Publishing makes an experience live for the users its settings target. This article covers publishing a draft, pushing edits to a live experience, scheduling when it goes live or comes down, unpublishing it, and checking its publish history. Some teams call this launching or going live.

Prerequisites

• The Admin or Publisher role. Editors can build and change settings, but can't publish, push, discard, or unpublish. If your role can't, the button shows: "Your role cannot publish experiences. Ask an account admin or publisher."
• The experience's settings are set: who sees it, where, and when. See Configure an experience's settings.

You can publish from the top of the experience's editor or from the menu (⋮) on its card on the Experiences page. The steps below use the editor.

Publish an experience

1. Open the experience. The header shows Draft.
2. Click Publish. The Publish experience dialog opens.
3. Click Publish. "Experience published" appears, and the header shows Live.

The experience shows to qualifying users the next time its trigger happens, for example when they load a matching page.

Push changes to a live experience

Edits to a live experience save as you work, but users keep seeing the live version until you push them.

1. Edit the experience's content or settings. The header shows Unpublished changes next to Live.
2. Click Push changes. The Push changes dialog opens.
3. Click Push changes. "Changes pushed" appears, and users see the new version.

Pushing changes doesn't reset who has seen the experience. A user who saw an experience set to Show once won't see it again. To show it again, clone it and publish the clone.

Discard unpublished changes

To throw away your edits and go back to the live version:

1. Click the arrow next to Push changes.
2. Click Discard changes. The Discard unpublished changes dialog opens.
3. Click Discard changes. "Unpublished changes discarded" appears, and the experience matches the live version again.

Schedule an experience

Schedule an experience to go live, come down, or both at a set date and time, for example for a launch or a time-limited offer.

1. Click the arrow next to Publish or Push changes.
2. Click Schedule. The Schedule publishing dialog opens.
3. Under Starts, choose When I publish or At a specific date/time. For a specific time, pick the date and the time.
4. Under Ends, choose When I unpublish or At a specific date/time. For a specific time, pick the date and the time.
5. Click Save schedule. The experience shows Scheduled.

Hover over the time zone note in the dialog to see which time zone the schedule uses. A date in the past takes effect as soon as you save. The end must be after the start.

To change or cancel a schedule, click the arrow, then Edit schedule. Change the dates and click Save schedule, or click Remove schedule.

Checklists can't be scheduled.

Unpublish an experience

Unpublishing stops an experience from showing to anyone. It stays in your list with its settings and analytics, and you can publish it again later.

1. Click the arrow next to Publish or Push changes.
2. Click Unpublish. The Unpublish experience dialog opens.
3. Click Unpublish. "Experience unpublished" appears.

To remove an experience from your list as well, archive it. See Find and manage experiences.

Check the publish history

1. Click the arrow next to Publish or Push changes.
2. Click Publish history. A panel lists every Published, Changes pushed, Changes discarded, and Unpublished event, newest first, with who did it and when.

You can also open it from the history icon in Who changed this, at the bottom of the Settings tab.

Preview before you publish

Click the arrow, then Preview to see the experience on your site, or Preview from beginning to start from the first step. See Preview and Test Flows.

If you can't publish

• The Publish button is greyed out. Hover over it for the reason. The most common ones:
  • Your role can't publish. Ask an Admin or Publisher.
  • The experience is archived. Unarchive it first.
• "This experience targets a segment that is switched off." Turn the Segment back on, then publish again.
• The Flow is part of a Workflow. The Workflow decides when it shows, so publishing happens there. Click Open workflow in Studio.
• It's a legacy NPS survey. Publish it in Appcues Studio.
• It's live but nobody sees it. Check its settings and installation. See Troubleshoot Flows.

Still stuck?

Collect the following and contact support:

• The experience's URL and Experience ID (in Settings > Who changed this).
• The exact message you see, if any.
• When you tried, with your time zone.
• A screenshot of the header and the publish menu.