👀 This update rolls out to all Chameleon accounts on October 10th, 2024. Contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
What’s changing?
We are improving how we display Experiences to users who move in and out of different Audiences. We updated how Chameleon assesses Segment membership and displays an Experience to end-users and won't display any Steps or Experiences to users who are no longer part of a Target Audience.
This improvement will make targeting in Chameleon more intuitive and will help you implement some key use cases more effectively, such as:
Overdue payment notifications -- users will stop seeing reminders once they’re back in good standing.
Increasing feature adoption (based on user engagement) -- users will not see Experiences that are set to trigger, for example, after a timed delay if the user engages with the feature and performs the event.
Discount offers for new users -- users will no longer see specific promotions as soon as they make their first purchase.
👉 With this update, an Experience that was "Started" but not "Completed" or that was "Snoozed" will no longer show to a user if they fall out of the audience. Previously that Experience would continue showing until it was "Completed" or "Exited".
ℹ If you relied on an Experience continuing to show until the end, even if the user dropped out of its Audience partway, then you will need to adjust your Segment or know that the Experience can stop displaying partway.
Existing scenarios that may need adjustment
👉 You are using a Segment as a way to add conditional logic between two different Tours, e.g., a Segment that targets users who have "Not Started" Tour A or Tour B, such that once the user starts one of these (based on a click from a Launcher or other entry point) then they would not be shown the other.
This case would also fall into the situation above where the user would fall out of the Segment as soon as they "Started" either Tour and not see subsequent Steps.
👉 A one-time Announcement Tour targets users who aren’t receiving promotional emails. The first Step has a button to opt-in to emails by using an additional Action that updates a “Send emails” property to TRUE. If the Segment required that property to be FALSE, users will immediately fall out of the Segment, and the Step would stop displaying. They will never see the second Step, which is a "Thank You" for signing up.
Instead, you could add an “OR” (Tour A has been "Started" AND Tour A has not been "Completed") to the Segment and it would continue.
💡 In these cases, we highly recommend removing this type of loop filter from your Segments and finding more robust ways of meeting your use case. There are other ways you can more effectively control who should /should not see an Experience:
Use Rate Limiting (including by Tag or set of Experiences)
👉 If your target audience for an Experience is users who haven’t taken a certain action but do so before the end of that Experience, and yet you still want them to continue through the full Experience, then you will need to revisit your approach.
First, consider whether it really is necessary for the user to see the remainder of the Experience: if they’ve already completed a key action was that the condition for them to view this Experience anyway? If so, you could amend your Segment or audience with an additional condition, something that the user would do after the end of the Experience, e.g., a second action or an updated user attribute.
If you were using a looping filter to help set a recurring Experience (e.g. "Not Started" Tour A within the last 30 days) in the hope of adding a gap to showing an Experience, this would also lead to a user starting that Tour and then not seeing subsequent Steps. We recommend using our Recurrence functionality for this instead.
👋 If you have any questions about how to solve your use case, please reach out to us via the Help Dashboard to review and advise you.
How to prepare for this update?
1. Review your existing Segments:
Review your existing Segments and ensure that the re-evaluation frequency won’t cause issues. This may be a good opportunity to clean-up your Segments, especially now that you can create more modular Segments and construct a target audience with multiple different Segments (instead of a single Segment).
2. Communicate with your team:
Inform your team about this change to ensure they understand how it might affect workflows or targeting, especially if they use Chameleon for time-sensitive or behavior-based experiences.
FAQs
Q1: Will this update affect all existing Segments?
A: Yes, Chameleon will re-evaluate all Segments with this update. We recommend reviewing existing Segments to ensure they work as intended.
Q2: Can I opt out of this update?
A: No, this update is global, and the new re-evaluation system will apply to all Experiences.
Q3: What should I do if I have a use case that relies on the infrequent Segment assessment (the old way)?
A: Review the suggestions in this article or contact us to get some advice on alternative ways to support your use case and goals!
Q4: Why is Chameleon making this change to Segment evaluation?
A: This feature improvement will make Segmentation more accurate and match who and how most customers expect Experiences to display.
Q5: Are my Experiences affected by this change?
A: Most Experiences have basic filtering properties and then use features like Recurrence or Rate Limiting to determine when it should stop showing to a user. It is best to review all Experiences to make sure they continue to work as you would expect. Let us know if you have any questions.