Troubleshooting journey campaigns

This page lists some common issues you may encounter when building your journey campaign, and tips for resolving the issues.

Delays and limits on sending email, SMS and push messages

The delivery of email, SMS and push messages may be affected by the email, SMS and push limits you have set in your Ortto account Settings. Review your email, SMS and push setup to make changes as required, such as limits on sending messages on specific days.

You may also wish to use a Delay shape to manage the timing of when people move to email, SMS and push shapes. Or, consider configuring email, SMS and push messages as transactional if you want to send the message immediately, irrespective of limits. Learn more about transactional emails under Making journey and playbook campaign emails transactional.

Failed action

Example action showing failed for two people

If you see a Failed notification on an action in the Preview, navigate to Activity then, at the action failed activity, click Show details to see why the action failed.

Example showing where in a journey to find the reason an action failed

People enter when and People exit when filter errors

When creating a filter, if you see a red condition, it means that the condition requires a value or the operator/s you have chosen are not valid. If a condition is red, it will not filter your results. Learn more about resolving filter errors in Working with filters.

People enter an SMS message shape but not many SMS messages are delivered

If you are seeing a large number of people go into an SMS message shape but few SMS messages delivered it could be because a lot of people in your CDP do not have a phone number listed or SMS permission is false.

You could add a Condition shape above the SMS message shape with the condition such as SMS permission is true and Phone number has any value.

Putting a Condition shape with Clicked email directly after an email message shape, for example, means that people will never meet the condition because the condition evaluates which people have clicked the email as soon as people reach the shape (which is as soon as the email was sent). So people have no opportunity to click it.

Example Condition shape after a message shape that may result in people never meeting the condition

Add a Delay shape between the email or SMS shape and the condition shape. We recommended to set the delay for several hours after the email or SMS message is sent to ensure that people who receive the message have enough time to perform the activity listed in the condition (e.g. clicked email) before they move to the condition shape.

Example solution to help ensure people can meet the condition related to the message sent

Shapes that are switched off

Example notification in the journey editor that a shape is switched OFF

Any shape that is switched off in your journey will block people at that shape until it is turned back on; people will not skip the shape. Ensure you turn shapes on to include them in the journey. Learn more under Managing journey shapes and paths.

Unpublished changes

Ensure you publish any changes to your journey to ensure that it reflects your most recent configuration. Learn more about publishing and versions under Journey flow editor.

You can’t disconnect a nested link

A nested link is bound by the preceding YES/NO paths. You may need to remove the condition or split shape that created the paths and choose which path (if any) you wish to keep.

Contacts that match a time-based entry filter don’t appear to be entering the journey

All audiences created in Ortto that use a time-related condition such as has occurred + a When clause or first/last occurred (e.g. Sent email has occurred more than 1 day ago) are re-calculated (re-built) once every 24 hours.

This rule affects the people entering a journey. For example, you might have expected a person to have entered a journey yesterday, but they didn’t enter until today. The reason is because that person’s activity was recorded after the day’s audience build, so they are included in the audience (enter the journey) on the following day.

To account for this, you could try using an occurs-type condition for the entry criteria paired with a Delay shape in the journey to allow people to enter the journey when they perform the entry activity but then wait a specified number of days until they move to the next shape.

Action failed: Duplicate

A journey action failed activity for a contact with the Log message: Receive action once: duplicate means that the action is set to perform only once, and has already been performed for this contact.

This might occur if, for example, the contact enters the same journey twice. When the action shape setting This action can occur is set to Only once, then the first time the person passes through, the action will be successful. But on the second pass, the action will fail.

To change this, set the action shape setting This action can occur to More than once.

You may also want to consider the If this action fails setting, to decide whether the person will continue in the journey or will exit the journey.