How do Ninetailed experiences and variants map onto Croct's model?
I am rebuilding what our team had in Ninetailed on Contentful, and before I touch anything I want a clean one-to-one mapping of the concepts so I can plan the work instead of discovering the differences mid-rebuild.
Specifically: how do Ninetailed's experiences and variants translate into Croct's experiences and slots? If someone can lay out which concept becomes which, I can size the rebuild properly.
2 answers
The mapping is close enough that planning is straightforward. In Croct an experience defines three things: who (the audience), where (the slot), and what (the content for that audience). That covers the targeting-plus-content part of a Ninetailed experience directly.
The variant/experiment part is separate but attaches to the experience: an experiment has a primary goal and 2 to 5 variants. So a Ninetailed experience that was really an A/B test becomes a Croct experience with an experiment on top; one that was pure targeting is just the experience with no experiment.
The audience piece is where it stops being a straight rename. Croct audiences are CQL conditions evaluated in real time per interaction, not precomputed segments you build up in advance. There is a fuller breakdown of that in how Ninetailed audiences map to Croct.
One detail to add for planning, since Ninetailed let experiences overlap on the same component. When several experiences match the same slot, Croct resolves by experience priority: a unique numeric rank per slot, and the higher one wins. So if you had stacked/ordered targeting before, that becomes explicit priority numbers rather than implicit ordering.
Also the statistics are Bayesian and unsampled with a built-in engine, so your experiment results do not depend on wiring up an external analytics tool the way some Ninetailed setups did.
This is the model I needed. Experience = who/where/what, experiment bolts on for the A/B cases, priority handles the overlaps. Much clearer now, thank you.