Track Your Contacts

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe how contact activity fields work.
• Create the data extensions that store your contact tracking information.
• Create decision splits based on contact activity fields.

Journey Tracking

Congratulations, your fiscal year is prioritized and you know exactly what journeys you want your contacts to experience. Now you need to make sure that your contacts make it into those journeys. Plus, you want to ensure that your high-priority contacts get into those journeys as soon as possible. So how do you help contacts resume an active journey, move seamlessly between journeys, or even track the progress of a contact through a journey? You can use a separate data extension to track custom progress markers for your contacts in a journey. Go ahead and create your new data extension. Name it whatever makes sense for your account, but we’ll refer to it as the Journey Tracking data extension in this module.

What to Track

Your company’s needs may differ, but here are a few attributes that tend to be the most important to track for Marketing Cloud Engagement users.

• Date and time for journey entry or exit
• Progress markers (the last known point that a contact reached in a journey, and when they reached that point)
• Testing identifiers (such as Test Group or Holdback Group)

In your journeys, you should also include an event that updates your contact records with the appropriate contact attributes. From there, you can use that information to guide your contacts in the right direction.

Now let’s take a look at the process of tracking contacts so we can prioritize which contacts enter which journeys. This example uses data extensions in Marketing Cloud Engagement, but you can also update custom and standard objects in fields in Sales Cloud or Service Cloud using Marketing Cloud Connect.

Set Up Contact Tracking

Paulo manages several customer journeys for Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), and he’s charged with making sure that NTO’s subscribers make it to the correct journey as quickly as possible. His team wants to track where contacts end up when they drop out of a journey and route them to a different journey, if necessary. For example, if a contact enters a welcome journey but drops out before they get to the call to action for SMS subscription, Paulo wants to reroute that contact back to the journey and give them another chance to sign up for SMS notifications. Let’s take a look at how he’s going to make that happen.

In this module, we assume you are a Marketing Cloud Engagement administrator with the proper permissions to create these data extensions. If you’re not an admin for Marketing Cloud Engagement, that’s OK. Read along to learn how your admin would take the steps in a production org. Don't try to follow these steps in your Trailhead Playground. Marketing Cloud Engagement isn't available in the Trailhead Playground.

Create a New Data Extension

First, Paulo creates a brand-new data extension called SMSJourneyPoints to contain the contact tracking data.

1. In Contact Builder, Paulo navigates to the Data Extensions tab and clicks Create.
2. He selects Create from New and names the data extension SMSJourneyPoints.
3. He also assigns an external key and a brief description to the data extension and saves it to the main location for NTO’s data extensions.
4. Paulo clicks Next.
5. In the Data Retention tab, Paulo clicks On and opts for the default policy.
6. Paulo adds these required fields to the data extension.
   1. SubscriberKey
      • Text
      • Primary Key
   2. Active
      • Boolean
      • Determine if contact engaged or not after an engagement split
   3. Last Activity
      • Text
   4. Date
      • Date
7. Paulo clicks Complete, then clicks OK.

All date and time information is stored in central standard time and does not observe daylight saving time.

Create an Attribute Group

While he’s in Contact Builder, Paulo builds an attribute group to link his new data extension to the entry source data extension, which contains the information necessary to send more email messages.

1. Paulo navigates to Data Designer and clicks Create Attribute Group.
2. He names the attribute group SMSJourneyContacts and saves the attribute group.
3. He clicks Link Data Extensions.
4. He links the entry source data extension to the main contact record by linking Contact Key to SubscriberKey.
5. He saves the attribute group, reviews the information about modifying data relationships, and clicks Done.
6. After saving, he goes back to link SMSJourneyPoints to the entry source data extension by SubscriberID and saves that relationship.

Add an Update Contact Activity

After creating the data extension, Paulo navigates to NTO’s welcome journey in Journey Builder and puts an Update Contact activity in the journey right before the SMS subscription activity. That way, Paulo can use the value of the Active field as part of future segmentation activities. This value is valuable information!

1. He drags the activity into position on the canvas.
2. He clicks the activity, then clicks Select Data Extension and selects the SMSJourneyPoints data extension.
3. Paulo clicks Attribute Value and selects Last Activity, then chooses the value to insert in the data extension.
4. He also repeats step 3 to assign a timestamp to the Date field and a status of True or False to the Active field.
5. He clicks Summary, then Done.

All of the resources are in place for Paulo to capture information about contacts as they progress through the welcome journey. In the next unit, we take a look at exactly what Paulo does with that information.

Resources 

• Salesforce Help: Update a Contact
• Salesforce Help: Create a Data Extension in Contact Builder
• Salesforce Help: Create an Attribute Group in Contact Builder