Audience decay

Airship automatically removes app and web channels that have been inactive within your project’s decay period so your addressable and billable audience stays current.

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How decay works

Decay is the process Airship uses to remove app and web channels that have been inactive for a set period of months, so your addressable audience doesn’t include channels you can no longer reach. Email, SMS, and open channels are not affected by decay.

Registration events are calls to Airship by the SDK or an API that indicate activity from the app or website, typically triggered by app opens or web page visits. Airship evaluates each app and web channel against your project’s decay period using the date of its most recent registration event.

Every week, Airship runs a batch process that identifies channels whose most recent registration event is older than the project’s decay period. If the job finds eligible channels, it marks them as uninstalled as of 23:59:00 on the last day of the previous month, removing them from the project’s addressable and billable audience.

The job can take several days to complete across all projects, and repeats weekly so changes to your decay setting take effect by the end of the month. The largest audience impact usually appears after the first run each month.

After a channel is uninstalled, Airship deletes associated contactAny user in your project. Contacts are identified as either an anonymous contact or a named user. Airship can set targeting data on these identifiers, which are also used to map devices and channels to a specific user. data according to the Data Retention Schedule.

The default decay period is 13 months, and you can change it to between 4 and 24 months. Contact your account manager to make the request.

Resources

Review decay-related uninstalls for your project:

Billing — See View monthly audience counts in View usage and manage billing.
Performance Analytics — See the Decay Uninstalls Look in the shared Lifecycle dashboard in Performance Analytics dashboard and Look definitions. Available for projects on the US cloud site only.
Real-Time Data Streaming — See Uninstall events, where body.decay is true.

To find a specific channel’s most recent registration date, use the Contact management tool.