N Per limits

An N Per limit restricts the number of records per grouping variable, allowing you to apply contact strategy rules to your audience. Use N Per limits to control how many times the same household, email address, or other entity appears in your audience.

Target specific geographic areas

You need two records per household income level, prioritising customers from a particular region.

You can apply two per income, then order by town. The system selects two people from each income band, prioritising residents from the specific town where available, and filling remaining slots with customers from other towns.

Applying an N Per limit

To apply an N Per limit to your audience:

  1. Go to Audiences and create or select an existing audience. See Creating an audience.

  2. Click Apply Limits.

  3. Expand the N Per section.

  4. Enter the Amount (typically 1).

  5. Under Per, click + Add Variable.

  6. Choose the variable that defines your grouping (for example, Household URN or Email Address).

  7. Under Order By, click + Add Variable.

    Note: Ordering works for both ordered variables (such as age bands or income ranges) and nominal variables (such as town, region, or mobile provider). For nominal variables, you define your own priority order by selecting specific categories and arranging them in your preferred order. This controls which records the system prioritises when selecting your audience members.

  8. Choose your variable to order the records by.

    Tip: Consider whether you need multiple priority categories or just one primary category.

    Tip: When applying a limit with sequential selection, you can use URN (Unique Record Number) variables to determine the order of record selection.

  9. For nominal variables, select the categories you want to prioritise and click the right arrow to move them to the Ordered Values column.

  10. Click and drag your Ordered Values, to arrange as required.

  11. Click Apply.

  12. Set the order direction to Descending.

    Note: Descending order ensures that your priority categories appear first. Selecting Ascending order may prioritise unclassified records.

  13. Click Apply.

The system now selects records based on your defined priority order, ensuring your most important categories appear first in each N Per group.

Tip: Test your ordering with a small audience first to verify the results match your expectations.

Note: Remember that ordering affects selection priority, not filtering. Other categories still appear when your priority items are unavailable.