# Experience

Discover what an experience is and how it works.

An experience lets you show different content to a specific group of visitors. People who match your targeting rules see the tailored content you define, while everyone else sees the default.

You can use experiences to personalize journeys or run controlled experiments, with full control over what is shown to whom — every change is purposeful, measurable, and driven by real user data.

![Experience definitions](/assets/explanation/experience/active-experience.png)

> **Need inspiration?**
>
> [Check our playbooks](/immersion/playbooks) and learn more about the most common use cases.

## How it works

Every experience is defined by three things: **who** sees it, **where** it appears, and **what** they see.

### Define the audience

The first step is choosing who the experience is for. You build an [audience](/explanation/audience/introduction) using real-time data such as user behavior, traffic source, preferences, or any [custom attributes](/reference/user/custom-attributes) you track.

A single experience can target multiple audiences. For example, if you run three paid search campaigns, you can create one audience per campaign and include all of them in the same experience. This lets you personalize content consistently while still evaluating each subgroup separately through the [Experience analytics](/reference/analytics/experience/overview).

![Experience audience panel](/assets/explanation/experience/audience-panel.png)

### Choose the slots

Next, you select the [slots](/explanation/slot) where the content should change. Slots are the specific areas of your application integrated with Croct.

You can use a single slot or combine multiple slots across different pages to keep the journey consistent. For example, you can adapt the homepage, product page, and checkout flow in a single experience.

### Set the content

The last step is defining the [content](/explanation/content/experience-content) each audience will see. This is the variation that replaces your [default content](/explanation/content/slot-default-content), whether it's a different message, layout, or conversion flow.

If you target multiple audiences, you can give each one its own content using [content groups](/explanation/content/groups).

### Run an experiment

You can optionally add an [experiment](/explanation/experiment) to measure the impact of your content before rolling it out to the full audience. Experiments let you test different variants, compare performance, and validate your strategy with real data before committing to broader changes.

![Experience draft with a highlighted experiment panel](/assets/explanation/experience/draft-experience.png)

## Status

Experiences have four possible statuses:

- **Active**\
  The experience is live and delivered to users who match the audience rules.
- **Paused**\
  The experience is on hold. You can resume it at any time without losing configuration or collected data.
- **Draft**\
  The experience is being created or reviewed. Drafts are not delivered until published.
- **Archived**\
  The experience has been deleted. Archived experiences are kept for reference only.
- **Scheduled**\
  The experience is scheduled to start at a specific date and time. Until that moment, it is not delivered to users. Once the scheduled start is reached, the experience automatically becomes active.

## Explore

- [Slots](/explanation/slot): See how slots make updating content easy without code changes.
- [Audiences](/explanation/audience): Understand how to deliver content to specific groups of users.