Nosto’s Scheduling allows merchants to schedule their content campaigns and promotions ahead of time, so you can sit back, grab a coffee, and let your campaign plan run smoothly.

In this article, we'll familiarize ourselves with the scheduling capabilities and learn how to schedule campaigns.

Note that as the scheduling capabilities are similar between content personalization campaigns and product recommendations, we will focus only on content personalization campaigns for the sake of simplicity.

Before getting started

All Nosto content and recommendation campaigns are displayed onsite using Nosto placements and target Nosto segments. When created, all campaigns are disabled by default . Once enabled, they can be displayed onsite when users browsing your online store, are eligible for the given segment(s) and are visiting a page type in which the targeted placement is present in the source code of the page.

The above fundamentals remain unchanged. When Scheduling rules are set for the campaigns, the status of the campaigns reflects the usage of the rules set and whether campaigns will be displayed onsite, are currently being displayed onsite or if they have been displayed but are not anymore.

Scheduling functionalities

When creating a campaign, scheduling rules are, by default toggled off (as per screenshot above) and users can make the rules available by switching the toggle on. Once all Scheduling rules are available, users can define when the newly created campaign will be live.

Defines a start date and time - and optionally, an end date and time.

In the example above, the campaign will go live on the 27th of November, 2020 at 00:00 and end on the 27th of November, 2020 at the end of the day, Pacific Standard Time.

A default time zone is set for the campaign, which mirrors the time zone defined in the Account Settings of the Nosto account. However, it is possible to change and define a time zone that is campaign specific using the dropdown in the upper right corner.

In addition to the start and end and date and time settings, you can also define whether or not the campaign should be displayed on a per-day and time slot basis.

In the example above, the campaign is set to go live on the 1st of October, 2020 and will run indefinitely. In addition, it will only be visible on weekdays between 12:00 (noon) and 17:00 (5pm).

When you are satisfied with the Scheduling rules set for a campaign, it's safe to enable the campaign and hit Save. The status of the campaign will automatically be adjusted to reflect that the campaign is now Scheduled or Running in the listing view.

Campaign statuses

All campaigns created are available in the listing view, displaying the status of the campaign. Let's recap the various possible statuses available in the listing view.

Regular campaigns that do not take advantage of any form of Scheduling will display either of the two statuses:

Campaigns that take advantage of Scheduling rules will display any of the following statuses:

Ended - Shown whenever campaigns were live but are now ended.

In addition, the campaign edit view is now adjusted whenever the Scheduling capabilities are in use for a campaign. A informative & verbose callout is displayed at the top of the page, allowing users to quickly verify the Scheduling rules set for the campaign.

Priorities between campaigns

In the campaign creation wizard, if a combination of segment and placement is already used by another campaign, you will be alerted that the newly created campaign will override the initial one.

This campaign overriding behavior is also valid if Scheduling rules are in use. The same behavior occurs for all campaigns: newly created campaigns take over initially created campaigns. When creating a new campaign, users decide whether or not a newly created campaign will override an initial campaign. Note that only one override is allowed per combination of segment and placement.

Need some additional guidance on how to enable Nosto’s Scheduling feature? Contact support@nosto.com.