As a Memberium Pro subscriber, you have exclusive access to the new background syncing feature. Once enabled, this feature will automatically pull down new changes to your members’ contact records.
What this Solves
Traditionally, a contact sync would only occur during login or when an Update Contact HTTP POST was made via Keap. The downside to this is busy sites that apply and remove many tags frequently, those tag changes wouldn’t show up on the site until the next contact sync occurred.
As an example, if a member is currently logged into the site and their subscription renewal fails, the tag that Keap applied to remove their access wouldn’t be recognized by Memberium until the member logged out and back in (there are other ways to sync a contact).
Enabling background sync means the same member above would be locked out of the content within 5 minutes of the tag being applied in Keap. Memberium would see the new tag and then cut off their access. This is just one example.
How to Enable Background Sync
Enabling background sync is simple. Note: this feature is available only to Memberium Pro and Advanced licenses
Go to Memberium > Settings > Performance and look for Background Sync
You will see two settings. Sync Size and Sync Tag
Sync Size: This setting determines how many contacts will be synced at each interval (5 minutes). While the maximum is 1000 contacts, it’s important to note that this feature is highly tunable. You can set it to 500, 250, 100, 42, or any number that suits your site’s needs and hosting capabilities. Balancing fewer contacts per sync (which results in more API calls) and more contacts per sync (which leads to a heavier database load) is key to optimizing performance.
Sync Tag: This setting is required. You’ll need to select a tag that your members/contacts in Keap have. If a member doesn’t have the tag set here, they won’t sync in the background. Regular syncing during login will still happen. This is required so Memberium can quickly identify who it should sync as not all contacts in Keap are members on your site. I’d recommend creating a specific tag such as “Background Sync” or “Site Member” that every site member gets in your fulfillment campaign.
Replacing Sync-on-Login
The background sync feature is designed to replace the sync-on-login. Running both simultaneously can lead to API surges that overload your API quota. Moreover, it’s counterproductive as the data pre-cached during the background sync would be discarded unused during login. Therefore, it’s recommended to use the background sync feature for a more efficient and effective synchronization process.
Temporary Workaround to Keap Issue
The way this feature works is Memberium looks at the “updated date” of each contact in Keap. If it sees the contact has been updated, it pulls down all the changes.
There is currently an issue with Keap where if a tag gets applied, the updated date doesn’t change on the contact. This means Memberium wouldn’t be able to see the contact changed and sync down the new tag. Keap is aware of this issue, but they haven’t released a fix. As a workaround, what you can do is update a field on the contact record. It can be any field and the change can be any change.
In a campaign, that might look like this above. A set field action after a tag is applied.
Keap should release a fix for this issue and we’ll update this page once we confirm it’s been fixed. In the meantime, you’ll need to use the workaround above to make the background sync feature work when only tag updates were made.
API & Server Limits
There are some limits to this feature that you should keep in mind. There isn’t any upper limit on the total number of members this feature can handle. Some of it depends on server performance, how much data on each contact is changing, how many contacts are changing at a time, etc. The more changes, the more power your web server will need to process all of the requests.
If the sync can’t complete a pass for some reason, it will self-heal and automatically recover pretty quickly.
As mentioned earlier, if the server has enough juice though, it should be able to handle updating 120,000 contacts per hour.
When it comes to API limits, Keap does have limits on how many calls can be made at any given time. To maximize these, you should sync as few fields as possible. This can be set under Memberium > Sync Options > Fields.
If you have 200 fields, and 1000 contacts get updated it’s got to process 200,000 fields per pass. We do try to skip fields that haven’t changed, but at the end of the day, you’re still processing that data and could run into a wall.
Final Thoughts
This feature opens the door to almost instant contact syncing compared to traditional solutions. It’s also less API intensive than the Contact Update HTTP POST which means greater scale is possible.
If you currently have a Standard license and want to upgrade to Pro in order to get this feature, click the button below to contact the support team. The same goes if you have ANY questions at all. We’re always ready to help however we can!
