Audience refresh rates

Learn how audience refresh rates determine how often user eligibility is reassessed in the Loyalty Engine, including daily, reactive, and manual refresh options.

An audience’s refresh rate dictates how often it updates to evaluate which users meet its criteria and should be included.

• Initial assessment: When an audience is first created, all user profiles in your loyalty tenant are evaluated against the criteria, and matching users are added.

• Ongoing refreshes: After the initial assessment, the audience refreshes at the selected interval, ensuring its membership remains up-to-date.

Audience calculations are designed to segment users based on historical activity and other data, rather than occurring in real-time.

• Batch calculations: Initial, manual or daily re-calculations can take several hours to complete.

• Reactive calculations: Typically near-instant, processing within a few minutes during normal traffic. However, during peak traffic, processing may take up to several hours.

Audience refresh rates can be found in the create and edit audience screens of the Loyalty Console

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Calculate on User Registration (Sync) 

Each audience has a Calculate on User Registration toggle, found alongside the refresh rate settings in the create and edit audience screens.

When disabled (default): New user registrations are processed asynchronously. The user’s eligibility for the audience is evaluated shortly after their profile is created, and they will be added to any matching audiences within a few minutes. This is suitable for most audiences.

When enabled: The user’s eligibility for the audience is evaluated synchronously — as part of the registration request itself. The user will be a member of any matching audiences the moment their registration completes.

• Use case: Audiences that are critical to the initial user experience, such as those controlling which program elements are visible or which earning mechanisms are active from the start.

• Example: An audience that determines a user’s membership level at registration, where the level controls which rewards and content are displayed.

Enable this setting only for audiences where immediate membership is essential to program functionality. Each synchronous audience calculation adds processing time to the registration request. Enabling it on too many audiences can slow down registration and lead to timeouts. For most audiences, the default asynchronous behaviour is recommended.

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Refresh rates

Manual

With a manual refresh rate, the audience must be refreshed manually using the “Refresh” button on the audience’s info page in the Loyalty Console. This triggers a full reassessment of all user profiles, similar to the daily refresh process, which may take a few hours.

• Use case: When the audience is used for reporting and doesn’t affect the day-to-day loyalty program behaviour.

• Example: Audiences used solely for reporting purposes that don’t need constant updates.

Daily

With a daily refresh rate, the entire audience is recalculated once per day, starting at around midnight in the tenant’s configured timezone. All user profiles are reassessed, adding or removing users based on the criteria. This process may take a few hours.

• Use case: When eligibility is determined by non-event-based criteria.

• Example: Users whose birthday is today. The audience refreshes daily to identify users with a birthday on the current day.

Reactive

With a reactive refresh rate, an individual user’s eligibility is reassessed every time an event is reported in their event stream. As mentioned above, this is typically near-instant, processing within a few minutes during normal traffic. However, during peak traffic, processing may take up to several hours.

• Use case: When eligibility is determined by event-based criteria.

• Example: Users who have purchased a reward. The audience refreshes within seconds of the reward purchase being recorded.

When an event is triggered, the Loyalty Engine processes it by firing all configured reactions first. After these reactions have completed, the user’s reactive audience memberships are recalculated. This sequence ensures that any changes in audience eligibility (based on the event) take effect only after the event and its reactions have been fully processed.

This order is essential to ensure accurate processing, as it prevents premature audience updates that might affect other reactions tied to the current event.

Daily Reactive

The daily reactive refresh rate combines both daily and reactive refresh rates. The entire audience refreshes daily, and individual user membership is reassessed each time an event is reported in their stream.

• Use case: When eligibility is based on both event and non-event-based criteria.

• Example: Users who haven’t purchased a reward in the last 7 days. The audience refreshes as soon as a reward is purchased and also daily to check when 7 days have passed since the last purchase.