Creating a Canvas

This reference article covers the necessary steps involved in creating, maintaining, and testing a Canvas. Follow this guide, or check out our Canvas Braze Learning course.

Original Canvas editor

You can no longer create or duplicate Canvases using the original Canvas experience. Braze recommends cloning your Canvases to Canvas Flow.

Creating a Canvas

Step 1: Set up a new Canvas

First, go to Messaging > Canvas, then select Create Canvas.

The Canvas builder will guide you step-by-step through setting up your Canvas—everything from naming it to setting conversion events and bringing the right users into your customer journey. Select each of the following tabs to view which settings you can adjust for each builder step.

• basics
• entry schedule
• target audience
• send settings
• build canvas
• summary

Step 1.1: Start with your Canvas basics

Here, you’ll name your Canvas, assign Teams, and create or add Tags. You can also assign conversion events for the Canvas.

Choose conversion events

Choose your conversion event type, then select the conversions to record. These conversion events will measure the efficiency of your Canvas.

If your Canvas has multiple variants or a control group, Braze will use this conversion event to determine the best variation for achieving this conversion goal. Using the same logic, you can create multiple conversion events.

Step 1.2: Determine your Canvas entry schedule

You can choose one of three ways in which users can enter your Canvas.

Entry schedule types

• scheduled delivery
• action-based delivery
• api-triggered delivery

After selecting your delivery method, adjust the settings to match your use case, then continue to setting your target audience.

Deduplicate behavior for Canvases using the original editor

Should the window of re-eligibility be less than the maximum duration of the Canvas, a user will be allowed to re-enter and receive more than one component’s messages. In the edge case where a user’s re-entry reaches the same component as its previous entry, Braze will deduplicate that component’s messages.

If a user re-enters the Canvas, reaches the same component as their previous entry, and is eligible for an in-app message for each entry, the user will get the message twice (depending on in-app message priority) as long as they re-open a session two times.

Step 1.3: Set your target entry audience

You can set the target audience for your Canvas on the Target Audience step. Only the users who match your defined criteria can enter the journey, meaning Braze evaluates the target audience for eligibility first before users enter the Canvas journey. For example, if you want to target new users, you can select a segment of users who first used your app less than a week ago.

Under Entry Controls, you can limit the number of users every time the Canvas is scheduled to run. For API trigger-based and action-based Canvases, this limit occurs at every UTC hour.

Testing your audience

After adding segments and filters to your target audience, you can test if your audience is set up as expected by looking up a user to confirm if they match the audience criteria.

Selecting entry controls

Entry controls determine if users are allowed to re-enter a Canvas. You can also limit the number of people who would potentially enter this Canvas by a selected cadence (daily, lifetime of the Canvas, or every time the Canvas is scheduled).

For example, if you select Limit entrance volume and set the Maximum entries field to 5,000 users with Daily as the limit cadence, then the Canvas will only send to 5,000 users per day.

Setting exit criteria

Setting the exit criteria determines which users you want to exit a Canvas. If a user performs the exception event or matches the segments and filters, they won’t receive any further messages.

Calculating target population

In the Target Population section, you can view a summary of your audience, such as your selected segments and additional filters, and a breakdown of how many users are reachable per messaging channel. To calculate the exact number of reachable users in your target audience instead of the default estimation, select Calculate exact statistics.

Note that:

• Calculating exact statistics can take a few minutes to run. This function only calculates the exact statistics at the segment level, not at the filter or filter group level.
• For large segments, it is normal to see slight variation even when calculating exact statistics. The accuracy of this feature is expected to be 99.999% or greater.

To view additional statistics, such as the average lifetime revenue for targeted users, select Show Additional Statistics.

Why the target audience count could differ from the reachable users count

The target population size that displayed in a campaign or Canvas may differ from the reachable audience size for a segment, even if you’re directly adding that segment into your campaign or Canvas without additional filters. This may happen for several reasons:

• When a Global Control Group applies to a campaign or Canvas, users in that Global Control Group are excluded in the reachable users count.
• The target population size on a campaign or Canvas excludes users that aren’t contactable through various message channels; the behavior differs from channel to channel. For example, the reachable audience for a campaign or Canvas excludes users who are unsubscribed, marked as spam (for emails), or soft bounced (for emails). The segment itself, however, only excludes opt-outs when showing the estimated number of email reachable users.
• Braze only sends SMS messages to users within the selected subscription group, so the SMS target population for a campaign or Canvas will also exclude any users who aren’t part of your selected subscription group.

Step 1.4: Select your send settings

Select Send Settings to edit your subscription settings, turn on rate limiting, and to turn on Quiet Hours. By turning on rate limiting or frequency capping, you can ease the marketing pressure placed on your users and ensure you aren’t over messaging them.

