Sitecore Personalize: Difference between "Experiences" and "Experiments"

December 7, 2021 Rodrigo Peplau 0

Recently I’ve had the privilege to go through the CDP/Personalize Partner Enablement Training, a single-week program with lots of interesting hands-on Labs.

During the exercises, there was a lot of confusion between two functionalities with similar names:

• ExperiENCES

• ExperiMENTS

Not only the names are similar: some sub-items are also named identical, worsening the confusion. In fact, some people created things under “ExperiMENTS” that were supposed to be under “ExperiENCES“, and vice-versa.

After all that confusion, it was a matter of time to hear some criticism about this UX…

Not sure if the CDP/Personalize team is planning to change those names in the future… but just in case, let’s understand the differences between the two.

 

ExperiENCES

Experiences are content variations that can be offered to different audiences in multiple ways, and their performance can be monitored.

For those who are familiar with Sitecore XP, ExperiENCES can be compared with Personalization.

There are three types of Experiences:

• Web - Experiences that can be added to website pages. They will normally consist of a visual experience, such as a modal window or a sidebar. Variations can be created based on pre-existing templates, or from scratch.
  

  Web Templates that can be used to create Experiences

• Full Stack – API-driven experiences, that can be either Triggered or Interactive:
  1. Triggered – Experiences that will occur when there is a change to data, some event is raised, or some specific conditions are met;
  2. Interactive – Experiences powered by APIs to serve dynamic data for best server-side personalization.

 

• Flows – Show Offers across multiple channels

 

ExperiMENTS

Experiences that consist in A/B Tests, capable to display multiple variations to the public, and determine which one is working best.

For those familiar with Sitecore XP, ExperiMENTS can be compared to Multivariate (MV) Tests.

There are two types of Experiences:

• Web - A/B tests that will be executed on your website;
• Full Stack – API-driven A/B tests. Similarly to Full Stack Experiences, they can also be Triggered or Interactive.

 

Categories: CDP/Personalize