Troubleshooting Journeys and FAQs

This article outlines common issues and questions you may face when building journeys and how to troubleshoot them.

Journey Message step is not sending

Your journey message step may not send messages immediately due to following reasons

Frequency Capping is reached

For a Message step in Journeys, there is an Advanced tab which allows you to toggle a setting called "Skip recently messaged contacts". This toggle is ON by default and if messages across campaigns and journeys to same contact exceed the frequency capping settings, then it will skip sending messages.

Troubleshooting Steps:

• If you want to send the message irrespective of the frequency cap, toggle OFF "Skip recently messaged contacts" from the Advanced tab of the Send Message step in the journey for the frequency cap to be not applied

The frequency capping settings are defined for each platform under

• Settings > Marketing

• Select specific platform like Email, SMS, WhatsApp or Push > Frequency capping

• Update this frequency capping settings if you want to set it to a different value

Journey is not getting triggered

Using segment trigger which has 6 hours default delay

When you use any of the below triggers in a journey, there is an inherent 6 hour delay between when the condition is satisfied and when the journey is triggered.

• Added to segment/Removed from segment

• Date property

Using segment trigger and updating the segment

When you publish a segment trigger journey and then later update the segment definition by editing the segment, it would no longer run. This is because the journey is still published with the older version of the segment.

If you want to edit the segment after publishing the segment trigger journey:

• Edit the segment

• Edit the journey and re-select the segment in the trigger

• Publish the journey again

Now, your journey is published with your latest changes and will trigger as expected.

Condition step is failing or stuck

When defining a condition step and selecting a property value, do not update the Data type dropdown from its prefilled value. This dropdown indicated the data type and changing it may cause failed evaluation of the condition. For example,

When selecting a property like Birthdate, the data type will be pre-selected as Date by default. DO NOT change its value from the dropdown.

Analyzing Journey Insights

On Wait step, Entered and Completed may be different in a selected time range

The journey metrics show a snapshot of the journey runs in a selected time range, which means that if you have a time filter of 30 days, Entered shows the total number of runs which entered in the journey in 30 days which may be 100. However, Completed may be more or less than Entered as more or less runs may have completed the Wait step in the 30 days as they may have entered and waiting before the selected time range. In this case, you can increase the time range to see more data.

Impact of Deleting steps

When you delete steps, the metrics are reset as it is new step and they are not combined with same step of the old version. You can still see metrics by selecting the older versions on the version filter. If the step is completely deleted, you can also see their metrics only by using the version filter.

Why your branches may show > 100%

• When a Jump To step is adding to a step and the branch, the Entered on the step would be greater than Completed form the immediate previous step. This causes the branch percentage to show > 100%

• If you have added or deleted steps in a new journey version, this may also cause > 100% branch percentages.

Why my next step shows more Entered than Sent in previous step

This may happen if messages sending is skipped due to reasons like global or percentage holdouts. These skip sending messages on a message step in a journey but allow the contacts to continue and enter the next step causing Entered on the next step to be higher than Sent on the previous step. Please click on the Message step to see detailed Entered and Skipped metrics for clarification.

FAQs

How to update the journey for contacts who have already entered the journey?

You cannot update the journey or messages by updating the journey as the entered contacts will follow the version of the journey they entered in. When you make edits to the journey, a new journey version is published and it is applicable to new contacts who will enter from now on.

You can only cancel the runs from the Runs page and make them re-enter by satisfying the trigger criteria again.

How to exit contacts who have already entered the journey?

You cannot make the contacts exit by updating the journey as the entered contacts will follow the version of the journey they entered in. When you make edits to the journey, a new journey version is published and it is applicable to new contacts who will enter from now on.

To exit existing contacts, you can only try to find them using the segment Journey entered event and then cancel their runs manually from the Runs page.

How to make contacts who completed a journey enter a second journey?

You can achieve this in following ways:

• Update contact to enter another list: You can add an Update contact step at the end of the first journey which adds them to a list which acts as a trigger for the second journey

• Update contact attribute value: You can add an Update contact step at the end of the first journey which updates a contact attribute value.

  • You can then create a segment using Properties about Contact and use this attribute value.

  • This segment can now be used as a trigger for the new journey.

• Use Journey Completed event in segment: You can directly create a segment using Journey Completed event

  • Create a segment using Something was done or not done > Journey Run Completed where Journey is <journey name>

• Use this segment as a trigger for the second journey.