With all the profiles and events in your account, data storage can increase rapidly, which may lead to additional costs. To manage this, you can set your own data retention for profiles and events. You find these settings in the Data module under Retention.
In the video below, we explain how to manage the data retention in Spotler Activate:
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Summary of this video
This video explains how to manage data usage and reduce overage fees in Spotlight Activate by using data retention settings. It notes that going over your license limit will not stop data collection or journeys, but an overage fee applies, so the goal is to minimize it.
The retention tab lets you control how long events are kept, with unknown profiles deleted after 12 months of inactivity by default and known profiles kept indefinitely when set to zero. Events like page views may become less useful after 2 to 3 months, while purchases are never deleted and events can be overridden per event for both known and unknown profiles. Account usage and overage are calculated nightly, so allow time to see the effect after changes.
Spoken text
In this short video, I'm hoping to save you a bit of money. On the data tab in Spotlight Activate, you will see a bar for the account usage.
You first see the stores that you're using at the moment, and then second, the limits that we have in your license.
So when you go over your limit, we won't stop collecting data. We won't stop performing with the journeys and personalizations, because that can also cost you a lot of money.
But there will be a fee based on the overage. So we want to keep that to a minimum. To keep that to a minimum, we have added the tab retention.
On that tab, you will see a graph with how many profiles we've deleted, but you will also see the settings.
And by default, the unknown profiles, so only the profiles where we have a cookie, will be deleted after 12 months of inactivity.
So we haven't seen that cookie on your website again. The known profile, so everyone with a user ID or an email address, we will keep indefinitely when it stands on zero, as this is the default.
For those known profiles and also the unknown profiles in the intermediate time, we will save all the events that they have on their profile.
That can come to a lot of events and also to a lot of data. If I go back to the data tab, you will see the events of the last seven days.
Most of the times you will see that the page view has the most events in your account. But the page view is also the less valuable event.
Because it only has the page view and the URL where it was triggered. So you probably won't be using it after a couple of months for your audiences or journeys.
So basically after two, three months, this event becomes worthless. But we do save a lot of them. You'll also see the view content, for example, where there's a product viewed.
And that is an event that is valuable over a longer period profile and where their interests lie.
So we want to keep that a bit longer. Purchases are always valuable, so we won't be deleting those at all.
Per event, in the retention tab settings, you can add an override, or a retention. And you can add that for known profiles and unknown profiles.
So if we want to play it safe, but we do want to delete some page views because I have a lot of them. We can set it to six months, for example. We also have the connect update, which only gives us some information, we save it on the profile, but after that, we don't need the event, except for a bit of debugging, maybe.
And I saw the personalisation view was also quite represented in my account so I want to delete that as well get look at my stats for at least 12 months, so I want to keep that for a year, for both known and unknown profiles.
Please don't go deleting a lot of data because you're afraid of the extra costs. Email us if you need any help with setting this up.
A pro tip is also to just add these events to your AI chat. Add our manual to the AI chat, which has a few of those examples that are given in this video, and ask, and ask your AI chat to give you an advice.
It can help you start with setting this up. After you set this up, and if you are one of our older clients that has a lot of historic data, it will need some time to delete all the data that you have.
So you will see here that there are extra events, so the orange bars will have a top. Once it goes up and down again, you're there, so it will be stabilized.
Uhm, the bar in the overage or the account usage, will be calculated every night. So give it some time to see what the effect is of your retention settings.
So to summarize, we do have an overage fee for your data, but in the retention, you can set per event how useful or how valuable the event is and for how long.
And after that, you can delete them to keep this overage to a minimum. I hope to have saved you a bit of money.
Each night, data that exceeds your retention settings is automatically deleted. The graph in this section shows which data was removed and how much was deleted.
Profile retention settings
Profiles in Activate can be automatically deleted after a period of inactivity, meaning no new events have been received for that profile. The number of months you set here determines how long a profile or event is stored.
The overall retention applies to complete profiles and their events. This defines the number of months a profile must be inactive before it is permanently deleted. Below you’ll find an explanation of the different profile types in Spotler Activate:
Known profiles
Known profiles are those identified by an email address or an external user ID. Even if they become inactive for a while, it’s possible to recognise them again through a new event containing an email (such as a login or purchase) or via an email click tracked by the email hash.
By default, known profiles are retained indefinitely (set to 0). You can keep this setting or choose a long retention period, such as 24 months, as these profiles can often be re-identified. If your privacy policy states that data must be deleted after a certain period of inactivity, you can set that timeframe here.
Unknown profiles
Unknown profiles are those that have not been identified; only a cookie is available. If these profiles are inactive for an extended period, it’s unlikely they’ll return, as the cookie may expire or the user may switch to a new device. These profiles cannot be re-identified, so it’s safe to delete them after a certain amount of time.
The default retention for unknown profiles is 12 months of inactivity. If your business has seasonal products, you could extend this to 14 months to capture the previous season’s data. If historical data is less relevant for your personalisation or audiences, a shorter period such as 9 months could also be sufficient.
Once data is deleted, it cannot be restored. You can monitor what happens after the nightly deletion and adjust the retention period if needed.
Event retention settings
Not all events hold the same value for your marketing strategy. The event retention settings allow you to decide which events should be deleted after a certain time. You can set different retention periods for known and unknown profiles.
By default, no events are deleted. There’s no right or wrong configuration; this depends on your use cases, goals, and the data you rely on. There are a few pointers that can help you decide which events to keep and which to remove.
Which events consume the most storage
Although you can’t see the exact data size per event, you can check which events are triggered most often in the Data module under Overview. This tab shows how many times each event was triggered in the past 7 days. While this number changes daily and can be affected by seasonality, it gives you a good sense of the most active event types.
You can then identify which events lose their value over time. Examples of such events are:
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PageView & SessionStart
These are events which are triggered often, but only have a URL as extra data. They are useful for targeting users who visit specific pages, for example yourwebsite.com/store-locations where you want to target everyone who has search for your physical stores. However, they lose value after a few months. Pages such as category or product detail pages are also tracked through ViewContent or ViewCategory, so you won’t lose important data. For pages that remain relevant longer, consider setting up a custom event to make retargeting easier. -
CRMUpdate or similar events
These are typically used to update profile data from an external system, such as a CRM. Once the data is stored on the profile, the event itself becomes less valuable except for debugging. You can safely set a short retention period for these. -
PersonalizationView
If you have many personalisations that load on every page, this event can take up a lot of storage. Although not highly valuable itself, it’s used for personalisation statistics, so it’s best to keep it for a reasonable period to compare performance across time. -
Product-related events (e.g. ViewContent, AddToCart)
These are more valuable and often useful for a longer time. However, consider how long they contribute to your marketing strategy. Are they still really relevant after 12 or 18 months?
These examples should help you assess the importance of different events and determine an appropriate retention period. If you have any questions about setting up your data retention, don’t hesitate to contact our support team.