Guide or Survey seen too often

Users sometimes report seeing the same guide or survey repeatedly, or receiving more guides and surveys than you intended. Most often, you notice the issue in your analytics first: a single user logs an unexpectedly high number of Guide Viewed events. This page describes the most common causes and how to fix them.

This article assumes you know how to configure a guide or survey. If you need a refresher, review Setup and Targeting and Throttling before proceeding.

Troubleshooting checklist

Use these questions as a quick checklist when a guide or survey appears too often. If you can answer "yes" to a question, that setting is unlikely to be the cause of your issue.

Is "Stop showing when completed" enabled?

The Limits section of the builder controls whether an experience can repeat. Amplitude enables Stop showing when completed by default. When you disable it, the experience remains eligible to trigger again after the user completes it, so the same user can see it every time the trigger condition fires.

Is "Stop showing when dismissed" enabled?

Amplitude also enables Stop showing when dismissed by default. When you disable it, the experience can trigger again after the user dismisses it. If users close a guide and it reappears on their next page load, check this setting first.

Is a cooldown configured, and is it long enough?

If you disabled Stop showing when dismissed on purpose, add a cooldown to limit how often the experience can trigger for a user. Without a cooldown, the experience can fire every time its trigger condition matches. If a cooldown exists but users still see the experience too often, increase its duration.

Is throttling turned on for your project?

Throttling sets a global limit on how many guides or surveys each user sees within a period (day, week, month, or session). Throttling settings for guides and surveys are separate, so confirm you configured the one that's causing complaints. Also check the Time Between setting, which enforces a delay between sequential guides for the same user.

Is the trigger broader than you intended?

A guide with the Immediately trigger and no page targeting fires on every page load until a limit stops it. Review the When and Where settings to confirm the trigger and page conditions match your intent. Narrow the Where condition to specific pages if the experience should only appear in one part of your product.

Does the user resolve to the same identity across sessions?

Amplitude stores the guides and surveys a user has encountered as part of their user history. If a user's identity changes between visits, Amplitude treats them as a new user and shows the experience again. This happens when users don't always receive a user ID and their device ID changes frequently, for example when anonymous users clear cookies or browse in incognito mode.

A related symptom is a user profile with many merged Amplitude IDs. When an existing user starts a new session with a new device ID and without a user ID, Amplitude treats them as a new user and shows the experience again. Later, the user signs in and receives a user ID, and Amplitude merges the two IDs into a single profile. That Amplitude profile will now show both Viewed events which can be unintuitive when a guide or survey was configured to be seen only once.

The most robust setup is to initialize the Guides and Surveys SDK only after the user signs in and has a proper user ID.

Situations that look like over-delivery

Some expected behaviors can feel like a guide or survey appears too often.

The reporting user is a test user

When a guide or survey uses the Testing status, Amplitude ignores limits for test users to make testing easier. Test users also continue to receive the guide or survey after you change its status to Published or Scheduled. If an internal user reports seeing an experience repeatedly, check whether their device ID, user ID, or cohort appears in the Test users section.Similarly, devices left in Test User mode (mobile only) don't render guides and surveys the way regular users do. Turn Test User mode off after you finish debugging.

Something bypassed throttling

Throttling and cooldowns don't apply in every situation. Amplitude ignores them when:

The guide or survey has Urgent priority.
A force trigger displays the experience: the SDK, a call to action (CTA) in another guide, the Amplitude Assistant, or a share link. A share link also overrides audience targeting, so users who follow a link with the guide's query parameter attached see the guide regardless of their history.
Someone reset the user's interactions with the guide through the user profile. Clearing a guide from a user's history makes that user eligible to see it again.

The guide is active and follows the user

When a user first views a guide or survey, it becomes active and remains active until the user completes or dismisses it. An active guide shows up on every page load and follows the user across pages, even where the trigger condition didn't fire. This is expected behavior, not a repeat display. The guide stops following the user after they complete or dismiss it.

To confirm the active state is the cause, inspect the guide's display events in the Event Explorer. The source.type property shows whether the active state or a new trigger caused each display.

The user snoozed the guide instead of dismissing it

If the experience is snoozable, a snoozed guide reappears after the snooze duration passes. Users who snooze rather than dismiss see the experience again by design. Increase the snooze duration if it reappears too quickly.

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