Action frequency capping and prioritization

How it works

By default, actions in AudienceStream fire as soon as their conditions are met. Depending on your connector choice, the actions configured fire when a user joins or leaves an audience or when a user is in the audience at the beginning or end of the visit.

The following options give you control over the timing of connectors.

Action Frequency Capping

Allows you to prevent actions from triggering too close together by prioritizing which actions to trigger relative to one another while ensuring that the most important action still triggers.

Prioritization

AudienceStream separately provides an option to set delays to prevent individual actions from triggering immediately. You can optionally configure delays in combination with a cooldown.

The highest priority number specified becomes the highest priority. For example, a priority of 2 is higher than a priority of 1. All non-capped actions trigger independently without delay and are not affected by the cooldown.

If two actions in the same cooldown group have the same priority, only one of them will trigger. If you need both actions to trigger, use separate cooldown groups.

Cooldown with Frequency Capping

When visitors qualify for numerous actions, such as emails, you can control the triggering by restricting the frequency of actions within a specific time period and then decide which actions to trigger and which to ignore. This will avoid spamming.

Cooldown only applies when an action is enabled for Frequency Cap and the connector configuration is assigned an action priority number. The action priority number dictates which actions to trigger in the event that several actions in the same cooldown are fulfilled simultaneously.

Frequency Cap On

When the Frequency Cap is toggled to On, the highest priority action in a cooldown group is triggered. No actions in the same cooldown group trigger for the rest of the cooldown period and they will not trigger automatically when the cooldown period expires.

Frequency Cap Off

Action does not qualify for cooldown and, therefore, will trigger as and when the triggering condition/event occurs.

Workflow

The following steps summarize frequency capping and prioritization the workflow:

1. AudienceStream evaluates the conditions for all actions in a cooldown group.
2. If only one action condition is true, AudienceStream instantly triggers that action.
3. If more conditions are true simultaneously, AudienceStream evaluates their action priorities and then triggers only the highest priority action.
4. During the cooldown hours configured for the group, no actions in that group trigger.
5. When frequency capping is in progress, non-capped actions are not affected by the cooldown and trigger independently without being throttled.
6. If an action has a delay set, the delay is respected.
7. The cooldown starts after the delayed action triggers. For example, if the action is set with a two hour delay, it will not trigger until after the delay.
8. If a higher priority action triggers before the delay time configured is met, the cooldown takes effect and suppresses the delayed action.
9. When the cooldown expires, AudienceStream reevaluates the conditions and starts over from Step 2.