Validate the journey logic with Journey Dry run

Hello everyone. In this demo, I’ll provide a walkthrough of the Journey Dry Run feature in Adobe Journey Optimizer. Dry Run is a capability allowing marketeers to smoke test a journey without actually sending any messages to end users. It will be useful to check if the journey is working as expected before making it live. I have drafted a read audience journey sending promotional messages to new loyalty members. Based on their channel preferences, they could receive either an email, an SMS, or a custom action. For email recipients, they will also receive a follow-up email one minute later, only if they are gold or silver customers. Before activating this journey to end users, I would like to understand how those profiles will flow through it. For this, by clicking on the Dry Run button, I will be able to start a Dry Run execution. On each Dry Run activation, I have the ability to decide if I want to disable wait activities and external data sources. Disabling wait activities will allow profiles in a Dry Run journey to bypass them, providing Dry Run metrics to marketeers in a fastest way. Disabling external data sources calls will allow a Dry Run journey to remain fully siloed if external data sources calls where expected. I will choose to not disable wait activities.

The journey is now activated in the Dry Run mode, which means that it will behave like a live journey, but with all action nodes, like emails, SMS, or custom actions being bypassed. As the Dry Run executes, I can see profiles flowing through different branches and nodes, providing a clear picture on how this journey logic is working. The total audience number for this journey is 998 profiles. Out of those 998, 93 have been routed to the email node based on their channel preference, 38 went to the SMS, and the remaining ones went through the custom action. For the one who went through the email node, I can see to how many gold and silver profiles will receive the follow-up email communication. While reviewing Dry Run metrics, I noticed that none of the profiles went through the silver branch. By checking the expression on the condition node for this branch, I discover a typo. To rectify it, I can close the Dry Run and moves the journey back to draft. There, the typo can be fixed and the Dry Run can be executed again. In the latest Dry Run, I can see the expected number of profiles in that silver branch. All time and last 24 hours reports are available for Dry Run executions. I can for instance go to the last 24 hours report by clicking on its dedicating button. There, I can visualize journey metrics, validate that email and SMS metrics are empty as no communication are sent during Dry Run execution, and click on the export button to download this report for future reference. Everything looks good now and I can proceed to the journey execution.