Journey Events
Understand Journey events and use it to segment the right customers
Journey events allow you to segment contacts, trigger automations and workflows based on what happens to your customer journeys. Understanding each event type and when it fires is essential for building effective automation workflows.
Event Hierarchy Overview
When a customer enters a journey, they either get rejected even before starting or proceed through various outcomes. Here's the hierarchy:
Entry Point:
Journey Run Rejected — Stops here, appear on contact timeline
If Validation Passes:
Journey Run Started — Customer enters journey and shows up on the contact timeline.
Journey Run Exited — Customer matched an exit condition
Journey Run Cancelled — Admin manually cancelled
Journey Run Completed — Journey finished (status: success or error)
Journey Run Failed — Critical system error prevented execution
Key takeaway: Every journey run is either Rejected OR Started. Once Started, it will end in exactly one of four states: Exited, Cancelled, Completed,or Failed.
Journey Run Rejected
What it means: The journey run was rejected before it even started execution.
When it triggers: When a contact fails initial start conditions or eligibility criteria before the journey begins processing.
Note: Rejected runs do appear on the contact's timeline.
Use Case: License Renewal Journey
You're sending a license renewal journey to customers, but some customers have opted out of communications on a specific channel let’s say WhatsApp which is defined in your start conditions of the Journey. A rejected run occurs when a customer's profile shows they're unsubscribed on WhatsApp before the journey processes.
Journey Run Started
What it means: The journey run has been initiated and is actively processing for the contact.
When it triggers: When a customer enters a journey and passes initial validation checks.
Scope: This event covers ALL runs except those that are rejected, including all the outcomes below.
Note: This is a broad event that captures every successful entry into a journey.
Use Case: Welcome Email Campaign
You want to track engagement from the moment anyone enters your onboarding journey. When a journey run starts, this can be used to measure total funnel entry.
Journey Run Exited
What it means: The customer exited the journey because an exit condition was matched.
When it triggers: When a customer meets the criteria defined in your journey's exit conditions before completing the journey.
Exit conditions are intentional breakpoints designed to remove customers who no longer meet your campaign goals.
Use Case: Win-Back Campaign with Engagement Gate
You're running a 30-day win-back campaign targeting inactive users. Your exit condition is: "Contact opens an email" (indicating they're re-engaged).
Action: When a run is exited, remove the customer from the win-back segment. This prevents duplicate messaging and focuses resources on truly inactive users.
Journey Run Cancelled
What it means: An admin manually stopped the journey run for a specific contact.
When it triggers: When a team member manually cancels a journey for a contact through the Bird platform, typically to remove them from an active campaign.
This is a deliberate administrative action, not an automatic system event.
Use Case: Support Team Manual Override
A customer reports to your support team requesting to be removed from an email campaign immediately. The support agent manually cancels their active journey run.
Journey Run Completed
What it means: The journey finished processing and reached its end, regardless of whether the outcome was successful or resulted in an error.
When it triggers: When the journey has executed its steps and actions, and reaches and end state of a "success" or "error" status.
Key distinction: This event fires for BOTH successful completions and completions with errors. You can add conditions to differentiate between them.
Use Case: Journey Runs executed
You can use this event to identify the percentage of all your Journeys that started and actually completed with a success or a failure.
Action: Create two conditions:
**If status = "error",**identify why journeys failed and address them.
**If status = "success",**denotes successful completion of your Journey designed as intended
Journey Run Failed
What it means: The journey failed to execute at all due to internal system errors.
When it triggers: When the journey encounters a critical error before or during execution that prevents it from running properly (e.g., database issues, API failures, system timeouts, performance degradation).
This is different from a journey that runs but produces errors in its steps, this is a system failure to even start execution.
Use Case: Identify Investigations to be reported
You are noticing a lot of Journey Runs Failing, this means there is a system issue and has to be addressed by the Bird platform team.
How to Set Up Conditions on Journey Events
You can use these events to create powerful automated responses. Here's how to set up a condition:
In your Journey builder, start conditions or conditions, select "If an event happened or did not happen"
Choose the journey event you want to monitor (e.g., "Journey Run Completed")
Use the "Where" section to add filters based on specific attributes
For example, to catch errors in completed journeys:
Event: Journey Run Completed
Where: Status equals "error"
This allows you to treat successful completions and error completions differently in your downstream actions.
Best Practices
Monitor Run Failed events closely: These indicate system issues that need investigation
Use Completed + Status condition: Separate successful outcomes from error outcomes for better reporting
Leverage Exited events: Use these to keep your segments clean and prevent message duplication
Track Journey Run Started broadly: Use this for total funnel metrics to understand overall journey performance
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