Testing and Publishing Journeys

When you've finished building a journey, it's a good idea to test it out as a final step before publishing. This can help you ensure that your journey's delays, filters, message sends, and user updates are working as expected before you add real users to the journey.

This article explains how to set up and run a journey test as well as how to publish journeys that are ready.

# In this article

# Testing a journey

Journey tests do not occur in a sandbox environment. The journey actually runs for any users who are added, and all of its included actions (such as message sends and user updates) occur even if the journey is not published or turned on at the time of the test run. This means that each time you run a journey test, any sends and clicks that occur as a result count toward your journey campaigns' delivery and performance metrics.

Keep this in mind as you set up and run your journey tests.

To test a journey:

1. Go to Messaging > Journeys and click the name of the journey you want to test to open it in Studio.

2. If the journey is already published, click Edit Journey or View Drafted Edits to switch to Draft mode.

3. Click Test Journey.

4. Under Run journey for, enter the email address of the person you want to add to the journey. We recommend adding either yourself or a teammate from your organization. If your journey includes filters that check for particular fields on a user's profile, make sure those fields exist on your selected test user's profile.

   NOTE

   It isn't possible to test a journey with a userId value. If your project identifies users by userId, you must also collect email addresses in order to run journey tests.

5. (Optional) If desired, click Add Sample Trigger Event to simulate the event that adds users to the journey.

   The JSON entry box accepts the contents of a dataFields object in a hypothetical call to Iterable's POST /api/events/track API endpoint. Do not include the full event payload — if you do, the test will fail.

   For example, consider the following event payload for a journey that starts when a user purchases a concert ticket:

   {
   "dataFields": {
      "purchaseDate": "2024-09-18",
      "ticketPrice": 449.95,
      "concertName": "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour"
   },
   "email": "user@example.com",
   "eventName": "ticketPurchase"
   }
   

   To test a journey that's triggered by this event, you would enter just the fields included in the event's dataFields object:

      {
      "purchaseDate": "2024-09-18",
      "ticketPrice": 449.95,
      "concertName": "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour"
      }
   

   NOTE

   The fields you include in the JSON entry box don't have any effect on the user's profile — they're only used to simulate the conditions needed to run the test.

   

6. Select whether or not Iterable should adjust the behavior of your journey's delay tiles for the test run. (NOTE: These settings don't change your journey configuration — they only provide a temporary adjustment to speed up testing.)

   By default, Iterable shortens the duration of all Delay tiles to 1 minute and all Hold Until and Hold for Reply tiles to 5 minutes. However, you have several options:

   • Uncheck the boxes to run the test with the full delay and hold times.

   • Select a longer or shorter delay/hold duration for each tile type.

   • Skip the delay/hold (test users immediately pass through the tile without any delays or checking for an event to occur)

     

7. Under Journey Actions, select which actions (if any) you want to occur during the journey test run. You can choose whether or not the test run should send messages, call webhooks, and update Facebook Custom Audiences, user profiles, list membership, and subscription preferences.

   

8. When you've finished configuring your desired settings for the test run, click Start Test.

9. While the test is running, you can see the user's progress through the journey by refreshing the page and looking for the icon that shows the user's current location.

10. When the test run is complete, check the test user's profile, event history, device/inbox, etc. to ensure your selected actions occurred as expected.

# Publishing a journey

When you're happy with your journey and confident things are working as expected, make sure you've saved your latest changes, then click Publish to turn the journey on. Eligible users will be added to the journey and start receiving messages from the associated campaigns.

In Published view, you can see your journey's performance data and turn the journey on or off, but you can't edit any of the journey's tiles, settings, or connections. To edit your journey, you'll need to switch back to Draft mode. To learn more, see Editing Journey Drafts in Studio.