Create your first journey jo-quick-start

Prerequisites start-prerequisites

In order to send messages with journeys, the following configurations are required:

Access journeys journey-access

Key metrics & journeys’ list access-metrics

In the JOURNEY MANAGEMENT menu section, click Journeys. Two tabs are available:

Overview: this tab displays a dashboard with key metrics related to your journeys:

Browse: this tab displays the list of existing journeys. You can search for journeys, use filters and perform basic actions on each element. For example, you can duplicate or delete an item. For more information, refer to this section.

Filter journeys filter

In the list of journeys, you can leverage various filters to refine the list of journeys for better readability.

Here are the various filtering operations that you can perform:

Filter journeys according to their status, type, version and assigned tags from the Status and version filters.

The type can be: Unitary event, Audience qualification, Read audience, Business event or Burst.

The status can be:

Use the Creation filters to filter journeys according to their creation date or the user who created them.

Display journeys which use a specific event, field group or action from the Activity filters and Data filters.

Use the Publication filters to select a publication date or a user. You can choose, for example, to display the latest versions of live journeys that were published yesterday.

To filter journeys based on a specific date range, select Custom from the Published drop-down list.

Additionally, in the Event, Data source and Action configuration panes, the Used in field displays the number of journeys that use that particular event, field group or action. You can click the View journeys button to display the list of corresponding journeys.

Build your journey jo-build

This step is performed by the business user. This is where you create your journeys. Combine the different event, orchestration and action activities to build your multi-step cross-channel scenarios.

➡️ Discover this feature in video

Here are the main steps to send messages through journeys:

Define your journey properties change-properties

Click on the pencil icon, next to the journey’s name, to access its properties.

You can change the name of the journey, add a description, allow re-entrance, choose start and end dates and, as an Admin user, define a Timeout and error duration. You can also assign Adobe Experience Platform Unified Tags to your journey. This allows you to easily classify them and improve search from the campaigns list. Learn how to work with tags

For live journeys, this screen displays the publication date and the name of the user who published the journey.

The Copy technical details allows you to copy technical information about the journey which the support team can use to troubleshoot. The following information is copied: JourneyVersion UID, OrgID, orgName, sandboxName, lastDeployedBy, lastDeployedAt.

Entrance and re-entrance entrance

By default, new journeys allow re-entrance. You can uncheck the Allow re-entrance option for “one shot” journeys, for example if you want to offer a one-time gift when a person enters a shop.

When the Allow re-entrance option is activated, the Re-entrance wait period field is displayed. This field allows you to define the time to wait before allowing a profile to enter the journey again in unitary journeys (starting with an event or an audience qualification). This prevents journeys from being erroneously triggered multiple times for the same event. By default the field is set to 5 minutes. The maximum duration is 29 days.

Learn more about profile entrance and re-entrance management, in this section.

Manage access manage-access

To assign custom or core data usage labels to the journey, click the Manage access button. Learn more on Object Level Access Control (OLA)

Journey and profile timezones timezone

Timezone is defined at journey level. You can enter a fixed time zone or use Adobe Experience Platform profiles to define the journey time zone. If a time zone is defined in Adobe Experience Platform profile, it can be retrieved in the journey.

For more information on timezone management, see this page.

Start and end dates dates

You can define a Start date. If you haven’t specified one, it will be automatically defined at publication time.

You can also add an End date. This allows profiles to exit automatically when the date is reached. If no end date is specified, profiles can stay until the global journey timeout (which is generally 30 days, and reduced to 7 days with Healthcare Shield add-on offering). The only exception is recurring read audience journeys with Force re-entrance on recurrence activated, which end at the start date of the next occurrence.

Timeout and error in journey activities timeout_and_error

When editing an action or condition activity, you can define an alternative path in case of error or timeout. If the processing of the activity interrogating a third-party system exceeds the timeout duration defined in the journey’s properties (Timeout and error field), the second path will be chosen to perform a potential fallback action.

Authorized values are between 1 and 30 seconds.

We recommend that you define a very short Timeout and error value if your journey is time sensitive (example: reacting to the real-time location of a person) because you cannot delay your action for more than a few seconds. If your journey is less time sensitive, you can use a longer value to give more time to the system called to send a valid response.

Journeys also uses a global timeout. See the next section.

Global journey timeout global_timeout

In addition to the timeout used in journey activities, there is also a global journey timeout which is not displayed in the interface and cannot be changed.

This global timeout stops the progress of individuals in the journey 30 days after they enter. This timeout is reduced to 7 days with Healthcare Shield add-on offering. This means that an individual’s journey cannot last longer than 30 days (or 7 days). After this timeout period, the individual’s data is deleted. Individuals still flowing in the journey at the end of the timeout period will be stopped and they will not be taken into account in reporting. You could therefore see more people entering the journey than exiting.

Due to the 30-day journey timeout, when journey re-entrance is not allowed, we cannot make sure the re-entrance blocking will work more than 30 days. Indeed, as we remove all information about persons who entered the journey 30 days after they enter, we cannot know the person entered previously, more than 30 days ago.

An individual can enter a wait activity only if he or she has enough time left in the journey to complete the wait duration before the 30 days journey timeout. See this page.

Duplicate a journey duplicate-a-journey

You can duplicate an existing journey from the Browse tab. All objects and settings are duplicated to the journey copy.

To perform this, follow the steps below: