Testing Journeys

This article discusses the testing you can perform before publishing your journey. Evaluating changes made to the journey after publication, such as assessing the impact of those changes on outcomes, is covered in a separate article focused on reporting and optimization.

Journey Simulation

Simulating straightforward journeys

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.

Simulating customer behavior while on a journey

When your journey includes an event, such as a purchase, you can manually click on that event during the simulation to demonstrate what happens to customers who make a purchase. Next, you can omit this manual step to observe the path taken by customers who do not make a purchase.

Simulating personalization while on a journey

If your journey includes decision steps, the simulation will show how customers with different attributes proceed down alternative branches after the decision step.

For example, in a journey with a decision step based on channel preference, the simulation can illustrate how customers with each channel preference in their profile are directed down the corresponding branch. One branch might trigger an email campaign, another an SMS campaign, and a third a push notification.

Another example involves a decision step based on an event attribute, meaning an attribute which is not part of the customer’s profile but an event associated with that customer. A decision step following a purchase could specify that customers whose purchase totals $100 or more follow a path that triggers a campaign offering 10% off their next purchase. Customers with a purchase below $100 would follow a different path, receiving recommendations for related products.

These simulations confirm that customers with the relevant attributes are directed down the correct paths.

Before progressing to set up the actions required in Cheetah Digital, such as triggering a campaign, it is recommended to check your journeys using the simulation tool.

Journey Healthcheck

This feature automatically verifies that all external components required for the journey are configured and published. The health check provides a status of green, amber, or red for all components specified in the journey.

Status	Description
Green	All required components are configured and published.
Amber	The journey can be published but required a component(s), such as an Cheetah Digital campaign included in the journey isn’t published
Red	The journey won’t work and can’t be published, such as where there is a decision step but the attributes are not configured

You can publish a journey with amber status to allow for live testing of the journey using test customers while awaiting the readiness of all the content in external systems being ready.

Live Testing

These tools expedite your testing process by quickly running simple tests. They help identify issues with your journey configuration if recipients do not progress down the expected path. Note that Journey Simulation and Journey Health Check are not substitutes for End-to-End Testing, which is covered separately.

For a step by step guide on how to perform simulations click here to watch a video (scroll down to Journey Simulations).