Why does segment processing take so much more time than before?

[SeanK260]

Anyone having this issue with segments? Contact segments used to take maximum 3 minutes to refresh for the last 4 years. Now every single segment takes more than 30 minutes, ten times longer! I've opened multiple tickets and called support several times. It hasn't changed. I have 10k LESS contacts than I had last year after a major purge, so it doesn't seem to be number of contacts. Does anyone have any tips on how to reduce the time it takes?

[SeanK260]

Hi all. Segment processing times have improved since the initial post in April when the timing issue was initially discovered. If you see processing times longer than a half hour, please contact our Support team for assistance.

[SeanK260]

My segments used to take maximum 3 minutes to refresh. Now it is 30 minutes. I actually have 10k LESS contacts than I had last year after a major purge, so it's not number of contacts.

Segments are totally unusable in their current state. What the heck is going on?

[Caitlin_M]

Hi @SeanK260. If you delete and recreate the segment, does it populate within a few minutes or are you still seeing a loading message?

[DebraG442]

This needs to be HIGH priority. We have had segments "processing" for several days. This is messing up our entire email marketing schedule. We have emails go unsent because they are not working and now we are totally off on our schedule

[SeanK260]

This is killing us as well. We went from waiting 45 minutes for a segment to process to them being completely broken. I can see that our recent campaigns sent duplicate emails to multiple contacts because the segments for "no emails sent in the last 7 days" are not working.

[SeanK260]

Hi Caitlin, thanks for your help with this.

I created a brand new segment to test this. The segment was the simplest I could make it: include contacts that are on one contact list. I included no other filters.

It's been now processing for 12 minutes. This is something that took less than 30 seconds a few months ago. Anything you can do to help will be appreciated.

Sean

[Caitlin_M]

Hi @SeanK260. I spoke with our advanced support team and they are actively investigating the issue. There isn't any information to share at this time in regards to a date when a fix could be implemented so until then, there is an increased wait time for the segment to be created and populate with contacts.

[SeanK260]

Thank you very much Caitlin, it's  helpful just to have this acknowledged as a problem. In my previous requests for support it feels like it wasn't seen as a real issue (maybe because it works eventually) but it's having a major impact on our processes.

Thanks again,

Sean Kennedy

[SeanK260]

Not sure if it helps but I'm seeing new records today:

In an email campaign you can't send to a segment that is still processing, so this slows the whole process down.

I read that "The segment refreshes before each send, ensuring that you're reaching the most current group of contacts that meet your criteria." - Does this mean that when I click send the segment refreshes, checking the criteria at the moment of sending? If so it's doing those refreshes a lot faster than the creation or manual update times.

That came from: https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/email-digital-marketing/articles/KnowledgeBase/25205-Defin...

Thank you,

Sean

[Caitlin_M]

Hi @SeanK260. Good question. The segment would still be in a processing mode so it wouldn't be able to update at the moment of sending.

[SeanK260]

Hi Caitlin, we are really struggling here. Segments haven't worked at all now for three days. Is there an ETA for a fix?

We are now getting reports that our contacts are getting multiple emails from us because the "hasn't been sent an mail in 7 days" segment filter is not working at all. I've got segments in "processing" for 12 hours, but the end result is not correct even when they finish.

We can't use Constant Contact without this functionality. This crucial feature has been getting worse now for three weeks and there have been no results from CC support despite me contacting phone and chat support a dozen times.

I'm tired of accumulating forum support badges because nothing is getting done.

[SeanK260]

@Caitlin_M Just wanted to follow up and thank you for your efforts in validating and resolving this issue. Things have been great with all of our segments recently, and the experience now seems to be better than before the problems started. Thank you very much for your help. It was a difficult road but today lets take the win!

Sean Kennedy

[Caitlin_M]

You're so welcome, @SeanK260! Some work is being done behind the scenes to narrow down what is causing the slow loading times and take steps to fully fix it. I'm glad to hear that your segments are loading faster. 

[user5185]

I've been attempting to create a segment for the first time, pulling from a "List" of approx 310 contacts and with one filter and it has been "processing" for 30 mins at this point. After reading through the above comments, I was hoping that this issue would have been resolved in the last 3-4 months but it seems to be an issue still! I too could have just done the task manually and been done by now!

[KristinS]

Right now, mine is taking over an hour to segment 18 names from a list of 85. I could've done it manually by now.

[STARRS-23]

I've now waited 7 hours and the Segment pulling a tag still shows no contacts in it, even though I checked and contacts have that tag. A previous segment still doesn't not show the new contacts I added to another tag and it's been 10 hours. When I am about the send an email, I click on Refresh Count multiple times but it still says "0 Recipients — Last Refreshed: 7 hours ago". Frustrating.

[STARRS-23]

UPDATE: I was under a time crunch to send an email out with meeting information that day. I contacted support and they were unable to fix the problem but offered a temporary work around. They turned the segment into a list so I was able to send it out in time. By the way, the segments I had created are still not populated with the right number of recipients even thought it's now been well over 36 hours. All I did was ask it to send an email to only the people who had a certain Tag, nothing complex. Hope CC can fix Segments soon. I have other clients who use Segments.

[SeanK260]

Segments are still not working well but I thought I'd provide my feedback regarding your issues since I may have relevant experience.

We used to use tags and one day they stopped working in segments and never worked again. I think this might be the issue you are running into. Here's a bunch of people talking about it: https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Questions-Discussions/Segments-using-tags-stopped-working/m...

Another thing that might be relevant is that if you use the "no email sent in the last 7 days" filter in segments but haven't sent ANY emails in the last 7 days it will return 0 contacts. It's counter intuitive but the "no emails in the last x days" filters require there to be at least one thing sent during their timeframe to actually work. It's like it needs something to exclude and if it doesn't have that it excludes everything.

I often have to send the same email from multiple email address since I'm working on behalf of many people, so the way I get around this limitation is by sending one campaign using a normal list, then for subsequent campaigns I switching to using segments with "no email sent in the last 7 days." This process prevents duplicate emails being sent to the same contact from different senders.

Good luck!

Sean

[user1152]

Circling back on this as I have been waiting for over 3 hours for a segment to load and it is a really easy segment of only about 150 contacts.  Please get this issue fixed! 

[Caitlin_M]

Hi all. Segment processing times have improved since the initial post in April when the timing issue was initially discovered. If you see processing times longer than a half hour, please contact our Support team for assistance.