(6 min read)

Monitoring the performance of your automated workflows and creating reports with details about the contacts who are moving through your workflows is an important part of further refining and improving your responsiveness to your supporters.
 

Read more on how to set up an Automation
 

Once you've Published your automation, you can begin to monitor the performance of these workflows and track how many contacts have completed the workflow or are still in the workflow and at what step. The Performance page in the Automation feature is intended to give you a real-time overview of how a particular workflow is functioning. There are also several searches and reports you can use to monitor the performance of your automations.

Using the Automation list page

To get started, open Automation from the Sidebar or from Main Menu > Engagement > Automation. From the Automation list page, you will see the most recent workflows you've created.



From this summary, you can see:

• whether the workflow is in Draft, Active, or Paused mode;
• how many Active Contacts are currently in the workflow;
• the total number of contacts that have ever entered the workflow;
• when the last contacts entered the workflow;
• who created the workflow;
• a graph icon that will open the Performance page; and,
• an action menu (...) that lets you Pause, Pause and Edit, or Delete the workflow.

Note: Delete is only available if the workflow is in Draft mode.

You will also see a search dialogue at the top that will let you search for any previously created workflows you may want to update or inspect. If you don't see the workflow you want to monitor, use the search to find your workflow.
 

Launching the Automation Performance page

Clicking on the workflow name will take you to the Build page if the workflow is in Draft or Paused mode or it will take you to the Performance page if the workflow is currently Active. You can also use the graph icon to go directly to the Performance page.
 

You can also reach the Performance page from the Build screen by using the tab at the top left. This tab will only be active on workflows that have been activated previously.

Understanding the Performance page

On the Performance page, you will see the summary and outline of your workflow on the right and a notification panel on the left that will alert you to the most recent contact entry, give you a quick link to the Workflow Steps Report, and show who last activated your automation.

The Workflow layout on this page will give you more detailed information for each step.

Decision steps will list the total number of contacts who reached that decision point. Below each decision, you will see the percentage of contacts who were sent down the Yes path and the percentage who went down the No path.

Wait steps will list the number of contacts who are currently waiting at that step before moving on.

To see performance details for any of your Action steps, hover your cursor over that step. 

Reporting on your Automation

There are two reports you can use to monitor the performance of your automations.

You can open the Workflow Steps Report from within the Performance page or from the Report Manager. This report will show details for each step in your workflow, including how many contacts are currently at that step, how many have already moved through that step, and what the description and status of each step are (including steps you may have previously removed).

You can filter this report to include only one workflow or you can remove the filters and instead Group By > Workflow Name to compare step details across all workflows.

The second report is the Workflow Contacts Report, also available in the Report Manager.

When you open this report, you'll be asked to specify which workflow you'd like to see. You'll then get a detailed list of all the contacts that went through this workflow along with details about when they first entered, when their most recent entry was, where they are in the workflow and when they entered that step.

This report can be especially useful for fine-tuning your workflows. You can look at the kinds of contacts that are moving in the direction you desire and identify the kinds of contacts that may need a different workflow or approach.

Building lists and searches using Automation criteria 

There are several criteria you can use to customize your reports or other searches based on the results from your Automations. These can be helpful if you are comparing the effectiveness of your workflow or if you want to find all contacts currently in a particular step.

To see which fields you can use in your searches, open Create a List > Automation.

The Current Step Type lets you choose contacts who have completed particular steps in your workflow.

The options for this field include:

• Decision - All contacts who have passed through a Decision step. You can create a query based on a Decision step regardless of whether the step used a saved search or Result of a previous step. The configurations used in Result of a previous step are not available as their own saved searches.
• End - All contacts who have reached the endpoint.
• Merged Contact
• Send an Email - All contacts who were sent an email from Send an email step.
• Start - All contacts who at the beginning of your workflow.
• Suppressed Contact - All contacts who were suppressed in the workflow.
• Wait - All contacts in a particular Wait step.

The Original Entry into Current Workflow selects all contacts who first entered your workflow in the selected date range.

Because some workflows allow contacts to go through them several times (examples would be Birthday Greetings or Recurring Payment Failure recaptures) you can use Last Entry into Current Workflow to select contacts who entered the workflow during a certain date range, regardless of how many times they have been in the workflow.

Entered Workflow allows you to select contacts that went through a particular workflow. Once you select this option, you'll be able to specify which step you want to include from the workflow you selected.

Entered Current Step allows you to restrict your search to a particular date range for contacts who entered the current step you selected above.