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.
➡️ Discover this feature in video
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 licencing 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.
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.