Rate limiting

As a marketer, you create various campaigns to reach your customers. You can use rate limiting to ensure that your users are getting the messages they need to without being overwhelmed by multiple messages from multiple channels.

You can use several different types of rate limiting in Blueshift that affect your campaigns:

Campaign level
Channel level
User level
External Fetch rate limit

Campaign level rate limiting for one-time/recurring campaigns

This limits the messaging rate per campaign, which means the rate limit is applied to each one-time/recurring campaign. You must to provide the messaging rate and also a segment size threshold over which rate limiting will be applied.

Here are some examples of how campaign level rate limiting is applied. Let’s assume the rate limit is set to 250K/hr and the segment size is 100K users.

One-time campaign A has 50K users in the segment. Rate limiting would not be applied since the segment size is under the setting of 100K.
Recurring campaign B has 1M users. Rate limiting would be applied.
One-time campaigns C & D each have 200K users and are scheduled to go out at the same time. Rate limiting will be applied to both independently so your total messaging rate becomes 500K/hr.

Important

The campaign level rate limit will override any channel level rate limit. However, it does not override the external fetch rate limit.

For example, consider that your account has an external fetch rate limit of 5,000 requests per minute and you have set a campaign level rate limit of 10,000 messages per minute. The effective messaging rate limit will be 5,000 messages per minute.

For more information, Campaign messaging preferences and messaging rate limitations.

Channel level rate limit

You can limit the messaging rate to a particular channel (email, push, sms). This limit is applied to sends across one-time/recurring and segment triggered, but not event triggered campaigns. Let’s say your rate limit for SMS is 50K/hr. If you have 30 one-time campaigns sending SMS, the total messaging rate across all those 30 campaigns will be 50K/hr.

To enable Channel level rate limit, contact support@blueshift.com, specifying a rate.

User level messaging limit

With Blueshift, you can create campaigns that target the same user across multiple contexts & channels. You can set a limit for the total number of messages a user can receive on one channel or across all channels combined. You can set these user level messaging limits from the Account Settings > Maximum Messages tab.

External fetch rate limiting

You can limit external fetches to a particular rate across all campaigns, including event triggered. To set the limit or to find out the limit that is already set, contact support@blueshift.com.