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charliesmith04's avatar
charliesmith04
Active Member II
2 years ago

Help - IAM's are spamming some of our users

We have IAM's in our mobile app that are occasionally being sent multiple times in a day to some users. This is concerning because it looks very spammy. 

We upgraded our iOS Braze SDK on May 15th and saw an increase in this behavior. But, it's been happening before just the rate was about 5% of users. Now it is more like 20% of users being affected. 

I find it hard to believe this is just an SDK issue. Plus, we also see this behavior on Android. 

About one of the affected campaigns:
The most concerning campaign is a rating request - not one you want to spam users with 😮
We have the Delivery Controls set so the user should not receive the campaign more than once in 30 days. 

Is there another way to try to prevent a user from seeing the campaign more than once that we are missing? 

Thanks in advance for any insight. 
It will be a bummer if the only resolution as another SDK update. That takes many months to propagate through our entire install base. 

In-App Message
  • jakedavis's avatar
    jakedavis
    Active Member II
    2 years ago

    Hey Charlie -  hasty response here given the nature of the issue.

    You could pretty quickly set up a custom attribute to determine if someone is eligible for this IAM. I'm not sure what your entry criteria is for the campaign/canvas, but you could set up a custom attribute called "last_rating_request_date" and update it after someone receives this IAM. If you're using a canvas, send your IAM and then use the user update step to enter today's date into the "last_rating_request_date" field. Then update your entry criteria to only allow individuals where last_rating_request_date is more than 30 days ago, or however long you'd like to make that wait. 

    You can set today's date in the User Update step using the json editor and entering something along these lines:

    {% assign timestamp = 'now' | date: "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ" %}
{
  "attributes": [
    {
      "last_rating_request_date": "{{timestamp}}"
    }
  ]
}

    Each time someone is qualified to move back through and receive the IAM, they'd receive that message and then the update step would keep the date updated - scales pretty easily. You could also add an additional attribute, or custom event, to log how many times someone has entered this canvas and block them from reentering after 3 attempts with no rating submitted, assuming your capturing that rating as a data point somehow. 

    Fully recognize that this doesn't solve the issue/mystery on why someone is reentering when they shouldn't be, but it's a potential solution to basically recreate the functionality you're experiencing these issues with to put a stop to the spammy behavior as you investigate further. 

    Hope that helps!

    • charliesmith04's avatar
      charliesmith04
      Active Member II
      2 years ago

      Thanks so much Jake. I will pass this on to my team and hopefully they will give this a try. 

  • charliesmith04's avatar
    charliesmith04
    Active Member II
    2 years ago

    Thanks MaggieBrennan. We do have a support ticket open. They seem to believe that an iOS SDK update will help. I have suspicions because we see this issue, at lower volumes, on Android. We updated to iOS SDK 15.3 on May 15th which seems to have made the issue worse but we were having problems before that update. 

    If we can find a solution aside from an SDK update, that would be preferable. Any SDK update will require all users to be on the latest app version before it goes away. That is a challenge and takes months.