Maintain the Send Log
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Clean and maintain send log data extensions.
- Ensure send logging is not a single point of failure for sends.
In the previous unit, you followed along as Michele set up NTO’s send logging data extensions for all of their sends. As we’ve mentioned, it’s important to remember that each send logging data extension is capturing all enabled sends related to an MID. And that’s a lot of messages. So how do you keep from accumulating too much data and slowing down your sends?
You follow best practices! Let’s talk about the steps you can take to keep your send logging on track.
Use Staging Data Extensions to Handle High Record Counts
First, remember that it’s always best to remove data from the send logging data extension and move it to a long-term storage data extension. The previous unit highlighted how you can use data extract activities to do this. But you may outgrow that method if you start dealing with millions and millions of records. To handle high record counts, you may want to use the initial long-term data extension as a staging data extension and then move it to different locations, such as remarketing or sale data extensions. That way, you can run your activities using separate data extensions and reduce the load even further.
Modify Your Schedule Based on Activity Run Time
In any case, you should limit the number of activities that use a single data extension, especially concurrently. In the previous unit, Michele created the two imports and set them to run about 6 hours apart. She may need to modify that amount of time if the activities take longer to process. Pay close attention to how long your activities require to run and modify your schedule accordingly.
Use Data Retention Policies
And, of course, you should always use data retention policies to manage the amount of data in the data extensions used for send logging. We recommend a maximum limit of 10 days to retain data. You can change data retention policies for your data extensions later, but it’s always good to start with a solid policy in place.
Plan Ahead for Your Data Extension Fields
It’s not ideal to add additional fields to an existing data extension, so plan ahead to make sure you have the custom fields you need in place before you start. Send logging data extensions start out with a few standard template fields, and you can add more to capture data from programmatic languages like AMPscript or Guide Template Language. Still, limit those fields to 10 or less to prevent processing load on that data extension. Remember, you’re going to ask this data extension to do a lot of work, and you should make that work as meaningful and productive as possible.
And, of course, it’s best to start following these best practices from the very beginning of your send logging. Fixing mistakes down the road is possible, but it takes time and intervention. You can avoid most pitfalls by planning accordingly and making sure that you reduce the load of send logging on your accounts. Once you’re up and running, you’ll have a wealth of new data to power your marketing activities.