Journeys
Holdouts and pausing
Comparison groups, dry run, blocked enrollments, frequency.
Holdout
A holdout is a random slice of eligible people who do not receive the Journey’s emails, so Insights can compare them to people who did. Impact is incremental product conversions against the goal event — not opens.
Set the holdout percentage on the Journey. 0 means no comparison group (measurementStatus: no_holdout). Campaigns do not have a holdout; they are one-shot sends.
If treatment converts worse than holdout, Insights flags losing_to_holdout. Pause, change the weak step, and only then resume. Do not “fix” it by deleting the holdout.
Dry run
Review → Dry run validates the graph without sending:
- Missing confirmed locales
- Unverified sending domain
- Consent / communication-class mismatches
- Unreachable branches
- Eligibility conflicts
Activation stays blocked until the checklist is green. A passing dry run is not a send.
Pause and resume
Pause stops new progress. People already waiting stay on their Wait step. Resume continues from where they were. Pausing is the right response to a complaint spike — do not delete the Journey.
Blocked people (consent_missing, suppressed, blocklisted) are not errors. Fix the underlying reason; Audryo retries the enrollment. You do not re-add them by hand.
Frequency
Journeys can cap how often someone is messaged (frequency cap on the specification). Prefer a cap plus honest communication classes over stuffing more emails into the graph.