Create actions

In this video, you will learn what an Action is in Adobe Journey Optimizer. The learning objectives of this video are to define and use an Action in AJO, and then how to configure a custom Action. So first, what is an Action? An Action is a step in a journey that engages your customer or creates an experience. Starting in my Journey canvas, you can see in the left-hand palette that there’s a list of Actions I can use. The types of Actions include sending an email, an In-App message, a push notification, or an SMS message. There’s also the Update Profile Action type, which allows you to update an attribute of the user’s profile. When on the canvas, it’ll prompt you to select a particular schema, a dataset, and a field in that dataset that you’d like to update by clicking on this field and searching. Here, let’s just say we want to put in a new phone number. I can select that, and then put in the value for what I want that field to be. I can reference contextual information, or I can just type it in manually. Another Action that you can use is Jump, which sends a user from one journey to another. Here I’ll place Jump in the canvas, and you can select a target journey to send your user to. Now, if we want to do something different from the out-of-the-box Actions, we can go ahead and make a custom Action. You can use custom Actions to send data to or retrieve data from an external endpoint. In other words, you can use custom Actions to configure a connection with a third-party system. Say, for example, you want to notify your sales team on Slack that someone downloaded a white paper. In this case, you can set up a custom Action that automatically sends a message to a specific group informing them of the new lead. Scrolling down to Configurations, click on Actions, and you’ll see a list of custom Actions if some have already been created. A custom Action is comprised of three main things, the URL, the authentication, and its payloads. For the URL configuration, you will need to select the associated method, which could be either Post, Put, or Get. You can also include any headers that are required. Second is Authentication. Here we have either No Authentication, API He, Basic, or Custom Authentication, and each option will require different values. And lastly, you’ll paste the request and response payloads. The request is the JSON payload that you need to send to the endpoint. You can copy that and paste it here for use in your journey. And you can optionally define the response payload if you expect to receive one from the endpoint and you want to use it in your journey as well. If you’re missing any mandatory fields, an alert will show up, and you won’t be able to save the custom Action. To leverage the response of the custom Action you just created, add it to a journey. You can then utilize the data fields in the response payload for conditions, additional actions, and personalization. These actions in the canvas are called at runtime and will send or retrieve data as soon as profiles reach them in your journey. Remember to consider the impact on the APIs that you’re calling when using them in custom Actions. As such, we recommend using capping and throttling APIs to limit the throughput of your custom Actions. This limits the number of calls sent per second so you can avoid overloading external systems. If the limit defined is reached, the call will either be rejected if you’re using capping APIs, or queued up to be sent later if you’re using throttling ones. If your custom Action has more than 1% failures over a 5 minute period, an alert will be raised letting you know that the Action has failed. To receive such alerts, you will need to subscribe to them through the Alerts section. You can find more information about this in the documentation. Custom Action alerts are considered resolved when, within the last 5 minutes, errors are below 1% or no profile is entered into that custom Action. You now know what an Action is and how to create custom Actions in AJO.