Overview
Data archival is the systematic process of removing inactive or dormant user data to ensure that your marketing workspace remains lean, focusing exclusively on users who provide genuine engagement opportunities and business value.
MoEngage implements data archival to balance platform performance with global privacy standards:
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Performance & Data hygiene: MoEngage maintains a lean and high-performance environment populated exclusively by reachable and marketable users. This high-fidelity dataset ensures faster segmentation query and provides more accurate analytics, as your insights will reflect genuine user intent rather than being skewed by stagnant, non-functional records.
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Regulatory Compliance (GDPR & CCPA): The policy aligns with the GDPR principles of Storage Limitation and Data Minimization- user data should be kept only as long as there is a legitimate business purpose; once a user is no longer reachable or marketable, archiving their data reduces legal liability and protects user privacy.
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Archival Frequency Every 14 days, MoEngage runs a process to remove inactive and unreachable users, events and devices from MoEngage services. Each entity has a separate archival policy, and upon archival, the data points are deleted permanently. |
Archival criteria
User Profiles
To ensure MoEngage only archives user data that lacks marketing utility, the system evaluates every user against the following three value markers:
- Reachability: The policy aims to retain users who are contactable. It will archive users who
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Cannot receive email- do not have an email address, or are unsubscribed from email lists.
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Cannot receive SMS- do not have a valid mobile number.
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Cannot receive Push- have uninstalled the app or disabled push permissions.
- Cannot receive a WhatsApp message- do not have a valid mobile number.
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Users who are no longer reachable across any channel (Push, Email, SMS, or WhatsApp) are prioritized for archival as they lack immediate marketing potential.
- Activity: Any interaction with your app or website (i.e any standard or custom event) serves as a signal of intent. The policy distinguishes users based on their relationship with your brand to ensure the most appropriate retention lifecycle:
| Type | Details | Retention window |
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| Registered (Identified) users | These are profiles with an identifier (ID, Email, or Mobile Number). As these represent known customers with a higher potential for long-term value, these profiles are archived after one year of inactivity (i.e. no event). |
No activity event in last 1 year |
| Anonymous (Guest) users | These are guest profiles - without any unique identifier (ID) OR - without any other identifier (Email, or Mobile Number) e.g., first-time website visitors. To keep your workspace lean and focused on high-intent audiences, these profiles are archived after 60 days of inactivity (i.e no event). |
No activity events in last 60 days |
- Campaign Engagement: The policy aims to retain users who actively interact with your communications. Interactions such as Opens or Clicks serve as engagement signals. It will archive users who
- Have not received/interacted with any campaign in last one year.
Events
By default, events remain available for 60 days. This determines how far back you can look to analyse user behaviour e.g., "Users who purchased in the last 2 months".
The event retention period is extendable on request basis. Please contact your dedicated MoEngage Customer Success Manager or the Support team.
Devices
MoEngage archives devices that have been inactive for 60 days. Removing the inactive and unreachable devices ensures that your Push campaigns are processed faster and directed only at active devices.
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Note
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