Key takeaways

In this module, you learned how to:

• Experience Targeting (XT) delivers a specific experience to a specific audience — it is not a competition. Unlike an A/B test, where the same audience is randomly split to find the best performer, an XT activity pairs each audience with one dedicated experience. If you qualify for that audience, you get that experience — full stop. There is no random assignment and no winner to be determined; the goal is simply to serve the right content to the right people.
• The typical workflow is: A/B test first, then Experience Targeting to implement the winner. A/B tests are used to discover which experience resonates best with which audience. Once a winner is identified, an Experience Targeting activity is the mechanism for actively delivering that winning experience to the right audience on an ongoing basis. Organizations also use XT as a temporary holding pattern while waiting for IT to make a winning experience the permanent default.
• Target evaluates experiences in the XT activity from top to bottom — order matters. When a visitor arrives, Target checks the first experience's audience criteria. If the visitor qualifies, they get that experience. If not, it moves down to the next, and so on. This means more specific, targeted audiences should sit at the top of the list, and broader catch-all audiences should be placed at the bottom — otherwise, a broad audience at the top will intercept visitors before they reach the more specific experience they were intended for.
• The VEC looks different in an XT activity — audiences are visible alongside each experience. In an A/B test, the left rail shows only experience names. In an XT activity, each experience is visibly paired with its audience in the rail, making the 1-to-1 relationship explicit. You can also drag and reorder experiences directly in this view to adjust the cascading evaluation order.
• Mutually exclusive audiences are strongly recommended to ensure predictable, reliable results. If two experiences have overlapping audiences, a visitor who qualifies for both will be placed in whichever experience appears first in the cascading order — which may not be the intended one. On a return visit, if session or context changes cause that visitor to qualify differently, they could land in a different experience, creating an inconsistent user journey and muddying the report data.