Build a real-time journey

A real-time journey runs continuously. A customer enters the moment they join a real-time segment, moves through the journey’s steps as time passes, and leaves the moment they meet an exit condition. Use a real-time journey for programs where timing matters, such as abandoned cart recovery, welcome series, and loyalty milestones.

Real-time journeys use the same canvas as batch journeys. This page describes what is different. For how real-time journeys behave, see Journeys in the real-time reference.

How real-time journeys differ from batch journeys

	Real-time journey	Batch journey
Runs	Continuously	On a schedule
Entry and exclusion	Real-time segments from one profile collection	Database segments
Exit conditions	Event type, real-time segment, or real-time journey	Segments
Goal conditions	None	Supported
Delay units	Minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months	Hours, days, weeks, or months
Quiet hours	Supported	Not available
Destinations	Real-time destinations	Destinations for journeys and campaigns
Measurement	Travel log, with a control group from a percent split	Goals, milestones, conversion metrics, and the travel log

A journey is real-time when Continuously evaluate this journey is turned on as you create it. Turning it on or off clears the journey’s entry conditions, so decide which kind of journey you are building before you configure it.

Who enters and who leaves

Entry conditions are required:

• Include one or more real-time segments. A customer enters the journey the moment they join one of them.

• Exclude real-time segments of customers who must never enter, such as customers who have not consented to the channel.

All of a journey’s segments must belong to the same profile collection.

Exit conditions remove a traveler from the journey immediately. A traveler exits when they:

• receive an event of an Event type, such as an order, which exits them the moment they purchase;

• join a Real-time segment, such as a segment of customers who purchased;

• enter another Real-time journey that takes priority.

Leaving the entry segment does not remove a traveler from the journey. A customer who abandons a cart and then buys it stays in an abandoned cart journey, and keeps receiving its messages, until an exit condition removes them or they reach the end of their path. Add an exit condition for every reason a traveler should stop.

Re-entry controls whether a customer can go through the journey more than once:

• Allow re-entry lets a customer enter again after they finish their previous path.

• Cooldown period sets how long they must wait before entering again, from minutes to months.

• Linked journeys keeps a customer out while they are in another journey you name, or within that journey’s cooldown, or when that journey doesn’t allow re-entry.

Steps

A real-time journey has the same steps as a batch journey, plus Quiet Hours:

• Activate sends the traveler to one or more real-time destinations, with the profile attributes the destination needs, such as the items in their cart. Some destinations also take payload settings, such as a campaign ID or an event name. Real-time destinations are set up by your operators; a real-time journey can’t send to a batch destination. See Real-time destinations for the supported connectors.

• Delay waits a set time before the traveler continues, from minutes to months.

• Quiet Hours holds travelers until a quiet window ends in their local time, so that messages are not sent overnight. The window has a Start and an End, a Timezone attribute on the profile that holds each customer’s time zone, and a Fallback timezone for customers whose time zone is unknown. These settings apply to every Quiet Hours step in the journey.

• Conditional Split sends travelers down different paths. Each path matches a real-time segment, or Custom criteria: conditions on the traveler’s profile attributes, such as their value tier. Travelers go down the first path they match, and travelers who match none go down No match.

• Percent Split sends travelers down randomly assigned paths by percentage. Include control adds a Control Group path for travelers who receive nothing, so that you can measure the journey’s effect.

• Merge brings split paths back together.

Test and run a real-time journey

A new real-time journey is Paused. Before it sends to customers:

• Test it. Set Destinations to Test to run the journey without sending to your live destinations, and review what the journey did with View test results. Set Destinations back to Live when you’re ready.

• Turn it on. Set Status to Running and save the journey. From then on, a customer enters the moment they join an entry segment. A customer who was already in the segment when the journey started does not enter until they leave the segment and join it again.

If customers don’t enter the journey or messages don’t send, see Troubleshoot real-time.

To stop a running journey, set Status to Paused, and choose what happens to the customers in it:

• Remove travelers, which is recommended, ends the journey for every traveler, and nothing more is sent to destinations.

• Drain travelers lets current travelers finish their paths, and lets no new travelers enter.

Measure a real-time journey

Real-time journeys don’t track goals, milestones, or conversion rates. To measure one, use its travel log, which records every step each traveler takes, the percent-split path they took, whether that path is the control, and why they exited.

The travel log is sent to a destination on a schedule: choose a JTL Destination and a Recurrence in the journey’s settings. The travel log goes to a destination for journeys and campaigns, not to a real-time destination. To measure lift, compare the outcomes of travelers on each percent-split path with those on the Control Group path.