Spike protection for automations

When you set up an Engage automation in Metorik, it automatically monitors the audience and sends emails whenever a new audience match takes place.

For example, you may have an order automation that emails orders when the order status is failed to let the customer know they need to fix the payment.

But what if one day, you updated 1,000 old orders from years ago that were stuck in an on-hold status to the failed status? If your automation is targeting failed orders, this could lead to 1,000 emails suddenly being sent to those orders. That could create confusion and potential spam issues if those emails were not meant to send.

Metorik automatically detects sudden audience spikes to stop this happening.

If we detect a spike, those emails will be given a failed status of Spiked automation and won't send. The automation will remain active and send to future matches.

We'll then email the Metorik user that created the automation to let them know:

If you did intend for these emails to be sent, you you can go to the automation's page in Metorik. There you'll be given the option to send those emails. This will let you email any that failed because of this reason in the past 5 days:

If you didn't want to email them, no further action is required and you can disregard the email.

Changing the spike threshold

By default, the threshold is 250 suddenly matched emails for a single automation.

This can be changed in your Engage settings to a higher threshold, if you find you're hitting it too often:

If you need to set it higher than 1500 emails, let us know.