I have an automation with multiple triggers: one is “contact visits a page” and another is “contact is assigned a tag”. Yet another is “contact clicks a link in an email”.
I want my contacts to only go through this automation once, regardless of how they entered.
What is the best way to achieve this?
I have “Runs Once” set for each trigger but the contacts still enter multiple times through the different triggers.
Hey Nick,
if they have already been in an automation once and you never want them to be in it again, you can add, what I personally like to call a “tag gate”. This will work regardless of how they entered as you describe.
The first step of the automation would be “If contact has tag X, exit automation”. The second step of the automation would be “add tag X”. In other words, if they had already been through it they will have had tag X and therefore would immediately exit if going through a second time.
For instance: http://screen.ac/2Y2z302A440m
If you have further questions, feel free to shoot us an email http://www.activecampaign.com/contact/ or visit us on live chat. Hope that helps! 
Thanks, Jordan. It helps.
It would be nice if there were a setting within ActiveCampaign to configure an automation in such a way that if a contact is already inside the automation, it is not re-entered again when one of the triggers is fired.
To my surprise, I found today that a single contact can be active inside an automation at different steps (branches) at the same time.
I.e. if a contact is waiting on a condition inside an automation and a trigger fires, it enters the automation again, but is not removed from his earlier location in the automation. Instead, he begins another journey “in parallel” to his first presence in the automation. So, he will remain waiting on the condition that he was waiting on and in parallel begin moving from the trigger down the steps. Depending on the logic of the automation, he may take a different branch on the second pass and end up waiting in another location within the automation.
I was really surprised by this behavior.
Having the same problem, thought that ‘runs once’ would do this trick but it doesn’t. I’m surprised as well.
Hi there, Amy from ActiveCampaign’s Customer Experience Team. We’re just refreshing our forum page and I wanted to add some help here for anyone who comes across this page/question/post.
The best way to do this would be to segment your start triggers with ‘has not entered automation >select the automation you are currently working in’
This will work to ensure that if the contact meets the start trigger (as you may have more than 1 start trigger) it will ALSO look to see if your contact has entered the automation before. So, let’s look at an example:
I have an automation with 2 different start triggers:
My contact subscribed to List A > the automation start trigger is fired and looks to see if:
The automation pulls my contact into it.
My contact later has Tag B added > the automation start trigger is fired and looks to see if:
The automation rejects my contact from entering.
(The same will work if I have Tag B added first then subscribe to List A, so long as both start triggers are segmented).
Here is a quick demo as a walkthrough.
Any questions or additional ideas, thread them below!