Use Data in Journey Builder

The essential functions of Journey Builder depend on data. To maximize the reach of your journeys, explore how you can use data for filtering, personalization, and other Journey Builder tasks.

• View Your Contact and Journey Data
  Access your contact data and see your Journey and Contact Data attributes in the Journey History dashboard. Journey Data is data from the data extension of your configured entry source, which is only visible after you configured your entry source. Contact Data consists of attributes linked to your contact model in Contact Builder.
• Create a Filter
  Create a filter to ensure that the intended Marketing Cloud Engagement contact enters your journey, follows a split activity path, or reaches the goal. Use contact data and journey data attributes in a filter as needed.
• Journey and Contact Data
  Journey data preserves the state of a contact's data at the moment an entry event fires, facilitating the use of that data throughout a journey. Contact data captures the data values in the event source data extension at the time when Journey Builder evaluates it. Both are uniquely useful in journey creation.
• Linked Data Extensions in Journey Builder
  Your data setup affects how Marketing Cloud Engagement evaluates the contact attributes used in journey entry source filters, wait activities, or decision splits. Review what happens when a data extension is linked to one or more other data extensions.
• Specify an Explicit Attribute Path
  Where multiple paths to an attribute exist, some filters have an ambiguous path in the filter expression. For instance, the filter could use an attribute other than the one you intended to determine which path a contact takes. If your filter’s configuration resulted in an ambiguous path, use these instructions to make the path explicit.
• Attribute to Attribute Comparison
  Compare an attribute value to another attribute in entry events and decision splits in Journey Builder.
• Personalization in the Journey Builder Email Activity
  Personalize email content sent by Journey Builder using the Marketing Cloud Engagement email personalization features.
• Email Personalization Use Case
  In Journey Builder, email personalization replaces the personalization string in the email with the matching attribute value found in journey data. This feature means that each personalization string is replaced with the specified attribute value as it exists when the contact enters the journey. Using journey data to substitute personalization strings for data values ensures that emails aren’t sent with blank or unintended data values.
• Journey and Contact Data in Decision Splits
  Use journey and contact data in Journey Builder decision splits to direct contacts down a path based on changes to an attribute value during a journey. This step is useful when you want to promote to a specific event, even if that event happened before the contact is admitted to the journey.
• Resolve Excess Salesforce Data Events in Journey Builder
  Actions in Sales and Service Cloud, such as creating or updating an object record that injects a contact into a journey, count toward your total Salesforce data event limits.