Experience Cloud Journey Data Model

When you create an Experience Cloud journey, you choose whether to add user or contact data. To avoid unintentionally sending emails to people who have opted out, you must stay consistent. There are also some event trigger and tracking limitations.

Available in: Enterprise, Professional, Unlimited, and Developer editions.

Every external site member has both an associated user object and a contact object. Internal site users, including employee site users, typically have only the user object. The email preferences for the user and contact records aren’t linked. A person who opts out of a contact record journey still gets email from user record journeys. A best practice is to choose one data type and stick to it.

A couple of other points to consider when picking the data model:

• Some events can trigger only user-based journeys. When you create a journey for a given event, the application shows you whether you can add user, contact, or either record to the journey. For many common community objects, only the user record is available. If you plan to standardize on contacts, use audience-based journeys instead as they can use either the user or contact records.
• Emails sent by journeys that are based on contact records are logged on the contact objects in Salesforce. Logging isn’t always the case for journeys based on user records. If tracking is important, go with contacts.