For Canvases targeting email and push channels, you may want to limit your Canvas so that only the users who are explicitly opted in will receive the message (excluding subscribed or unsubscribed users). For example, say you have three users of different opt-in status:

• User A is subscribed to email and is push enabled. This user doesn’t receive the email but will receive the push.
• User B is opted-in to email but is not push enabled. This user will receive the email but doesn’t receive the push.
• User C is opted-in to email and is push enabled. This user will receive both the email and the push.

To do so, set the Subscription Settings to send this Canvas to “opted-in users only”. This option will ensure that only opted-in users will receive your email, and Braze will only send your push to users who are push enabled by default.

These subscription settings are applied on a per-step basis, meaning that there is no effect on the entry audience. So, this setting is used to evaluate a user’s eligibility to receive each Canvas step.

If desired, specify Quiet Hours (the time during which your messages will not be sent) for your Canvas. Check Enable Quiet Hours in your Send Settings. Then, select your Quiet Hours in your user’s local time and what action will follow if the message triggers inside of those Quiet Hours.

Step 2: Build your Canvas

Step 2.1: Add a variant

Select Add Variant, then add a new variant to your Canvas. Variants represent a journey that your users will take and can contain multiple steps and branches.

You can add additional variants by selecting the plus button. When you add new variants, you’ll be able to adjust how your users will be distributed between them so that you can cross-compare and analyze the efficacy of different engagement strategies.

Step 2.2: Add Canvas steps

You can add more steps to your Canvas workflow by dragging and dropping components from the Components sidebar. Or, select the plus button to add a component with the popover menu.

Maximum duration

As your Canvas journey increases in steps, the maximum duration is the longest possible time a user can take to complete this Canvas. This is calculated by adding the delays and trigger windows of each step for each variant for the longest path. For example, if your Canvas has a Delay step with a delay of 3 days and a Message step, the maximum duration of your Canvas will be 3 days.

Editing a step

Looking to edit a step in your user journey? Check out how to do this depending on your Canvas workflow!

You can edit any step in your Canvas Flow workflow by selecting any of the components. For example, let’s say you want to edit your first step, a Delay component, in your workflow to a specific day. Select the step to view its settings and adjust your delay to March 1. This means on March 1, your users will move to the next step in your Canvas.

Or you can quickly edit and adjust the Action Settings of your Action Paths step to hold users for a window of time. This prioritizes their next path based on the actions during this evaluation period.

The lightweight components in Canvas allow for a simple editing experience, so adjusting the finer details of your Canvas is made easier.

Messages in Canvas

Edit the messages in a Canvas component to control messages that a particular step will send. Canvas can send email, mobile, and web push messages, and webhooks to integrate with other systems. Similar to campaigns, you can use certain Liquid templating to personalize your messages.

The Message component manages the messages sent to users. You can select your Messaging Channels and adjust Delivery Settings to optimize your Canvas messaging. For more details on this component, check out Message.

Select Done after you’ve finished configuring your Canvas component.

• canvas entry properties
• event properties

Step 2.3: Edit connections

To move a connection between steps, select the arrow connecting the two components and select a different component. To remove the connection, select the arrow followed by Cancel Connection in the footer of the Canvas composer.

Step 3: Add a control group

You can add a control group to your Canvas by selecting the plus button to add a new variant.

Braze will track the conversions for users who are placed into the control group, although they will not receive any messages. To preserve an accurate test, we will track the number of conversions for your variants and the control group for exactly the same amount of time, as shown on the conversion event selection screen.

You can adjust the distribution between your messages by double-clicking the Variant Name headers.

In this example, we have our Canvas divided into two variants. Variant 1 has 70% of the users. The second variant is a control group with the remaining 30% of users.

Intelligent Selection for Canvas

Intelligent Selection capabilities are now available within multivariate Canvases. Similar to the Intelligent Selection feature for multivariate Campaigns, Intelligent Selection for Canvas analyzes the performance of each Canvas variant and adjusts the percentage of users being funneled through each variant. This distribution is based on each variant’s performance metrics to maximize the total expected number of conversions.

Keep in mind that multivariate Canvases allow you to test more than copy, but timing and channels as well. Through Intelligent Selection, you can test Canvases more efficiently and have confidence that your users will be sent on the best possible Canvas journey.

Intelligent Selection for Canvas optimizes your Canvas results by making gradual real-time adjustments to the distribution of users sorted into each variant. When the statistical algorithm determines a decisive winner among your variants, it will rule out the underperforming variants and slot all future eligible recipients of the Canvas into the Winning Variants.

For this reason, Intelligent Selection works best on Canvases that have new users entering frequently.

Step 4: Save and launch

After you’re done creating your Canvas, select Launch Canvas to save and launch your Canvas. After you’ve launched your Canvas, you’ll be able to view analytics for your journey as they come in on the Canvas Details page.

You can also save your Canvas as a draft if you need to come back to it.