Holiday campaign, should I use date conditions or scheduled publishing?
Hello everyone. I am preparing our Christmas campaign and I see two ways to run it, and I would like to understand the tradeoff before I commit.
Option one: keep the experience active the whole time and gate it with a date-based audience condition, so it only shows during the campaign window.
Option two: use scheduling so the experience publishes and unpublishes itself on fixed dates.
Which is the intended approach, and does my plan matter here? We are on Growth currently
2 answers
Both work, they just behave differently.
The date-based audience approach uses the built-in context variables now, today, yesterday, and tomorrow directly in the condition. Something like a clause comparing today against your campaign dates. The experience stays technically active the whole time and the condition decides visibility per interaction. The nice side effect is you can change the copy or the dates without touching the publish state at all.
The tradeoff is that the experience shows as Active in your dashboard even outside the window, which can confuse teammates scanning the list.
To answer the plan part: scheduled publishing is a Scale plan feature, so on Growth the date-based audience is your self-serve option. For reference, experiences move through Draft, Active, Paused, Scheduled, and Archived statuses, and Scheduled is the one that requires Scale.
On Growth the workflow is draft the experience now, publish it manually when the campaign starts, and pause it when it ends. Publishing and pausing happen from the dashboard without any code changes, so a marketer can own the whole cycle. If your campaign has a hard legal cutoff, set a calendar reminder for the pause; the date-gated audience from Henrik's answer is the belt-and-suspenders version since it stops matching on its own.
Thank you both. I will go with the date-gated audience plus a manual pause afterwards. Two mechanisms, one outcome, that suits me fine.