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Audience Limits on a Canvas

LiamG

Hi,

I am trying to limit an audience path to a specified volume, on a canvas.

The use-case I have is that we are emailing a sample of an audience population and we need to cap this exactly to 10,000.

The only way I can see this is do'able is to use an experiment path to apply a % to a known volume. That is quite a faff - and also means I am never bang on the limit.

Has anyone worked round this problem / has any ideas on a solution?

Thanks!

Liam

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Accepted answers

HariSirigiri1

Hey Liam, had the same problem - Experiment Paths are percentage-only so you're never bang on the number.

What worked for us was a parent-child Canvas architecture with a single Segment Extension acting as the capping layer in between. The parent Canvas handles initial audience qualification and routing. One Segment Extension then does all the heavy lifting - the SQL query uses a step ID as an identifier for each path, applies individual caps per path within the same query (e.g. ROW_NUMBER() partitioned by step ID, filtered to the cap limit for each), and outputs the capped population. The child Canvases then pick up only users who made it through their relevant capped allocation and execute the send.

This scales really well - we had dozens of paths each needing individual caps, all managed in a single Segment Extension. Adjusting a cap is just a tweak to the SQL, no Canvas changes needed.

All comments

Jonathan

Hey Liam,

This defo feels like something that should be available as an option in the Delivery Settings of the message step. Like, it's so obvious to me that it should be there, my subconscious tells me it is, and I'm always disappointed when I don't find it there.

I've done this in two different ways. Both trough an Audience Path step, where either I used a segment with an exact set of users or I used a bigger segment and used Random Bucket filter to get to the approximate number I wanted to reach.

Both of the options are almost the same hustle as your way, but they offer a bit more control of the number of users and who gets the email.

Hope this helps

LiamG

Thanks Jonathan, helpful to hear a couple of other workarounds. But yes, seems like a no brainer for this to be much easier and cleaner than it currently is!

Manoj__

@LiamG
The not so good workaround is to create 2 canvases.

Main Canvas: This is the main canvas where everyone will enter and here you can do you segmentation or any other logic you might want to add.
1. once the audience is decided then you can use the "Send to Destination" node to send the audience to secondary canvas.
Secondary Canvas: You can limit the number of entries in this canvas to whatever number you want. Make sure the entry criteria is open to everyone coming from Main canvas.

LiamG

Thanks Manoj - yea, this is another good workaround. Becomes a bit of a pain though when you need to say have different limits per message split. Definitely feels like it should be easier than it is!

HariSirigiri1

Hey Liam, had the same problem - Experiment Paths are percentage-only so you're never bang on the number.

This scales really well - we had dozens of paths each needing individual caps, all managed in a single Segment Extension. Adjusting a cap is just a tweak to the SQL, no Canvas changes needed.

LiamG

Thank you! I hadn't considered that - but sounds like it will do the trick!