Journey Q&A

Can we set up an AB-Journey where the target group is 100%?

It is indeed possible to use a 100% test audience but this is not what the feature was built for. If you do this there are some things that need to be considered.

Let's start with a dynamic segment with 3000 contacts and 3 email versions. The following will happen:

• The first run you'll send out respectively 1000 emails per version (This is normal behavior).
• The second run we'll send out the winning version.

Since it's a dynamic segment, it's possible that by the time that the winning run will be scheduled, new contacts were introduced. This is very important to know, because maybe you don't want to send to more than 3000 contacts. Starting of from a static segment could omit this.

The way how the winner will be determined is also very important. If the setup is not valid, you can get the following error message: Unable to select a winner for this AB test with criteria [%s]. When this error occurs, the journey will remain live. You might expect that the winner would be selected after a few minutes while in real life the journey remained live for days / months / weeks.

Example:
- The Journey has been launched on 2022-01-03 16:00.
- Journey sends 33% to each version (100% / 3 versions).
- Journey has been set to determine the winner after 1 minute based on the orders.
- Journey couldn't determine the winner: Unable to select a winner for this AB test with criteria [%s]
You detect on 2022-04-01 that the journey is still live.
=> If the journey would have produced any order, causing the journey to select a winner, the journey would have been sent again on 2022-04-01 while this wasn't the intention. If the segment would have grown in these 3 months, they would have sent unintentionally additional mails.