#3 - Geolocation

If you find yourself having a hard time getting started there's two great questions to ask yourself. They'll help you start to design a journey.



How would someone enter this journey? There's four common ways for a profile to enter a journey



What components do I need to create the journey? Open a notepad and visualize what components you'll need to have to be able to create the journey. In this case:



In Adobe Places  you can define Points-of-interest (POI) for locations you'd like your mobile app to trigger geolocation events. The technology required on your mobile app is all available in Adobe's mobile SDK. This will generate location.entry and location.exit event on the profile when they enter or exit the POI.

You can then create a event configuration in Adobe Journey Optimizer to use these events to trigger journeys.

When building a journey it's important to be concious about how customers flow through the journey. Journeys in Adobe Journey Optimizer are per profile, instead of as a group like in most traditional marketing automation systems. This means that every profile runs though the journey alone and therefore every action on the canvas will be considering the individual rather than the mass.

In the past you likely selected a group of customers, then split this group based on some condition, excluded a few and then send an email to the remaining customers. In Adobe Journey Optimizer you'll instead build your journey asking yourself "If a customer does [something], I want them to [next step]". It might not sound like a big difference, but just imagine yourself how a "Wait"-activity would work in both of these scenarios.

So based on this change in perspective, how would your journey look?

In Adobe Journey Optimizer you can create custom (API) connections to external systems, these are called Custom actions. You can use these Custom actions in your journeys to call the external system to send and receive information in real-time! Some examples include:

Once a Custom action is configured it'll become available as an activity in your journeys in the actions-tab. For this exercise we've already configured a Custom action called getBloomreachContent. The API will send responses back based on given input. Additionally this Custom action will write it's responses to a Webhook. On this website  you'll be able to see all API calls made by custom actions during the Hands-on Lab.

You might have noticed that one of the request parameters for the API is "Airport name". How do you populate this? Events in Adobe Journey Optimizer come with contextual data. This is data attached to the event that describes what happened in the event. In our case, with the airportEntry, we've added the POI Name to the contextual data. The POI Name is the name given in Adobe Places to the POI. In our case this would be the airport name! If you want to reference this data (for example in the API request parameter), navigate to Context > airportEntry > Place context > POI interaction > POI detail > POI name or use the search bar and search for POI.

The content for the push notification is coming from our Custom action. When the API called by the Custom action gives a response, this response will automatically be added to contextual data and can be used in message personalization.

When in the push notification designer, use the -icon for the title, body and media to open the advanced editor. You can find your Custom action responses in the Contextual attributes tab, navigating to Journey Orchestration > Actions > Bloomreach API > content and select the respective field.

When creating your journey you'll see the journey properties in the right menu. If you already closed this menu, you can alwas reopen it by clicking on the  -icon next to your journey's name. In this menu you can define the Entrance configurations. You can choose if the journey can be entered more than once (default: yes) and can define the wait period for reentrance. The value you set here is the time a profile needs to wait before being able to enter this journey again. This can help you prevent customer dissatisfaction due to overly frequent communication caused by journey reentries.

The resulting journey should look something like the image below. Notice the reentrance wait period in the right hand menu is set to 30 days.

You can now run this journey in test mode. When you want to run an event-triggered journey in test mode, you'll need to provide all the contextual data. For the airport entry event, you'll have to provide:

As you don't have a mobile app we can push to, you will not be able to receive the push notifications. Luckily, the demo API (Bloomreach) will write it's responses to the a Webhook so you can see what you requested and how the API responded here .

An example of this journey is available, called [Example] Geolocation.