How Optimizely’s Data Platform Powers Smarter Marketing

If you've read the first few posts in this blog series, like Connecting the Dots: Experimentation, Personalization, and the Real Power of Optimizely, Why You Shouldn’t Sleep on Optimizely’s Content Intelligence, Why Experimentation Isn’t Just for A/B Testing Anymore, or the Sesame Street post about simplifying experimentation, you know I’m on a mission to demystify how Optimizely’s suite of products work together.

Today, I want to focus on a part of the Optimizely ecosystem that might not seem flashy but is foundational: the Optimizely Data Platform (ODP).

If you’re trying to connect your data, understand your customers, and deliver more personalized, relevant experiences, this is where you should start.

What Is a CDP and Why Should You Care?

Let’s begin with some basics. A customer data platform (CDP) brings together all your customer data from different systems and interactions, creating a single view of each person.

It solves a fundamental problem: your data is everywhere. It lives in your email tool, your web analytics, your customer relationship manager (CRM), your commerce platform, and so on. Without a central engine, those touchpoints stay disconnected.

A CDP ingests data across these platforms, resolves identities, and activates those profiles in real time. It helps you:

• Unify online and offline data
• Build segments based on behavior, purchases, or predictive attributes
• Trigger personalized messages and experiences
• Make data available across marketing tools, experimentation platforms, and personalization engines

So, What Makes ODP Different?

Optimizely’s Data Platform stands out because it focuses not just on data collection, but on orchestration and activation.

Where some CDPs feel like data vaults, ODP is an engine designed to move that data where it needs to go, fast. It’s:

• Built for marketing and product teams
• User-friendly, with drag-and-drop segmentation
• Natively integrated with Optimizely Web and Feature Experimentation, Content Management, and Opal
• Real-time, behavior-driven, and flexible enough to match your tech stack

ODP is flexible enough to support a wide range of industries, from media to healthcare to education, but it shines especially bright for organizations with a commerce lens, particularly B2C brands. If you have a clear view of customer lifetime value or recurring purchase behavior, the ability to activate real-time segments, personalize journeys, and measure downstream outcomes becomes even more powerful. Whether you're managing a storefront, subscription service, or loyalty program, ODP makes it seamless and scalable to turn customer insights into action.

That said, it’s important to understand where ODP fits within your broader data and decision-making ecosystem. While it excels at unifying data and orchestrating activation across tools, ODP is not a full business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform. For detailed dashboards or performing long-tail performance analysis, you should pair ODP with a tool like Optimizely Analytics, which is built for reporting, insight, and exploration.

In other words, if Optimizely Analytics helps you understand what happened and why, ODP helps you decide what to do next. It’s the connective tissue between your raw data and the real-time actions you take, powering smarter campaigns, more relevant personalization, and targeted experimentation across the customer lifecycle. When it comes to making data truly usable and actionable across your marketing stack, this is where ODP delivers the most impact.

Real-Time Audience Targeting Without the Headaches

One of ODP’s best features is its segmentation engine. Unlike older systems that require custom queries or IT support, ODP lets marketers create dynamic audiences based on:

• Site behavior
• Email interactions
• Transaction history
• Predicted churn or conversion likelihood
• Content interest clusters (more on this in a moment)

Need to create a segment of high-value users who browsed your headless CMS content but haven’t purchased in 30 days? Done in minutes.

And these segments aren’t just for show. You can activate them across platforms like:

• Braze, Iterable, or Klaviyo for campaigns
• Google and Facebook for retargeting
• Optimizely Web for A/B tests and personalization
• Email newsletters, loyalty flows, and more

These aren’t static lists either. They update in real time, so as behavior changes, your marketing stays relevant.

Unifying Profiles: From Anonymous Browsing to Personalized Engagement

ODP builds rich customer profiles from the moment a user interacts with your brand, even before they convert.

It collects every click, scroll, and purchase and begins to build an identity. Whether someone is reading blog content, watching a video, or adding items to their cart, ODP tracks that activity and enriches the user profile.

Once identity resolution kicks in, say a user signs up for email or logs into their account, ODP stitches together anonymous and known interactions.

These profiles include:

• Behavioral history
• Content topic engagement
• Channel preferences
• Predictive scores

If you’ve read my breakdown of Opal, Optimizely’s AI engine, you’ll know these profiles get even more powerful when layered with AI-driven predictions. Opal can suggest next-best actions or personalized experiences based on this underlying data, making your marketing smarter with less manual work.

The Data Layer That Powers Personalization and Experimentation

What makes ODP so effective is how seamlessly it connects to other tools in the Optimizely ecosystem.

For example:

• You can push interest-based segments from Content Intelligence into ODP and activate them across campaigns.
• You can take those same segments and run dynamic experiments, A/B tests, and personalization campaigns using Optimizely Web Experimentation.

You can pass enriched user traits into your product recommendation engine, email campaigns, or landing pages.

This tight integration turns ODP from just a CDP into a decision-making engine. You’re not just gathering data, you’re using it to deliver the right message, to the right user, in the right context.

Honest Take: ODP Isn’t for Deep Analytics (and That’s Okay)

While ODP does offer some reporting features, such as tracking conversions, user journeys, and behavior flows, it’s not built to replace GA4, Mixpanel, or even Optimizely Analytics.

That’s actually by design. ODP is about activation and orchestration, not dashboards or BI analysis. It helps you move faster with data and orchestrate experiences across channels.

If you want to analyze what content themes are working or explore historical performance over time, pair ODP with Optimizely Analytics. That combination gives you both insight and action.

A Recap of What ODP Brings to the Table

ODP delivers real value when:

• You want to create and activate audiences based on live behavior
• You need unified profiles across multiple channels and systems
• You’re personalizing digital experiences, not just email blasts
• You’re testing hypotheses and need to target specific segments for experimentation
• You’re building a long-term view of your customers for lifecycle marketing

If your goal is to run better campaigns, design smarter experiences, and fuel relevant experimentation, ODP is a perfect launchpad.

And if you’re layering in tools like Opal or Optimizely’s content and experimentation tools, you’ll find the performance curve starts to steepen fast.

Why Your Data Model Matters More Than You Think

Before you start activating campaigns or building segments in ODP, there’s one foundational step that often gets overlooked: your data model.

It’s easy to start with just web or email data, especially early on, but ODP is built to grow with you. It can ingest and unify data from your commerce platform, CRM, offline systems, and more. The real power shows up when those sources connect under a thoughtful structure.

That’s why it’s important to define how customer traits, events, and attributes are organized. Without it, you risk duplicated data, fragmented profiles, and limited targeting later.

At Velir and Brooklyn Data, this is the kind of work we love to help clients with. Building a scalable, flexible data model isn’t just a technical task; it’s strategic, and it’s in our DNA. It doesn’t need to be perfect on day one, but thinking through the structure early will save you time, avoid rework, and unlock ODP’s full potential as you scale.

Data is Only Useful When It Moves

The power of ODP isn’t just in the data it collects; it’s in what you can do with it.

If you’re already using Optimizely CMS or Experimentation and want to unlock true 1:1 personalization, ODP is your bridge.

If you’re working toward a world where your website adapts to interest, your emails reflect behavior, and your experiments are powered by actual customer segments, ODP is the foundation.

And if you’re looking to simplify the complexity of modern marketing, tools like Opal and ODP make a great duo.

Want to learn more about how this could work for your team? Velir can help you connect the pieces. Whether you’re just exploring CDPs or ready to scale your personalization and experimentation efforts, contact us. We’re here to guide the way.