Core concepts

This guide uses six customer-facing terms. Here they are with a shopping site’s review summary feature as the example. These are the customer-facing terms used throughout this guide.

Term	One-line definition	Review summary example
Feature	The customer-visible product unit whose performance you judge, identified by a Feature ID	review.summary
Variant	One way of running a feature. Model + prompt + parameters	GPT with a long prompt / Claude with a short prompt
Routing	The ratios that split real traffic across variants	Current 90% + new candidate 10%
Test run	A one-off trial call before anything ships. Never appears in your production records	Call both variants side by side with a real review input
Event	What a user who saw a response actually did	summary_copied, purchase
Success metric	The one number that defines success for a feature	Summary success rate, revenue per AI dollar

How the six terms connect

Routingsplits the traffic Variantgenerates the response Eventwhat the user did Success metricoutcome as a number

This is the loop inside one feature (review summaries). New candidates enter it only after being screened by a test run.

Good to know

• Features and events register automatically on the first call or first occurrence.
• The first time a call comes through ABTO, the settings your code originally sends are registered automatically as a variant called Origin.
• The same user keeps getting the same variant until you change the ratios. Their experience stays steady, and the comparison between “the people who got A” and “the people who got B” stays clean per person.
• Comparison, routing, and success metrics all operate per feature, because the model that suits review summaries and the one that suits support replies are different.

Events and success metrics

The SDK installed in your site or app sends events in one line. A sent event connects automatically to the AI responses that user received.

abto.capture('summary_copied');
abto.capture('purchase', { value: 32000 });

You define what counts as success yourself, out of events and call records, and there are two ways to define a success metric.

Form	What it measures	Example
Ratio	The share of people using this feature who did the target behavior	Summary success rate = purchase 70% + summary copied 30%
Value	One number defined by a formula	Revenue per AI dollar = sum of purchase value ÷ sum of call cost

Designate one metric per feature as Primary and it becomes the Overview summary number and the default comparison basis on Compare.

See Dashboard at a glance for the customer tasks these terms support.