Measure Journey Campaign Performance
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- View specific journeys, versions, and contact history in the Journey Health dashboard.
- Describe the aggregate performance information provided in the analytics panel in the Journey Analytics dashboard.
- Review in-depth details about a journey’s performance.
- Access standard Journey Builder reports.
Introduction
The analytics tools available in Journey Builder help you examine individual engagement and aggregate journey data for cross-channel campaigns. You can see which data sources, versions, channels, and content had the biggest impact. You can use this data to optimize customer journeys or as a guide for future campaign plans. In this module, we explore how to use analytics to measure against goals and refine journeys with versioning.
In Journey Builder Basics, you learned that when you launch Journey Builder, the Journeys dashboard provides an overview of all of the journeys you’ve saved, and it’s your first stop when you’re ready to create a new journey. In this unit, let’s take a closer look at the health and history of your journeys.
Access an Aggregate Journey Performance Overview
The Journeys dashboard gives you a high-level overview of journey performance for the most recent version of a journey, regardless of whether it’s running, finishing, stopped, or still in draft status. Here's a handy reference for the different types of journey statuses.
Version Status |
Description |
---|---|
Canceled |
A Single Send journey was canceled before the scheduled date and time. |
Deleted |
The journey was deleted. |
Draft |
A fully editable version that has not been activated. There are no active customers running through or waiting in it. |
Running |
The most recently activated version. Once activated, it becomes the primary version. |
Scheduled |
The Single Send journey is scheduled to send at the specified date and time. |
Sent |
A Single Send journey started or sent a message on the specified send date and time. |
Stopped |
A running journey version can be stopped at any time. Customers in that version of the journey are ejected and the journey becomes inactive. |
Finishing |
Existing contacts continue to flow through the journey, but no new contacts enter the journey. |
Pausing |
A user has requested this journey to be paused, and the process is in progress. The journey's next status is Paused. |
Stopping |
A user has requested this journey to be stopped, and the process is in progress. The journey's next status is Stopped. |
Resuming |
A user has requested this journey to be resumed, and the process is in progress. The journey's next status is Running. |
The Journeys dashboard also includes the number of contacts in the journey’s audience and the percentage who completed the journey. High-performing journeys can serve as models for future campaigns of a similar type. On the other hand, when a journey isn’t performing well, there can be opportunities to revise and refine your journey plan. Is an engagement split showing that an email isn’t having the impact that you'd hoped? Do you need to adjust the wait period between messages? Does your message content need revision?
From the Journeys dashboard, you can drill down to more in-depth information—such as where contacts stop progressing through the journey—and create and activate new versions or copies of the journey.
You can refine the list of journeys displayed here by using the search or filter tool, or by selecting a specific journey folder. This can be particularly helpful when you have numerous journeys in your account or folder and just want the highlights. We learn more about organizing journeys into folders in an upcoming unit.
Measure Your Goals
In the Journey Builder Campaigns module, you learned how to define a goal for a campaign. Each contact in a journey is regularly evaluated against the goal target during the journey. The schedule for when a contact is evaluated depends on whether a goal is set to remove them from the journey.
Journey Builder evaluates a contact against a journey’s goal target:
- Each time a wait period expires
- Every day at midnight US central standard time, if an exit criteria is set for the goal
Click in the dashboard’s toolbar to expand the Analytics panel to view the number of journeys that have met the goal, and the highest and lowest performing journeys.
Check Your Journey’s Health
After you activate a journey, you may want to periodically check to see if it’s progressing as you expected. To do this, click a journey from the Journeys dashboard. From there, select a version to view in more detail by clicking the version name in the dashboard. Click for the Journey Health panel, which includes:
-
Goal Attainment: Shows the goal you set and the percentage or number of contacts in the journey that reached the goal.
-
Current Population: Shows the number of contacts currently in the journey and the exit criteria you set, if any.
-
Alerts: Shows that the system is processing slower than expected.
Review Journey History for Deeper Insights
Use Journey History to view information about a specific contact’s engagement with your campaign. By default, the Journey History page shows results for up to the last 30 days’ activity. You can also see the total number of contact records across all journeys in your account.
To track a specific contact through the journey, first find the contact key that represents the contact. Use filters to refine the information so you can see:
- Which journeys the contact entered
- A status message to indicate the contact's history in the journey
- The time of each transaction
- Which journeys a contact has been in for the past 30 days or less
- Where the contact is on a journey
- If a contact exited a journey
Journey Builder Reports
Marketing Cloud Engagement provides two standard reports for monitoring email engagement tracking over time for a particular journey. You can run these reports at any time or schedule them to run automatically. The reports can be emailed to one or more addresses, or exported via FTP.
Journey Builder Email Send Summary |
Tracking and engagement metrics for emails sent in journeys over a specified time frame. Choose specific journeys and versions to include in the report. |
---|---|
Journey Builder Email Sends by Day |
Tracking and engagement metrics for emails sent in journeys, aggregated by day, for a specified time frame, along with specific journeys and versions to include in the report. |
To access these reports, navigate to Analytics Builder and select Reports.
Intelligence Reports for Engagement
Intelligence Reports for Engagement enable you to generate, view, and share a detailed analysis of your Email and Journey campaign- level data. With Intelligence Reports, you can use out-of-the-box dashboards, scheduled reports, and pivot tables to gain more in-depth knowledge about your marketing activities. Here are three reports commonly used for journeys:
Email Overview: Provides a high-level view of top KPIs like Sends, Delivery Rate, and Open Rate, as well as how these metrics have performed over time.
Journey Performance by Email: Provides an in-depth view into your journey and activities data, including the journey performance and a detailed breakdown by domain, day of week, audience, and more.
Email Engagement: Provides a detailed visualization of your email engagement data including engagement KPIs, engagement timelines, and in -depth breakdowns by domain, day of week, audience, and more.
Case Study: Isabelle Reviews Her Journey Performance
Isabelle allowed her welcome campaign for Northern Trail Outfitters to run for a couple of weeks while she worked on other projects. Now she’s ready to check and see how well it’s performing. When she logs into Marketing Cloud Engagement and goes to the Journey Builder tab, she finds her campaign listed in the Journey dashboard. The journey has a status of Finishing, and she can see the exact number of customers who were admitted into the journey (500) and the percentage who completed the journey (63%).
While Isabelle is pretty happy with how her welcome campaign has performed so far, she wonders if it can be beneficial to shorten the wait time between email messages 1 and 2. In the next unit, we learn how to create and manage versions that can help her test this theory and potentially improve her response rate.
Resources
- Salesforce Help: Goals
- Salesforce Help: Journey History
- Trailhead: Journey Builder Campaigns
- Salesforce Help: Use the Journey Analytics Dashboard
- Salesforce Help: Get Started with Reports
- Salesforce Help: Create a Standard Report
- Salesforce Help: Journey Builder Email Send Summary
- Salesforce Help: Journey Builder Email Sends by Day