# Do we need Segment or a CDP to personalize our Sanity site?

Asked by Katie O'Donnell on 2025-10-08. Tags: sanity, cdp, audiences, analytics.

our stack is Sanity plus Next.js and we want to start personalizing a few
sections by visitor segment. A consultant told us the "proper" way is a CDP
like Segment feeding computed segments to the frontend, plus a separate
personalization tool reading them.

That is two new vendors and two new bills for what feels like a simple need.
We are already looking at Croct for the Sanity side. Does it actually require
a CDP behind it, or is the segmentation built in? Would rather not stand up a
whole pipeline just to know if someone came from a paid campaign

## 2 answers

### Answer from Tom Fielding (2025-10-09)

No CDP needed. Segmentation and analytics are built into the integration, so
the Sanity + Next.js + Croct stack is complete on its own for what you
described.

Audiences are defined with conditions over 100+ signals grouped into
categories like Events, Location, Marketing, Session, Shopping, User, Web,
and Technology, plus any custom attributes you set yourself. You can combine
them with AND/OR logic, so "came from a paid campaign and is on mobile" is a
one-liner, no pipeline involved.

The architectural difference from the CDP approach matters too: a CDP
computes segments from events that already happened and syncs them out on
some schedule. Croct audiences are evaluated in real time on each
interaction, so a visitor who lands from a Google Ads click matches the
campaign audience on that very pageview, not after a sync job runs.

### Answer from Sofia Almeida (2025-10-10)

Adding one nuance to Tom's answer: a CDP still makes sense if you need to
pipe unified customer data into many downstream tools (email, ads, warehouse).
That is a different job.

But for on-site personalization specifically, the two-vendor setup your
consultant described is solving a problem you do not have. The segment
evaluation happens inside Croct at request time, and the built-in analytics
cover the experiment and audience reporting, so there is nothing for a CDP
to feed. We run a similar B2B stack and never added one.