Continuing the discussion from Conditional First Name tag use with if/else:
Wouldn’t ELSE be the addition of more IF’s?
It would mean the difference between asking the server 100+ small questions or a couple large ones… Which is better? I don’t know. I did just try and ask it 150 conditions and it failed “Your content could not be processed”. However, I don’t know whether it failed because it was overloaded or failed because my code had an error I don’t know yet.
I have found that less is better, but there’s a workaround when you have no choice.
I created an automation that checks if the contact has a tag for each of the 75 workshops we offer (so 75 If/Else Conditions). When I initially set it up as one automation, it was a nightmare. The automation was so wide, it took 3-4 minutes to scroll right when connecting the elements together so I spent HOURS and HOURS building it.
I finally got fed up and figured out a workaround. I broke up the 75 If/Else Conditions into 9 automations (because we have 9 workshop categories). I add a tag to the contact to get them started down automation #1. When they get to the end, they are automatically dropped into #2, and so on. There is no other way to get into automations #2-9. Only by completing the previous automation. At the end of automation #9, the tag that started it is removed.
I call them “Cascading Automations” but I don’t know if there’s an official term.
Hope that helps.
Hello, my name is Andres from the Customer Experience team at ActiveCampaign. In the spirit of providing the most updated information, I wanted to respond to this question in case somebody else has been wondering what is better.
As a best practice, ActiveCampaign typically encourages users to err on the side of building smaller — or modular — automations that work together rather than one large automation with complex branching paths.
There are many reasons why smaller automations are better, published here: Building Automations in ActiveCampaign: Best Practices
As mentioned, larger automations may experience technical issues. For example, an automation that is particularly enormous may experience freezing and slowdown in editing mode or may have difficulty loading altogether. I hope this information was helpful and if you still have more questions you can contact us at help@activecampaign.com.