What are Event based Automations?

As the name suggests, create/schedule frequently performed tasks through automation for specific events without the hassle of re-creating the changes every time. Perform this scheduled task for multiple locations without having to do it manually for 1 location at a time.

The only event-based triggers we have at the moment are review responses.  

From your Navigation bar, select Automations -> All automations -> Setup automations -> Event based automations.

To create an event-based automation- There are 4 steps involved:

1. Set up automations details
2. Choose automation locations
3. Setup automation actions & select recipients for the alert emails
4. Preview & publish automation

Step 1 - Set up automation details

• Give your Event automation a name.
• Select the start date.
• Select the start time when you want this automation to be activated.
• Select trigger action - New reviews (Interactions is the review header name on the dashboard)
• Then click on + Add Review Criteria to open the drop-downs for review sources.
• Select from the 3 available criteria drop-downs - Review source, Review Rating, Review content.
• Then select the value filter drop-downs (Equals to, greater than, Greater than/equal to, less than, less than or equal to)
• If you choose, review source - select the site (Example - Google, FB). If you choose the criteria Review rating - select values to the star ratings. If you choose the criteria for review content - type in the keywords you want to see alert triggers for.
• Once you have added all the criteria, click Next Step

Step 2 - Choose automation locations

• In step 2, you will select the location for which you want to trigger the automation.
• Select the Filter Conditions - Tag, Name, City Postal code, Categories, State, Folders.
• Then select the value filter from the dropdowns - Equals to, Not equals to, Contains.
• Then select the actual value in the field provided - based on the Filter condition - in the given example we have selected the value filter as Tag, hence the field will be added with an existing tag that has already been created.
• Note: When you start typing - the existing tags will show up in the dropdown, from which you can select the Tag value you want. The same principle applies to other filter conditions as well.
• Once this is done, click on Next Step.

Step 3 - Setup automation actions & select recipients for the alerts.

Under Step 3 there are 3 different alert actions you can set up -

• Send an email - send email alerts that fit the criteria mentioned in the trigger part(Step 1) to selected recipients.
• Respond to review - auto responds to new reviews
• Send digest email - sends out one consolidated mail with all the new reviews that fit the criteria mentioned in the trigger (Step 1)

Refer to this article for more detail to understand how this alert action triggers function.

Step 4  - Preview & publish Automation

• In this Final step, verify the automation details you have added.
• Verify the start date.
• Verify the review trigger type and the review criteria.
• Verify the filter conditions & locations/tag locations added
• Verify the recipients added.
• Verify the alert frequency set up.
• Verify the trigger messages/content/review response templates that have been set up, along with the wildcards used.
• Once you have verified all the automation triggers & actions created - you can either save it as a draft or Create Automation.

Check your automation status -  active & enabled.

• Once the automation has been created/Enabled/Active - you will see a confirmation screen, like the image added here.
• As you have noticed, there is no end date for the automation. If you wish to stop this automation at any point, click on the message displayed “Click here to stop the automation”.
• You can also edit the automation created - to add additional recipients/change the trigger types/frequency/any other parameters you set up. Just click on the Edit automation option displayed within the automation.
• Other additional options are available to Stop, Delete, Clone & Run details for every event-based automation you create.

*Run Details - will show the history of email triggers/Alert triggers that were run for this particular event-based automation for the respective frequencies setup.

Some clauses:

If you are creating an automation using tags, and any new location gets added/removed from a tag - there are a couple of clauses in place to know whether or not the location got added in the particular run.

1. If an automation is running from 1st to 5th and repeats every month, then any location that exists and matches the criteria on 1st will get included.
2. If a location gets added on the 3rd it won't be included in the current run. It'll get included in the next run.
3. The set of locations to be included in an automation is recomputed at the beginning of an automation run.