What is the shortest wait time duration value I can use?

[Robert_Whited]

Inside the "flow" of one of my smart campaigns I am using several "Wait" actions. Is the smallest wait duration 1 hour? I would like to use shorter wait durations if it's possible.

[Adam_Vavrek1]

I think you can do seconds here but I can't find anything in the Help Articles to support this theory. When I enter in seconds in the Flow step, navigate to another program and then back to that Flow step, the value is still there (as opposed to getting an error message or deleted like invalid values do). I'd be interested in hearing more about this as well.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Wait times can be as low as you want them -- even down to seconds. Just type in "30 seconds" or "1 minute" etc. 

As a side note: I try to minimize the number of "Wait" steps I have in my campaigns as too many in one campaign tends to slow down my instance. If you have significantly different activities happening in one smart campaign, I would suggest creating separate trigger campaigns for each activity (helps with tracking too!). Just a thought! 

 

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Seconds and/or minutes definitely works! That said, I don't find as much value in second-based wait steps as I do in minute-based wait steps because they help me to ensure that something will go in the order I intended, whereas seconds might not help the way I wanted it to. 

[Josh_Hill13]

1 second

As Dory noted, probably not helpful except if you are testing a flow that should wait in minutes or hours.

[Grant_Booth]

You can go down to seconds, but note that wait steps in the minutes or seconds are likely to take significantly longer than you expect, depending on whether or not there are other campaigns running in the background at the time.

Imagine that your Marketo works kind of like it has a few workers in the office. You tell one of them to go make 300 copies of something. If they're busy that day, they aren't going to just sit there and stare at the copy machine until it's finished - they're going to leave, go do something else, and come back when they're done with the other task to get the copies. Or if someone else is free at the time, they might go pick up the copies when they're done. If everyone else is busy though, the copies could sit there for a little bit.

Wait steps work kind of the same way. When Marketo's "workers" see a wait step, they leave to go do something else, and could get delayed coming back. This is why wait steps tend to be inaccurate on the scale of seconds or a few minutes.