Create your first journey

Last update: February 26, 2025

CREATED FOR:

Intermediate
User

Adobe Journey Optimizer includes an omnichannel orchestration canvas which allows marketers to harmonize marketing outreach with one-to-one customer engagement. The user interface allows you to easily drag and drop activities from the palette into the canvas to build your journey. The journey user interface is detailed in this page.

sample of journey canvas

The main steps to create a journey are detailed in this page. They are streamlined as follows:

journey creation steps: create, design, test, and publish

Build multi-step customer journeys initiate a sequence of interactions, offers, and messages across channels in real time. This approach ensures customers are engaged at the optimal moments based on their actions and relevant business signals. Target audiences can be defined based on behavior, contextual data, and business events. Prerequisites depend on your use case, and the type of journey you are building.

Before starting building your journey, check the relevant configuration steps are done:

If you want to trigger your journeys unitarily when an event is received, you need to configure an event. You define the expected information and how to process it. Read more.

Your journey can also listen to Adobe Experience Platform audiences in order to send messages in batch to a specified set of profiles. For this, you need to create audiences. Read more.

You can define a connection to a system to retrieve additional information that will be used in your journeys, for example in your conditions. This connection relies on a data source. Read more

Journey Optimizer comes with built-in message capabilities. If you are using a third-party system to send your messages, you can create a custom action. Learn more in this section.

As a data engineer, steps to configure your journeys, including Data Sources, Events and Actions are detailed in this section.

NOTE

Journey guardrails and limitations are detailed in this page

Create a journey

To create a multi-step journey, follow these steps:

In the JOURNEY MANAGEMENT menu section, click Journeys.
Click the Create Journey button to create a new journey.
Edit the journey’s configuration pane to define the name of the journey and set its properties. Learn how to set your journey’s properties in this page.

You can then start designing your journey.

Design the journey

The omnichannel journey designer helps you build multi-step journeys with targeted audiences, updates based on real-time customer or business interactions, and omnichannel messages using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

Start by drag and dropping an event or a Read Audience activity from the palette into the canvas. To learn more about journey design, refer to this section.
Drag and drop the next steps that the individual will follow. For example, you can add a condition followed by a channel action. To learn more about activities, refer to this section.

Test the journey

Once you have built your journey, you can test it before publishing. Journey Optimizer offers “Test mode” as a way to view test profiles as they move along the journey, detecting potential errors before activation. Running quick tests allows you to check that journeys operate correctly so that you can publish them with confidence.

Learn more in this section

Publish the journey

You must publish a journey to activate it and make it available for new profiles to enter it. Before publishing your journey, verify that it is valid and that there is no error. You cannot publish a journey with errors. Learn more about the journey publication in this section.