Journey Context

Event-Triggered Journeys redefine how you orchestrate and personalize customer experiences.

This page explains Journey context, which can help you dynamically adapt each journey to individual user interactions, creating highly relevant, real-time workflows.

Overview

Unlike traditional audience-based journeys, which rely solely on user progress through predefined steps, event-triggered journeys capture and store the details of user-triggered events. This shift allows you to access the data that caused users to reach a specific step and use it to make more precise decisions throughout the journey.

With journey context, you can:

• Personalize customer experiences using real-time event data.
• Enable advanced use cases like abandonment recovery, dynamic delays, and more.

For example:

• When a user cancels an appointment, send a message that includes the time and location of the appointment they just canceled.
• When a user abandons a cart, send a message that includes the current contents of their cart.

What is Journey context?

Journey context is a flexible data structure that captures key details about the events and conditions that shape a customer’s journey. Journey context provides a point-in-time snapshot of event properties, making accurate and reliable data available throughout the journey.

Journey context stores event property information tied to specific user actions, like Appointment ID or Order ID.

Journey context doesn’t store:

• Profile traits, which may change over time.
• Audience memberships, which can evolve dynamically.

However, the up-to-date values of profile traits and audience membership can be added in a payload sent to a destination.

This focused approach ensures journey decisions are always based on static, reliable data points.

Examples of stored context

Event properties are the foundation of Journey context. Examples of event properties include:

• Appointment Scheduled:
  • Appointment ID
  • Appointment Start Time
  • Appointment End Time
  • Assigned Provider Name
• Order Completed:
  • Cart ID
  • Order ID
  • An array of cart contents

Segment captures each event’s properties as a point-in-time snapshot when the event occurs, ensuring that the data remains consistent for use in personalization.

Using Journey context in Event-Triggered Journeys

Journey context provides the framework for capturing and referencing data about events and conditions within a journey. It allows Event-Triggered Journeys to dynamically respond to user behavior by making event-specific data available for decisions and actions at each step.

This is useful for scenarios like:

• Abandonment recovery: Checking whether a user completed a follow-up action, like a purchase.
• Customizing messages: Using event properties to include relevant details in communications.

By incorporating event-specific data at each step, journey context helps workflows remain relevant and adaptable to user actions.

Journey steps that use context

Journey context gets referenced and updated at various steps in an event-triggered journey. Each step plays a specific role in adapting the journey to user behavior or conditions.

Hold Until split

This step checks whether a user performs a specific event within a given time window. If the event occurs, Segment adds its details to journey context for use in later steps.

For example, a journey may wait to see if a checkout_completed event occurs within two hours of a user starting checkout. If the event happens, its properties are added to context and the workflow can proceed; otherwise, it may take an alternate path. The data captured includes event properties (like Order ID).

If a Hold Until branch is set to send profiles back to the beginning of the step when the event is performed, those events are also captured in context. Because they may or may not be performed during a journey, they will show as available in future steps but will not be guaranteed for every user’s progression through the journey.

Send to destination

The send to destination step allows journey context data to be included in payloads sent to external tools, like messaging platforms or analytics systems.

For example, a payload sent to a messaging platform might include Order ID and Cart Contents to personalize the message. Users can select which parts of journey context to include in the payload.

Context structure

The structure of journey context organizes event-specific data gets and makes it accessible throughout the journey workflow. By standardizing how data is stored, Segment makes it easier to reference, use, and send this information at different stages of a journey.

Journey context is organized as a collection of key-value pairs, where each key represents a data point or category, and its value holds the associated data.

For example, when a user triggers an event like Appointment Scheduled, Segment stores its properties (like Appointment ID, Appointment Start Time) as key-value pairs. You can then reference these values in later journey steps or include them in external payloads.

The following example shows how journey context might look during a workflow. In this case, the user scheduled an appointment, and the workflow added related event data to the context:

{
  "journey_context": {
    "appointment_scheduled": {
      "appointment_id": 12345,
      "start_time": "2024-12-06T10:00:00Z",
     "end_time": "2024-12-06T11:00:00Z",
      "provider_name": "Dr. Smith"
    },
    "appointment_rescheduled": {
      "appointment_id": 12345,
      "start_time": "2024-12-07T10:00:00Z",
      "end_time": "2024-12-07T11:00:00Z",
      "provider_name": "Dr. Jameson"
    }
  }
}

This payload contains:

• Entry Event properties: Captured under the appointment_scheduled key.
• Hold Until Event properties: Captured under the appointment_rescheduled key.

Journey context and Event-Triggered Journeys

Journey context underpins the flexibility and precision of Event-Triggered Journeys. By capturing key details about events and decisions as they happen, journey context lets workflows respond dynamically to user actions and conditions.

Whether you’re orchestrating real-time abandonment recovery or personalizing messages with event-specific data, journey context provides the tools to make your workflows more relevant and effective.

To learn more about how Event-Triggered Journeys work, visit the Event-Triggered Journeys documentation.