Journey frequency capping and prioritization

Hey there, I’m Aaron Forrest, a Product Manager on the Adobe Journey Optimizer team, here to show how you can create journey frequency capping rules and how to optimize the highest priority journeys within a given capping constraint. Let’s dive in. Let’s say your brand has multiple journeys running simultaneously and you wish to limit your customers to only being enrolled into one journey at a time. Or perhaps you may wish to limit the number of journeys a customer can enter into in a given period of time. For example, capping journey entries to no more than once per day, week, or month. Both of those journey capping options are available to you in Adobe Journey Optimizer within the business rules area of the product. Let’s run with this specific use case example to highlight both the journey frequency capping creation as well as the configuration to successfully arbitrate journeys so I can rest assured as a marketer that my customers are entering into only the highest priority journeys. In our example here, we have two journeys scheduled for this week. My Fall Apparel Promotion Journey is scheduled to begin tomorrow and extend for two weeks. But I also have another journey, my Black Friday Promotion Journey scheduled to begin on Friday. Note that the Black Friday Promotion Journey is a higher priority journey and I don’t want my customer to be in both of these journeys at the same time. My wish is to suppress customers from entering into my Fall Apparel Journey if they’ll also be entering into my Black Friday Journey later this week. You can see that both Brad and Jane are in the audience for my journey tomorrow but that Jane is also in the journey on Friday. As such, I want to ensure that I suppress Jane from entering the journey tomorrow given her current audience eligibility for the upcoming scheduled journey on Friday. Now let’s navigate to AJO and talk about our setup to achieve this journey arbitration use case. Once I’ve opened Business Rules, you’ll see an inventory of rulesets. Think of a ruleset simply as a folder which contains your frequency capping rules. In the final step, I’ll be applying this ruleset to both of these journeys so that only one of these two journeys will be enrolled into for any customers who are in the audience for both. Let’s name this ruleset Fall Promotional Journeys. I’ll select the journey domain. Now I need to create the Journey Frequency Capping Rule in this ruleset. I’ll select a max volume of one journey at a time. Additionally, I’ll want to select a look-ahead period of seven days so that at the time a customer is to enter into that Fall Apparel Journey, the system will be able to recognize the upcoming Black Friday Journey that’s five days ahead. Hit save and let’s activate both. Now let’s jump over to our two journeys that I have pre-created and have in a draft state. In the journey properties, scroll down to the Conflict Management section. You’ll see that I’ve given a low priority score to the Fall Apparel Journey. Please note, the higher the number, the higher the priority. And this dropdown is where I will select the ruleset that we just created. I’ll now hit publish for this journey to go live. I now need to do the same for the Black Friday Journey. I’ll give it a higher priority and select the relevant ruleset. Both these journeys are activated and scheduled for our customers. Again, any customers who are in the audience for both journeys will be suppressed from tomorrow’s Fall Apparel Journey as the system will recognize this higher priority Black Friday Journey later this week. If you’d like to confirm the suppression took place as expected, you can navigate to the journey report. Here in the journey exclusions section, you’ll see the total volume of customers who were suppressed as a result of the frequency capping rule that was applied. In summary, journey frequency capping and arbitration is a valuable tool that enables you to optimize the best journeys for your customers.