Journey Control Groups

A control group is a percentage of an audience that is excluded from receiving messages. Audience members in the control group are randomly selected on entry to the journey, and they continue the journey just like active audience members, only without receiving any of its messages. Related events and conversions are recorded for both audiences, providing data you can use to evaluate journey performance. Using control groups in this way can help you:

• Determine the attribution of conversions to, as well as the potentially negative impacts of, various marketing efforts.
• Evaluate the impact your messaging has on driving conversion goals, KPIs, or uninstalls/opt-outs, to make informed decisions on how to best evolve your marketing strategy.
• Preview and set the pace for a controlled rollout.

You can create a control group from the journey Manage, Performance, and Test screens:

1. Click Experiments in the leftside drawer.
2. Click Create a control group, and enter the percentage of users to exclude from messaging.
3. Click Save.

After saving, Experiments will update to show the allocation percentage, along with additional information, depending on how you decide to use the control group. Get all the details and watch a video tutorial in our Journey Control Groups documentation, and learn how to:

• Compare Performance reporting — A journey Performance report compares audience behavior to a journey’s goal. While a control group is enabled, you can review the performance of the active group compared to the control group and determine if messaging is having the expected impact on the journey’s conversion events.

• Manage a controlled rollout — You can use a controlled rollout to increase the availability of a journey over time. This can be helpful for journeys that are considered high-risk, such as promoting a new feature launch or product line. If you want to preview the performance before deployment, set the initial control group allocation to 100%, and compare performance data before reducing the group size.

• Measure campaign lift — Lift attempts to determine the efficacy of a journey by comparing the conversion rate of an active audience with that of a control group who received no messages. This can give you an idea of how your audience performs with and without your marketing efforts.

• Create a new control group — When you need to change a journey’s content and settings, you will likely also want to cancel your current control group and create a new one. For instance, you might update a journey for seasonality, e.g., changing from winter to spring campaigns.