In-App Survey Throttling
Introduction
By default, Refiner displays in-app surveys to all users in your target audience as soon as a trigger event occurs. Throttling allows you to control how often surveys are shown and how many responses are collected over time.
Common use cases for throttling include:
- Preventing sudden spikes in survey responses
- Maintaining a steady flow of incoming feedback
- Avoiding survey fatigue for individual users
- Limiting the amount of feedback your team needs to process
Refiner supports throttling at three different levels:
- Per survey
- Per user
- Environment-wide
You can configure survey-level throttling in the Targeting tab of the survey editor. Global throttling settings are available under Settings → Throttling.
Throttling per survey
Survey-level throttling allows you to control how often a specific survey is shown and how many responses it can collect within a certain period of time.
The following settings are available:
- Time Frame: Defines the time period used when evaluating throttling limits
- Max. views: Maximum number of times the survey can be displayed during the selected time frame
- Max. responses: Maximum number of responses that can be collected during the selected time frame
To avoid response spikes when launching a new campaign, we recommend starting with shorter time frames (for example a few hours) and gradually increasing them if needed.
If your survey is recurring and uses a trigger event that may fire frequently within a short period of time (for example Page Visit or Manual Trigger), additional per-user throttling options are available.
Per-user throttling limits how often an individual user can see or respond to the same survey.
- Max. views per user: Maximum number of times a single user can see the survey during the selected time frame
- Max. responses per user: Maximum number of responses a single user can submit during the selected time frame
- Gap time: Minimum amount of time that must pass before the same user can see the survey again
Environment wide throttling
Instead of configuring throttling individually for every survey, you can also define global throttling rules for your entire environment under Settings → Throttling.
Global throttling settings are grouped into three categories:
- Global Limits
- Per-User Limits
- Per-Survey Limits
Each group includes the following settings:
- Time Frame: Defines the time period used when evaluating throttling limits
- Max. responses: Maximum number of survey displays allowed during the selected time frame
- Max. views: Maximum number of survey responses allowed during the selected time frame
Here is what each group provides:
Global Limits
Global Limits apply across all in-app surveys in your environment, including web and mobile surveys.
This is useful when you want to control the overall speed of data collection across your entire account.
For example, you may want to limit the total number of responses your team receives each week to ensure that all feedback can be reviewed and followed up on in time.
Per-User Limits
Per-User Limits control how many surveys a user can see or respond to overall, regardless of which surveys are active.
This is especially useful when running multiple surveys with overlapping audiences, as it helps prevent survey fatigue caused by excessive survey exposure.
For example, you can ensure that a user sees no more than one survey per week across your entire environment.
This group also includes a Gap time setting, which defines the minimum amount of time that must pass before a user can see another survey.
Per-Survey Limits
Per-Survey Limits allow you to define default throttling rules for all surveys in your environment.
These settings are applied automatically unless a survey has its own throttling configuration defined in the survey editor.
Survey vs. environment wide throttling
When both survey-level throttling and global throttling are configured, you can decide how they interact using the following options in the survey editor.
- Also apply global limits: When enabled (default), both the survey-level limits and the global environment limits must be satisfied before the survey is shown. When disabled, only the survey-level throttling rules are applied. Disable this option if a survey should ignore global throttling rules entirely.
- Count towards global limits: When enabled (default), survey views and responses contribute toward your global throttling limits. When disabled, activity from this survey is ignored when calculating global limits. Disable this option if you want a survey to bypass global quotas without affecting other surveys.
Important notes
Survey throttling should be considered an approximate control mechanism rather than an exact limit.
On high-traffic websites or apps, it is possible for survey views or responses to slightly exceed the configured limits – especially immediately after launching a campaign.
This happens because multiple users may become eligible for a survey at the same time before all survey views and responses have been fully recorded in the system.
In most cases, these temporary spikes stabilize quickly and average out over time.