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Overview

When you run more than one referral program on the same site, each program has its own call-to-action, but they can end up opening the same share experience. A customer clicks the CTA for one program and the share experience that opens belongs to another one. This is not a broken CTA and it is not a mis-targeted campaign. It happens because the programs share a zone name for the share experience, and Extole keeps each person in one program at a time. This page explains the behavior and the setting that fixes it.

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How Extole Picks Which Program Answers a Zone

A zone is a named place on your site where Extole serves content. When a zone request arrives, Extole gathers every live campaign that publishes that zone name — the candidates — and then decides between them in a fixed order:

1. Journey check. If the person is already in a journey that one of the candidates owns, that candidate answers. The person stays in the program they are already in.
2. Journey entry. Only if no candidate matches an existing journey does Extole start a new journey and pick a candidate for it.

That order is what keeps a returning advocate’s experience consistent: someone part-way through one program does not get pulled into another one because they landed on a different page. It also produces the behavior on this page. When only one campaign publishes a zone name, there is only ever one candidate, so the zone always serves that program. When several campaigns publish the same zone name, the journey check runs first — and once the person holds a journey, that journey decides, whichever CTA they clicked.

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Why the Share Experience Is the Zone That Collides

Every CTA has a CTA Popup Zone Name setting, which names the zone the CTA opens. On the call-to-action component it defaults to share_experience, so programs built from the same theme inherit the same value. (Some themes set a different default — the welcome offer themes use welcome_experience — but sibling programs built the same way still share whichever one they inherit.) So two programs built from the same theme both publish that zone, both point their CTAs at it, and neither team has done anything wrong. The collision is the default rather than a misconfiguration, and it appears as soon as the second program goes live. The result for a customer with more than one program available to them:

• Their first CTA click creates a journey and serves that program’s share experience. This is correct.
• Every later CTA click, for any of the programs, matches that first journey and serves the same share experience — even though they clicked a different program’s CTA.

Which program a person is pinned to therefore depends on which CTA they happened to click first, which is why the symptom looks intermittent and customer-specific.

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What Does Not Fix It

Two things that look like the fix are not:

• The program label on the share experience request. The label sets which program is preferred when a new journey is started. A visitor who already holds a journey never reaches that step, so the label leaves them where they are.
• Adjusting the program-label rules on the campaigns. The person is not being excluded by a rule — they are being matched by an existing journey, which happens first.

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How to Fix It

There are two remedies, and they trade a campaign change against a site change.

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Option 1: Give Each Program Its Own Share Experience Zone

Recommended when you can change the campaigns. Each zone then has a single candidate, so the click decides again:

1. For each program, choose a distinct zone name — for example share_experience_poa, share_experience_will.
2. In each campaign, open the CTA component’s basic settings and set CTA Popup Zone Name to that program’s name.
3. Build and publish every campaign you changed.
4. Update any place that requests the old shared zone name directly — site tags, app integrations, email links, and promotion links — so they ask for the program’s new name.

Once each share experience zone name is published by one campaign, the CTA click is what selects the program again, because the single candidate is reached through journey entry rather than journey check.

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Option 2: Send an Explicit Journey Hint

Recommended when changing the campaigns is not practical. journey.campaign_id is a high-priority targeting hint that is considered ahead of the visitor’s existing journey, so a share experience request carrying the intended campaign’s id is served by that campaign even when the visitor is already in a sibling program’s journey. See Targeting for how explicit hints rank against normal selection. This keeps one shared zone name and moves the work to whatever makes the share experience request — each CTA has to send the hint for its own program. Test it on one program before rolling it out; the hint has to reach the request that opens the share experience, not only an earlier page view.

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How to Confirm the Behavior

Test with a fresh browser session per program, and test the collision deliberately:

1. In a clean session, click one program’s CTA and confirm the share experience that opens belongs to that program.
2. In the same session, click a different program’s CTA. Before the fix, the first program’s share experience opens again. After the fix, the second program’s own share experience opens.
3. Repeat in a new clean session starting with the other program, to confirm the result follows the fix and not the order of clicks.

Testing each program only in its own clean session hides the problem entirely, because a fresh visitor holds no journey and the journey check has nothing to match.

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Measuring How Many Customers Were Affected

To size the impact, compare the program a person’s CTA views belong to against the program that served their share experience, per person. Two things will give you a wrong answer:

• The share experience step’s own source column reports the zone name as read back from the campaign that rendered it, so it always agrees with itself and reports no mismatches.
• Pairing a CTA view to the next share experience by time over-counts, because promotion view events are recorded once per person per zone rather than once per click.

The reliable comparison is at the person level: people whose CTA views name only one program, who also have a share experience recorded under a different one.