In-app guides

The in-app guide channel powers in-product messaging such as banners, modals, paywalls, and announcements using your own UI components. You configure a guide's content, targeting, and activation rules in the Knock dashboard, and your application fetches and renders eligible guides for the current user at runtime.

This page covers how guides work as a channel. For implementation details, see our guides documentation under building in-app UI.

Unlike other Knock channels, the in-app guide channel does not generate messages directly from a workflow step. Instead, guides create messages in the background that are fetched on demand for eligible users:

1. You create a guide in the dashboard. Each guide has content based on a message type, targeting rules that determine which users are eligible, and activation rules that determine where in your product the guide appears.
2. Your application requests guides for the current user. Using a client SDK or the guides API, your application asks Knock for the guides the current user is eligible to see, optionally passing runtime data and a tenant to inform targeting and personalization.
3. Knock evaluates eligibility and returns guide data. Knock evaluates the user against each guide's targeting and activation rules, applies any ordering and throttling, and returns the matching guides' content.
4. Your application renders the guide. Your engineering team owns the UI layer, so you render the returned content with your own components. Knock ships pre-built React components for common patterns like banners, modals, and cards.

Because eligibility is evaluated when a guide is fetched, a guide reflects the user's current audience membership, properties, and application state at render time. For more information on how you can make a user eligible for a guide during a workflow or broadcast run, see using guides with workflows and broadcasts below.

The in-app guide channel is listed under Channels and sources in your Knock dashboard. It has its own unique channel ID, which you use to initialize the guides provider in your client SDK or to call the guides API directly. Knock currently supports only one guide channel per account, so you will not be able to add additional guides channels.

Guides themselves are created and managed under the Guides page in your dashboard. Guides are version controlled like workflows, so you can create a guide in your development environment and promote it to production when ready.

Guides are not a channel step in the same way as email or the in-app feed, but you can influence guide eligibility from a workflow or broadcast. The in-app guide step enrolls a recipient into a guide's targeting the moment the step runs, so a cross-channel campaign can make a user eligible for an onboarding modal or an upgrade banner in your application.

You can also manage eligibility through audiences: use the update audience function to add a user to a static audience referenced in a guide's targeting rules, or the update user function to change properties that a guide's targeting conditions depend on.