Multiple experience audiences in an A/B Test

February 4, 2025

Topics:
A/B Tests

You can target versions of the same experience to different audiences in Adobe Target A/B activities. You can set up multiple audiences for an experience in the Visual Experience Composer (VEC) or in the Form-Based Experience Composer.

Visitors can switch between experience audiences as their profile changes. Visitors are not stuck in the same experience for the activity’s lifetime.

For example, if your site uses a consistent design across pages or products and you want to use the same experience for multiple audiences (such as visitors with different browser languages), you can set up multiple versions of the experience. You might present the same experience to English and Japanese speakers, with the only difference being that the text is presented in the visitor’s language. Data is collected for the experience, regardless of language, so the report shows the performance of the experience, rather than the version.

Without the ability to set up experience versions, you would have to set up different tests for each language (in this example), then manually aggregate the results to try to get an idea how a single experience with both languages might perform. This produces less accurate results. For some tests, these calculations might not even be useful because of the way visitors are randomized.

By creating different versions of an experience, you receive more accurate information without the need for manual calculations and assumptions.

Scenario

You are testing two experiences, a geo-targeted banner versus a generic banner. The banner for each geography needs to be different, but the overall test is to determine whether geo-targeting is better than showing generic content. If you set up a separate experience for each location, you would actually be measuring how each geo performs against the other, rather than whether geo-targeting helps meet your success goals when measured against the generic banner.

In this case, what you need are geo-specific versions of the experience, so you can test the geo-targeted experience against a non-geo-targeted control.

Create an A/B activity as you normally would.

When configuring the experience that will have multiple versions, select the audience for each version, as shown in the following steps.
Select the experience, then click Configure > Multiple Audiences.
Click the Add Audience icon ( ) in the Experience Audiences pane, then select the first audience you want to target. Repeat for each audience.

If the audience does not yet exist, click Create Audience and set it up.

If a visitor qualifies for more than one audience, the content for all audiences is returned, with the last one in the list actually rendering on the page.
Continue setting up the activity.

Best Practices

Choose mutually exclusive audiences. If the activity was created in the VEC, if a visitor matches more than one audience, the content for each audience is returned, with the content for the audience listed last displaying on the page.
Activity-entry audiences defined in the diagram are combined with the experience audiences using an AND condition. To enter the activity, a visitor must qualify for the activity audience, and one of the experience audiences.
Add the same audiences as segments for reports. This helps you look at the test results at the high level of experience A versus B, and at the lower level of experience A versus B for just “browser lang ja_JP.” This works only for Target-based reports, not Analytics-based reports.

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