In-app guide step | Knock Docs

Docs

Platform

Workflows

In-app guide step

Learn how to make a recipient eligible for a guide directly from a workflow or broadcast step.

Use an in-app guide step to update a user's guide eligibility within a workflow or broadcast run. This is useful when eligibility is driven by the context of the workflow or broadcast. For example, recipients may become eligible for an onboarding modal after completing a certain action in a cross-channel onboarding campaign.

How it works

An in-app guide step references a guide by its key. When you add the step to a workflow or broadcast, Knock creates a managed static audience behind the scenes and links it to the guide's targeting rules. When the step executes for a recipient, Knock adds that recipient to the managed audience to make them eligible for the selected guide.

If the workflow or broadcast run includes a tenant ID, Knock adds the recipient to the audience as a user-tenant pair. Learn more about audiences and tenants.

To receive the rendered guide in your application, eligible audience members must also meet any guide targeting criteria set directly on the guide. This includes property-based targeting and activation rules. Guides may also be subject to throttling depending on how they've been prioritized against other guides your user is eligible for.

Adding an in-app guide step

Add the in-app guide step

In the workflow or broadcast builder, drag the In-app guide step onto your canvas. It's listed alongside your channel steps in the step panel.

Dragging the in-app guide step onto the workflow canvas

Select a committed guide

Select the guide you want to make recipients eligible for. Only guides that have been created and committed in the current environment are available for selection.

Selecting a committed guide in the in-app guide step

Add optional conditions

Add step conditions to control when the step should run.

Adding optional step conditions to the in-app guide step

Promoting the guide with the workflow

The in-app guide step references a guide by key, and that guide must be committed in the same environment as the workflow or broadcast. Publish the guide first so the dependency exists before Knock evaluates the step:

Create and configure the guide, then publish it.
Add the in-app guide step to your workflow and publish the workflow, or add the step to your broadcast.
Update the guide's audience targeting if needed. To only target recipients through the step, leave the guide's audience empty, then publish the guide again.

If you've enabled environments, follow the same order when you promote to each environment on the way to production: commit and promote the guide, then the workflow, then any guide targeting changes. If you promote the workflow first, the guide_key can't resolve and the step is invalid in the destination environment. Broadcasts aren't promoted, so create them in an environment where the guide already exists.

Guide targeting and the managed audience

When a guide is referenced by an in-app guide step, its Audience settings reflect that it's targeted by a workflow or broadcast step rather than, or in addition to, a manually selected audience. You can see which workflows and broadcasts trigger a given guide in the Triggered by section of the guide's details page in the dashboard.

Tenant context

When a workflow trigger includes a tenant ID, Knock includes that tenant ID in the recipient's audience membership context. This means the in-app guide step enrolls the recipient as a user-tenant pair, rather than as a user alone. The same applies when a broadcast run includes tenant context.

This context can affect guide eligibility when tenancy strict mode is enabled. See the tenancy strict mode documentation for details.

Frequently asked questions

Yes. In-app guide steps are supported in both workflows and broadcasts.

Not necessarily. As described in How it works, enrollment makes the guide eligible, but your application still needs to fetch (or refetch) guides for that recipient before the guide can render. See rendering guides for how to do this in your application.

Not through the in-app guide step itself, since it only adds recipients to the managed audience. If you need to revoke eligibility, use property-based targeting or activation rules on the guide to control when it's actually shown, rather than relying solely on audience membership.

The in-app guide step becomes invalid. Workflow or broadcast runs skip the invalid step and continue to the next step until the guide reference becomes valid again. Knock records the skipped step and error in the run log, but the run does not exit with an error state. Update the step to reference a different committed guide, or restore the guide's committed state.