Ads and experiments

Ads

An ad (Marketing → Ads) is a call to action: an internal title, a button label (the one required field), a link, a headline, an optional picture or media, a body, and the rules for where and to whom it shows.

Placements:

• modal — a card at the bottom right of any page (never inside the app, the admin, an article, a form on its own page — /form/… or /to/… — a booking page — /book/… — or the API reference);
• inline — at the foot of an article's body;
• both — modal and inline;
• footer — the close at the foot of every article and the store's home (the question, the button, the glow on the ground). The footer shows the headline and the button only.

Who sees it: an audience (guest · authenticated · paid · subscribed; empty means everyone), the topics and concepts it speaks to and whether a page must match any or all (on an article the topics are scored against its tags; an ad that names none is eligible anywhere), a minimum number of topic views, a cooldown in hours between showings, and a priority to break ties. The picker scores every published ad for the page and the person and shows the best; with no footer ad the site's own words stand.

An ad's body is user-facing copy in the modal and inline placements; a note for the team goes in a comment, never in a field.

Experiments

An experiment (Marketing → Experiments) is its own record, never a field on the thing it tests. Pages and ads know nothing about testing; the experiment points at them.

Its fields: kind (page or ad), variants (each a key, the page or ad it shows, and a weight), a goal (a path — the goal is a page view of it; for an ad experiment with no goal, a click on the ad), an end date (two weeks by default), a declared winner, active, and notes in the body.

• Visitors are assigned a variant by weight and keep it (sticky).
• A page experiment chooses among the pages on one route; an ad experiment collapses to the visitor's variant before the ad picker scores.
• The exposure is recorded once per session; the conversion is the goal.
• Paused (active off) means everyone sees the first variant, not that the experiment is hidden.

Experiments is a cards view with the results and the actions: pause, end, extend, declare a winner, add a variant by duplicating one. The drawer edits the record with a variants editor that chooses pages and ads from a list.

Where nothing appears, and who has the corner

Two things put themselves over a page uninvited — an ad and the support chat — and they occupy the same corner. Until they were made to ask the same question, each decided alone, so somebody could get both at once, stacked, on a page where neither belonged. lib/interrupt.js is the one place that decides, and both ask it.

Some pages are never interrupted. A place of work is not a place to be sold to: the admin, the person's own app (/app), the configured community routes (feed, spaces and people), the person's own settings (/p), a form on its own page, the API reference, a booking page, the preview and the share cards. The shared predicate also reserves /feed and /p even when those routes are not active. On those nothing appears at all — not a card, not a teaser, not even the chat's launcher.

In one page view the corner belongs to whoever takes it first, and to nobody else. If an ad is going to show, the chat's pop-up is off for that page view; if the chat is already saying something, the ad waits for another page rather than stacking on it. The claim is dropped when the person goes somewhere else, because that is a new page view — and dismissing either gives the corner back, so the other may still speak later on the same page.

The rules are pure and pinned by build/interrupt.test.mjs, which is where to add a path that should be left alone. After an asynchronous ad lookup, the current route and the shared quiet-route predicate are checked again before the ad claims the corner, so navigation to an ineligible page cannot reveal a late card.