things that are not within Made With Intent's scope.
Made With Intent isn’t going to change your recommendations process Optimizely's NLP-driven content recommendations and ecommerce product recommendations are well-established. Made With Intent adds an intent layer; we don’t replace what’s powering your recommendations process.
Mobile app personalisation. Optimizely Feature Experimentation has native SDKs for iOS, Android, React Native. Made With Intent is web-first.
Edge experimentation. Optimizely's Edge Worker integrations (Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly) sit outside Made With Intent's use case
How to get started with Optimizely and Made With Intent
Use Made With Intent to create intent-ready audiences in Optimizely: Pass Made With Intent's live intent attributes — purchase confidence, abandon risk, buying stage, intent trend — into ODP as attribute conditions, or into Web Experimentation as Tags.
Build audiences like "high purchase confidence + declining intent trend" (needs reassurance), "medium confidence + high abandon risk" (needs timely intervention), "low confidence + active comparison signals" (needs guidance, not a discount).
Execute experiences in Optimizely using those audiences. Use Web Experimentation and Personalization for what they do well, so things like variant production, Stats Engine analysis, content variations across the DXP.
Serve the experience (or a variant) through Made With Intent's decision agent, where the experience is served based on visitor intent rather than rule-defined audiences.
Use Made With Intent to prove the incrementality of "Optimizely + intent". Holdback groups on top of the Optimizely experience answer the CFO question: did this cause incremental orders, or did we just personalise for visitors who would have bought anyway? Particularly valuable for discounting — Made With Intent surfaces which high-intent visitors needed no incentive.
Neve Jewels Group, the luxury jewellery brands Austen Blake and Sacet, moved from universal promotions to intent-level targeting across their basket abandonment strategy.
Rather than applying the same discount to every abandoning visitor, Made With Intent segmented interventions across four intent levels, targeting what Director of Customer Experience Jo Homer described as "the nudge moment."
The result: 13% conversion uplift on basket abandonment, and £2.4m in annual revenue uplift overall, 4.8x the original business case, paid back within a single experience. You can learn more here.
What sort of businesses work best with Made With Intent?
This all depends on the size and structure of your eCommerce operation.
Mid-market retailers (£20m–£100m online revenue)
Made With Intent often leads here. Optimizely's Intelligence Cloud commonly lands at £50–80k+/year for this band, based on G2 reviews and procurement data. Made With Intent's session-based pricing, 30 to 60 minute install, and agentic layer fit eCommerce teams of two to ten people who need to ship and prove things quickly.
If you are running Optimizely for the Stats Engine and feature experimentation and those are load-bearing, keep them. Add Made With Intent for intent targeting and causal measurement of your on-site experiences.
Enterprise retailers with dedicated personalisation teams
Both, with clear role separation. Optimizely for the experimentation surface, Stats Engine credibility, server-side feature flagging, and DXP integration. Made With Intent for on-site intent-driven decisioning and causal measurement.
Try Made With Intent today
There you have it. Made With Intent and Optimizely are designed to complement one-another, not compete with one another. Many of our clients use Optimizely to continue A/B testing, while using Made With Intent to serve experience to customers on a 1:1 basis.
If you're interested in learning more about how Made With Intent works, and how you can use it in your tool stack, book a demo here.
Disclaimer:This comparison is based on publicly available information from Optimizely's documentation, marketing site, and customer reviews as of July 2026. Both products evolve continuously. If anything looks out of date, get in touch.
July 28, 2026
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