Work with journey events about-events
Use events to trigger journeys individually, delivering real-time messages to each user as they enter the journey.
In the event configuration, you configure the events expected in the journeys. The incoming events’ data is normalized following Adobe Experience Data Model (XDM). Events come from Streaming Ingestion APIs for authenticated and unauthenticated events (such as Adobe Mobile SDK events). You can use multiple events (in different steps of a journey) and several journeys can use the same event.
Event configuration is mandatory and must be performed by a Data engineer.
You can configure two types of events: Unitary events and Business events.
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Unitary events unitary-events
Unitary events event are linked to a person. They relate to the behavior of a person (for example, a person bought a product, visited a shop, exited a website, etc.) or something happening linked to a person (for example, a person reached 10,000 loyalty points). This is what Journey Optimizer will listen to in journeys to orchestrate the best next actions. Unitary events can be rule-based or system generated. To learn how to create a unitary event, refer to this page.
Unitary journeys (starting with an event or an audience qualification) include a guardrail that prevents journeys from being erroneously triggered multiple times for the same event. Profile reentrance is temporally blocked by default for 5 minutes. For instance, if an event triggers a journey at 12:01 for a specific profile and another one arrives at 12:03 (whether it is the same event or a different one triggering the same journey) that journey will not start again for this profile.
Business events business-events
Business events are not linked to a specific profile. For example, it can be a news alert, a sports update, a flight change or cancellation, an inventory update, weather events, etc. While these events are not specific to a profile, they may be of interest to any number of profiles: individuals subscribed to particular news topics, passengers on a flight, shoppers interested in an out-of-stock product, etc. Business events are always rule-based. When you drop a business event in a journey, it automatically adds a Read audience activity right after.Learn how to create a business event on this page.
Event ID type event-id-type
For business events, the event ID type is always rule-based.
For unitary events, there are two types of event ID:
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Rule-based events: this type of event does not generate an eventID. Using the simple expression editor, you simply define a rule which will be used by the system to identify the relevant events that will trigger your journeys. This rule can be based on any field available in the event payload, for example the profile’s location or the number of items added to the profile’s cart.
note caution CAUTION A capping rule is defined for rule-based events. It limits the number of qualified events that a journey can process to 5,000 per seconds for a given Organization. It corresponds to Journey Optimizer SLAs. Refer to your Journey Optimizer licensing and Journey Optimizer Product Description. -
System-generated events: these events require an eventID. This eventID field is automatically generated when creating the event. The system pushing the event should not generate an ID, it should pass the one available in the payload preview.
Data cycle data-cycle
Events are POST API calls. Events are sent to Adobe Experience Platform through Streaming Ingestion APIs. The URL destination of events sent through transactional messaging APIs is called an “inlet”. The payload of events follows XDM formatting.
The payload contains information required by Streaming Ingestion APIs to work (in the header) and the information required by Journey Optimizer to work and information to be used in journeys (in the body, for example, the amount of an abandoned cart). There are two modes for the streaming ingestion, authenticated and unauthenticated. For details on Streaming Ingestion APIs, refer to this link.
After arriving through Streaming Ingestion APIs, events flow into an internal service called Pipeline and then in Adobe Experience Platform. If the event schema has the Real-time Customer Profile Service flag enabled and a dataset ID that also has the Real-time Customer Profile flag, it flows into the Real-time Customer Profile Service.
For system-generated events, the Pipeline filters events which have a payload containing Journey Optimizer eventIDs (see the event creation process below) provided by Journey Optimizer and contained in event payload. For rule-based events, the system identifies the event using the eventID condition. These events are listened by Journey Optimizer and the corresponding journey is triggered.
About Journey event throughput event-thoughput
Adobe Journey Optimizer supports a peak volume of 5,000 journey events per second at an organization level, across all sandboxes. This quota applies to all events that are used in active journeys, which includes Live, Dry run, Closed and Paused journeys. When this quota is reached, new events get queued with a processing rate of 5,000 per second. The maximum time an event can spend in the queue is 24 hours.
The following types of events are counted toward the 5,000 TPS quota:
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External Unitary Events: Includes both rule-based and system-generated events. If the same raw event qualifies for multiple rule definitions, each qualified rule counts as a separate event. More details below.
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Audience Qualification Events: If the same streaming audience is used in multiple journeys, each usage counts separately. For instance, using the same audience in an audience qualification activity in two journeys results in two counted events.
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Reaction Events: Events triggered by profile reactions (email opened, email clicked, etc.) within a journey.
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Business Events: Events not tied to a specific profile, but to a business-related event.
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Analytics Events: If the integration with Adobe Analytics to trigger journeys has been enabled, these events are also included.
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Resume Events: Technical event triggered when a profile resumes from a paused journey. Learn more about resuming paused journeys.
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Wait Node Completion Events: When a profile exits a wait node, a technical event is generated to resume the journey.
About raw events qualifying for multiple rule definitions
Same raw event can qualify for multiple rule definitions in journeys. When an event is configured in the Administration section, for the same event schema, multiple event rules can be defined. Let’s say for example that we have a purchase event which has fields city and purchaseValue. Let’s consider the following scenarios:
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An event E1 named
newYorkPurchasesis created with a rule definition saying thatcity=='New York'. This event might be used in 10 journeys but will still be counted only as 1 event, when it will come. -
Now let’s say that an event E2 named
highValuePurchaseswithpurchaseValue > 1000as a rule definition is also created, on the same event schema than E1. In this case, the same incoming event will be evaluated against two rules:newYorkPurchasesandhighValuePurchases. Now it may happen that a newYork purchase is also a high value purchase.In this case Journey Optimizer will create two events, E1 and E2, out of the same incoming event, which will make this single incoming event count as two events.
Note that these events start getting counted when they are used in an active journey, including Live, Dry run, Closed and Paused journey.
Updating and deleting an event update-event
To avoid breaking existing journeys, when you edit an event used in a Draft, Live or Closed journey, you can only change the name, the description or add payload fields.
Any event used in Live, Draft or Closed journeys cannot be deleted. To delete a used event, you must stop journeys using it, and/or remove it from the Draft journeys where it are used. You can check the Used in field. It displays the number of journeys that use that particular event. You can click the View journeys button to display the list of corresponding journeys.
How-to videos video
Learn how to configure an event, specify the streaming endpoint and the payload for an event.
Understand the applicable use cases for business events. Learn how to build a journey using a business event and which best practices to apply.