Validate and Test your Journey

Once you’ve created a Journey it’s important to test it to ensure it works as intended. Journeys allows you to do this by simulating the Journey without publishing it, using different customer profiles and behavior. Journeys also offers a Health Check feature which checks to make sure that all assets within other Marigold apps (“dependencies” such as campaigns) are all set up correctly and ready to go.

Indicators During Creation Process

During the Journey creation process, users are presented with several indicators of mandatory, pending configurations — such as when building multi-step campaigns or applying and saving changes on the Journey canvas. This pops up as a large orange banner that lists all the required updates.

Within the Journey canvas, any steps that require additional configuration are marked with a red exclamation mark. You can click on the Step to open the Settings pane to see the pending updates.

Journeys allows marketers to save their progress at any stage, even if some configurations remain incomplete. This feature enables users to continue building at their own pace, while maintaining visibility of outstanding tasks through a clear checklist.

Health Check

The Health Check tool verifies that all external supporting components required for your Journey to function properly are active, ready for use and correctly configured.

It performs checks on the following:

  • The setup of the Data Source table

  • The accuracy of customer attributes used in conditions

  • The status of Campaigns used in the Journey (campaigns must be launched)

To see your Journey's Health Check, click on the first aid box icon in the left side menu.

The dependencies section displays the status of the dependent items with the following indicators:

Red Warnings(X Icon) means that your Journey will not run unless you have resolved this issue.

Amber Warnings (! Icon) means that something (normally in another system) still needs to be configured for your Journey to work.

Green (Tick Icon) means that everything is fine.

Simulation

This feature provides a visual representation of the Journey you’ve created and offers a dynamic simulation of how a customer progresses through it. For straightforward Journeys, it serves as a basic check to ensure the Journey is set up as intended and is useful for demonstrating the Journey to stakeholders. The simulation skips all wait steps, allowing you to see the Journey play out in just a few seconds. For Journeys with decisions and events, the simulation becomes even more powerful.

It checks the following aspects:

  • The Journey is able to invoke a message without a problem (trigger the Campaign in Cheetah Digital).
  • The conditions defined in the Start/Update and Decision Steps are executed without any issues.
  • The steps are properly connected and that the simulated user travels down the correct path as intended.

Users for Simulation

The simulation tool allows you to choose a user from your recipient table and run the Journey as if it were real, without the wait and without sending. The list of users available for selection depends on the presence of three attributes that were selected during the Data Source table configuration in your Journey settings.

For effective simulation, choose a range of suitable customers who have the attributes which appear in your conditions or decisions. To do this:

  • Find the list of all the attributes used in your Journey using the Health check tool.
  • Choose three of these attributes in the Data Source table configuration in your Journey settings.

Simulating your Journey

The Journey simulation tool guides you through the Journey process showing how an user will travel through your Journey, based on their segmentation and simulated activities. To set up a scenario, define the relevant event attributes. Please note that time durations defined in Wait Steps will be ignored during the simulation.

To see how a user would progress through your Journey, follow the steps below:

  1. Click Journey Simulation icon on the left side menu.

  2. Slide the toggle button to select between simulation only (without sending campaigns) or to simulate and send campaigns to the recipient in the simulation.

  3. Enter the Recipient ID in the field or click Select.

  4. In the Select Table Record window, search and click on the recipient from the list.

  5. Click Select.

  6. In the Events section, all the events in the Journey are listed. Enter the value for the required event attributes based on the scenario you wish to simulate.

  7. Click Play to see the user travel through the Journey, based on the attributes and personalized data. Alternatively you can use Step, or Finish.