What Is Dynamic Yield? Mastercard's Personalization Engine
By Joris van Huët · Dynamic Yield's own site
The short answer: if you want recommendations, A/B tests and triggered emails from one vendor on an ecommerce site with a developer to spare, Dynamic Yield is the enterprise option, and Mastercard sells it: dynamicyield.com redirects to a Mastercard page, no price is published, and every button leads to a sales call (Dynamic Yield page, checked on 5 November 2026). Mastercard closed its purchase from McDonald's on 4 April 2022, when the product served more than 400 brands (Mastercard release).
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What to settle before the sales call:
- Size the holdout yourself. Every experience starts with its control group at 0%, and the vendor calls 5 to 15% usually enough (traffic allocation guide). For example, on 300,000 monthly users a 10% control is 300,000 x 0.1 = 30,000 people who see the plain site.
- Count the developer steps you have covered. Feed, page context, event tracking and user management are developer work in the implementation journey.
- Choose the metric per page. The primary metric decides each test, and for a product page the vendor advises add to cart over revenue (primary metric guide).
What Experience OS covers
The platform is Experience OS, with Shopping Muse for conversational product discovery and Experience APIs for server-side use sold beside it; the capability list runs segmentation, targeting, recommendations, journey orchestration, search, optimization and AI (Dynamic Yield page). A campaign holds up to 20 experiences, each with targeting and variations served by A/B test, by dynamic allocation, a bandit, or by user affinity (campaign overview, dynamic allocation guide). Recommendation algorithms run from Purchased Together to NextML, a deep learning model (strategies guide).
Triggers sit in the Reconnect app: email, SMS, web and app push fired by an offline purchase, a price drop or a week of silence (journey orchestration page). Since 29 July 2026 every customer also has five named AI agents, with the marketer approving what goes live (agents announcement).
Who it fits, and who it does not
A retailer, travel brand or bank with a catalogue, an event stream and developers on call. A .eu console keeps its data in AWS Frankfurt, a .com console in North Virginia (Experience APIs guide). It does not fit a site that wants a price on the page or a trial, and Predictive Targeting reports audience opportunities only after a test has run for more than 14 days (Predictive Targeting guide).
What it costs
Nothing is published; the Dynamic Yield page and each product page end in Contact sales or Book a demo (Dynamic Yield page, checked on 5 November 2026). Implementation is sold with the licence: the customer success page lists a dedicated onboarding manager, a 10-day accelerated onboarding plan, program bundles delivered in three months and more than 50 solutions partners for the agency question.
The control group ships at 0%, so an experience measured the way it arrives shows uplift against nobody (traffic allocation guide); every purchase inside the experience is then credited to personalization, and only the holdout you set yourself can take that credit away.
How it compares
Optimizely. Now an AI platform for marketing teams with an agentic CMS and agentic experimentation, and no price on its homepage either (Optimizely). Choose it when CMS and testing should share a vendor.
Bloomreach. Bloomreach runs Loomi AI across email, SMS, web personalization, search, recommendations, A/B testing and a CMS.
Insider. Now Insider One, with Agent One across web, email, WhatsApp, push, SMS and site search.
Nosto. Nosto lists Shopify, Shopify Plus, Shopware, Adobe Commerce and BigCommerce among its platforms. A mid-sized Shopify store lands here before a Mastercard sales call.
OptiMonk. The low end: free to 10,000 pageviews a month, then Essential at $19 a month billed yearly or from $29 monthly, with A/B testing on every plan (OptiMonk pricing, checked on 5 November 2026).
Getting started
How to use Dynamic Yield runs a recommendation test on product pages with a holdout.
FAQ
Is Dynamic Yield part of Mastercard?
Yes. The acquisition from McDonald's closed on 4 April 2022, and the product now lives on mastercard.com as Mastercard Dynamic Yield (release).
What are triggers in Dynamic Yield?
Behaviour-fired messages: Reconnect sends email, SMS, web and app push after an offline purchase, a price drop or a lapse in activity (journey orchestration page).
Does it need a developer?
For the first campaign, yes: feed sync, page context, events and cookies are developer steps in the implementation journey.
A senior operator doing the work: campaigns, channels, CRM and AI agents, live from day one.
With Joris van Huët, interim and fractional CMO in Utrecht. From EUR 5,000 a month, monthly cycles, a 30-day exit.