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Journey best practices

Version notice

Scheduled Journeys is available in Accelerator version 26.2.3. Contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM) for more information.

Overview​

Journeys give marketers significant control over how customers move through orchestrated experiences. That flexibility comes with decisions that affect journey reliability, message delivery, and the accuracy of performance reporting. This article covers the recommendations that matter most when designing and operating journeys in Accelerator.

For guidance specific to user profile design, see User profile best practices.

Plan your data architecture before building​

Journeys require that the entry audience, user profile, and Journey State Table all use the same database connection. This single-warehouse constraint is enforced at journey configuration time — database connections cannot be mixed across components.

Before building your first journey, confirm:

  • The audience you plan to use for entry is on the same warehouse connection as your Managed Data Schema
  • The user profile you plan to use is also on that connection
  • Your customer ID (RecipientId) values are consistent across data sets

Choose evaluation cadence based on audience volatility​

The evaluation cadence controls how frequently Accelerator checks for new entrants and advances users through delay tiles. Choosing the wrong cadence creates unnecessary load or delays user progression longer than intended.

For scheduled journeys, choose an evaluation cadence based how frequently you need new customers to enter the journey, with a maximum cadence equal to the shortest Time Delay tile.

For example, if the shortest Time Delay tile is 1 hour, choose an evaluation frequency between 15 minutes and 1 hour, based on how frequently you want new users to enter the journey.

note

Journeys has a minimum refresh window of 15 minutes. Evaluation cannot run more frequently than once every 15 minutes.

Design delays with the evaluation cadence in mind​

A Delay tile pauses a user for the configured duration. The user advances at the next evaluation cycle after the delay has elapsed — not at the exact moment the delay expires.

This means the effective delay a user experiences is the configured duration plus the time until the next evaluation. On a daily evaluation cadence, a user who completes a 1-day delay at 2:00 PM will not advance until the next evaluation run, which could be up to 24 hours later.

If precise timing matters — for example, sending a message exactly 24 hours after entry — use an hourly or custom cadence, and set the delay to the minimum duration that satisfies your business requirement.

Ensure channel identifiers are mapped in the user profile​

A common cause of silent send failures in journeys is a missing channel identifier in the user profile. When a user reaches an Email, Push, or SMS tile and the required identifier is not present in their profile row, the message is not sent and the user advances to the next tile. The send counts as a Content error in tile analytics.

Content errors do not pause the journey or alert the user. Review Content error counts in the activation analytics modal regularly during a journey's early operation to identify identifier gaps.

If only a subset of your audience has a given channel identifier, that is expected, but you should know the expected coverage percentage and watch for Content error rates that deviate from it.

Including marketing consent filtering rules in your audience membership and user profile prevents users from entering a journey or removes in-flight members mid-journey.

Common suppression use cases:

  • Users who have unsubscribed from a channel used in the journey
  • Users who have recently been contacted through other high-frequency campaigns

With user profile filter rules applied, a user who opts-out after joining a journey is removed from the journey mid-flow. Audience consent filtering prevents the user from re-entering if they exit and would re-qualify.

Configure conversion events before activation when possible​

Journey conversions use Managed Events to track conversion activity. Conversion events must be added to the Managed Events list and enabled for conversion tracking before they can be selected in journey settings.

Configuring Managed Events and Event Syncs before activating the journey means conversion data is attributed from the first evaluation forward. If Managed Events are configured after a journey has been running, conversions that occurred before the event was configured are not retroactively attributed.

We recommend selecting two conversion events when possible — a primary conversion event (such as a purchase) and a secondary engagement event (such as a product view or account activation) — to give a more complete picture of journey impact.

Use the entry preview to validate the audience-profile join​

Before activating, always use the entry preview in the journey entry configuration. The preview shows you:

  • A sample of audience members successfully joined to their profile rows
  • The No profile count — audience members who have no matching profile row
  • The count of members missing specific channel identifiers

A non-zero "No profile" count is not always a problem — some audiences might intentionally include members who may not have profile data. But a high "No profile" rate indicates a Recipient ID mismatch between the audience query and the user profile query that should be resolved before activation.

Use re-entry rules deliberately​

Re-entry rules determine whether and when a user who exits the journey can re-enter it. Default to Do not allow re-entry for journeys that represent a one-time experience — a welcome series, a post-purchase follow-up, or a churn win-back sequence. Re-entry into these journeys is rarely intended and can result in users receiving the same communications multiple times.

Use Allow re-entry — maximum entries when you want to allow repeat participation but want a hard limit on total lifecycle exposure to the journey.

Monitor the evaluation history after activation​

After activating a journey, check the evaluation history after the first two or three evaluation cycles. Early evaluation failures often surface RecipientId issues, warehouse or permission problems, user profile column mis-mapping, and segment split filter issues that were not caught in pre-activation validation.

The evaluation history detail view provides the exact error message and the stage (Entry, Movement, or Write) where the failure occurred. Entry failures mean no new users enrolled in that cycle but existing members were unaffected. Write failures mean no state was committed, and persistent Write failures may pause the journey automatically.