A regular in-app campaign shows surveys to the people who use your web app, on a schedule you set. Two schedule rules decide when a contact sees their first survey in this campaign and how often recurring surveys follow. A third setting, the throttle, keeps the same person from being surveyed too often.

Each regular in-app campaign follows its own schedule. Surveys from your other campaigns do not hold a contact back from being surveyed here, unless you set the throttle to count them.

In this tutorial we will cover the details of each schedule rule configuration:

The first survey is shown only to contacts that have never been surveyed before in this campaign. If one of your other campaigns has already surveyed them, they can still see the first survey here. If they have already been surveyed in this campaign, they can only see recurring surveys in this campaign.

The Display first survey in setting is a number of days, counted from the date the contact was added to Retently (for example, their first visit to a page with the in-app script, or an import or integration sync). For example, if you have configured to display the first survey in 3 days, a contact added to Retently on Monday can see the survey from Thursday, the next time they visit a page where the in-app script is installed.

IMPORTANT: If a contact was added to Retently more than 3 days ago (e.g., 20 days ago), they can see the first survey on their next visit as soon as you switch ON the campaign. Set the value to 0 to show the first survey on the first eligible visit.

The contact continues to see the survey every specific number of days, counted from the date of the last survey this campaign showed them, which might be the first survey or a previous recurring survey.

Surveys from your other campaigns do not restart this countdown. Reminder surveys do not restart it either: a reminder is a follow-up to the survey it was sent for. If reminders are still scheduled for a contact, the next recurring survey waits until the reminder sequence has finished.

The contact sees a single survey in this campaign: the first survey, shown only to the contacts that qualify, as described in the first chapter. They can still be surveyed by your other campaigns.

The schedule rules above decide when a contact is due for a survey from this campaign. The throttle sits on top of them: if the contact was surveyed recently, this campaign holds off.

You will find it on the Schedule step, under Throttle the survey to avoid over-surveying contacts. Switch it ON and you get two settings.

The time window. Choose the number of days, from 1 to 365. Anyone surveyed inside that window is skipped for now.

Which surveys count. Any campaign counts surveys from all of your campaigns, whichever channel they were sent on. This campaign counts only the surveys this campaign showed.

This is a delay, not an exclusion. A contact skipped by the throttle stays in the campaign and becomes eligible again as soon as the time window passes. When one campaign is throttled for a contact, another in-app campaign that qualifies can still show its survey on that visit.

The throttle is checked alongside the recurring interval, and a survey is shown only when both allow it. If your recurring interval is 30 days and your throttle is set to 90 days on Any campaign, the contact sees a survey from this campaign at most every 90 days.

If you run several in-app campaigns for overlapping audiences and want each person to see at most one survey in a given period, switch the throttle ON with Any campaign on each of them.

NOTE: New campaigns are created with the throttle switched ON, set to 30 days, counting Any campaign.

The daily limit caps how many surveys the campaign shows in one day. Once it is reached, contacts who were due see the survey on a later visit.

An in-app survey can only be shown when the contact visits a page where the in-app script is installed. When a contact is due, the survey appears on the Queue page as "awaiting next visit" and is shown on their next visit after the scheduled date.

If the contact does not visit within one year of the scheduled date, the survey is closed without being shown and marked Not shown on the Queue page. The same happens if the contact visits but no longer matches the campaign's audience. In both cases the contact can still qualify for later surveys.