Schedule experiences

This is for:

Developer
In this article

In this article, we’ll show you how to schedule an experience to automate the launching and pausing. We’ll also discuss some use cases around scheduling and some of the rules you’ll need to be aware of.

Why schedule?

Scheduling is a good option if you would like to time an experience to automatically start and end in line with weekend messages, late night cut-offs, Black Friday messaging, campaigns, or promotions.

Tip
Leading-practice

We give you the flexibility to start an experience ahead of its scheduled start and end an experience ahead of its scheduled end. See Modifying a schedule for details.

Before adding a schedule to an experience, please review the following points:

Timezone

  • The timezone used for scheduling is taken from the current timezone for the device used to set the schedule. As an example, if a user in London sets a schedule to end at 13:00 GMT, for visitors in Rome, which is in the time zone GMT + 1, the experience will end at 14:00

Start date/time

  • All schedules must have a start date/time–by default this is the current date/time +1 hr

  • There needs to be a minimum of 15 mins between the current time and the scheduled start time

End date/time

  • By default, the end date/time is the current date/start time +1hr

  • There needs to be a minimum of 15 mins between the scheduled start time and the end time

  • If you clear the end date/time, the experience will run continuously until you pause it

  • When the end date/time is reached, the experience will be paused and visible in the Paused view

Add a schedule

Step 1

Open your experience and switch to the Settings tab. Select Edit in the Details card

Step 2

Select a start date using the date picker and use the up, down, right, and left arrow keys on your keyboard to set the start time

Step 3

Select an end date using the date picker and use the up, down, right, and left arrow keys on your keyboard to set the end time

In the following example, the user has scheduled the experience to start at 9 AM on Tuesday 14 November 2017 and end on Friday 17 November at 11:30 PM:

scheduled-start-end

Step 4

Select Save to confirm

The experience will now display in the Scheduled view in Experiences.

To give you a heads-up prior to going live, we’ll notify you 30 minutes before the scheduled start date/time. You can see this notification in the Settings view:

toast-notification-start
Note

We’ll also notify you 30 minutes before the scheduled end date/time.

When the scheduled start date/time is reached, the experience will be automatically published and shown also in the Live view.

Modify a schedule

Before your experience is scheduled to start

If your experience is scheduled to go live and you want to start it earlier, open the experience, select Publish experience and then Start schedule now

Note

Bringing the schedule forward, ahead of its planned start date/time, does not affect the scheduled end date.

Before your experience is scheduled to end

If your experience is scheduled to end and you want to end it earlier, open the experience, select Pause experience and then End schedule now

Remove a schedule

You can remove a schedule at any time, even if your experience is live.

Step 1

Open your experience, switch to the Settings tab and select Edit in the Details card

Step 2

Clear the scheduled start date and / or end date and select Save and then Save again to confirm

Notes

  • Removing the start date by itself means that you will have to publish the experience manually. It will still end automatically according to the scheduled end date.

  • Removing the end date by itself means that you will have to pause the experience manually. It will still start automatically according to the scheduled start date.