Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) provides a visual, drag-and-drop journey designer that allows teams to build, test, and orchestrate personalized customer experiences across multiple channels.

At the center of the journey designer is the canvas, where activities are connected to define how customers enter a journey, progress through it, and receive relevant experiences. The activity palette is organized into three core categories: Events, Orchestration, and Actions. Each category serves a distinct purpose with different activity types and configuration options available to support specific customer journey requirements.

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1. Events: Defining When a Journey Begins

Events determine how profiles enter a journey. Events trigger journeys when a configured event occurs, allowing businesses to respond to individual customer behaviours in real-time and deliver personalized experiences as customers enter the journey.

AJO enables configuration of three event types:  

• Unitary Events: Trigger a one-to-one journey based on the behaviour of an individual person, such as a purchase or website visit.

• Business Events: Trigger a journey based on a business-event, such as an inventory update or a flight change. Business event journeys automatically add a Read Audience activity right after to identify the customer profiles that should progress through the journey.  

• Audience Qualifications: Trigger a journey when an individual profile enters or exits a defined audience, such as a customer passing the threshold to enter the next loyalty tier. This allows journeys to respond dynamically to changes in audience membership

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2. Orchestration: Controlling How Customers Progress

Orchestration activities determine how profiles move through a journey. They introduce timing, decision-making, audience selection, and other logic that help businesses deliver experiences based on customer context.

The available orchestration activities include:

• Optimize: Determines which path a profile follows based on configuring criteria including experimentation, targeting, and specific conditions, enabling highly customized and effective journeys.

• Read Audience: Reads profiles from a selected Adobe Experience Platform audience and brings them into a journey. This is useful when a journey needs to reach a defined group rather than start with an individual event.

• Wait: Pauses a profiles progression before the next activity. Wait options include a relative duration, a custom calculated date and time, or send-time optimization, which uses Adobe’s AI to determine when the journey should continue.

• Journey Fragments: Inserts reusable groups of preconfigured journey activities into a journey. These fragments help teams maintain consistency and avoid rebuilding common journey logic.

• Content Decision: Uses decisioning capabilities to select personalized offers or content for profiles as they progress through a journey.

• Dataset Lookup: Retrieves relevant information from a dataset to enrich the context available for subsequent journey activities.

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3. Actions: Delivering Experiences and Triggering Workflows

Actions define what happens as a profile progresses through a journey. They can deliver customer-facing messages and experiences through supported channels or connect AJO to external systems.

The main action options include:

• Built-in Channel Actions: Configure supported channels, including email, push notifications, mobile messages, in-app messages, web experiences, code-based experiences, and content cards.

• Custom Actions: Connect AJO to external services through configured integrations. These actions can send API requests to third-party systems, enabling workflows beyond Adobe’s built-in channels.

• Jump: Transfer profiles from one journey to another, allowing teams to connect journeys and organize complex, customer experiences into smaller, reusable flows.

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Creating the Full Customer Journey

Events, Orchestration, and Actions work together to form a complete customer journey. Events define when the journey begins, Orchestration determines how profiles progress, and Actions deliver the resulting experiences or trigger connected workflows.

By combining these activity categories, teams can design customer journeys that respond to individual interactions, account for customer context, and coordinate personalized experiences across channels.

Understanding the available activities and their configuration options is an important first step toward building effective, scalable customer journeys in AJO.

Want to learn more about Adobe Journey Optimizer? Our team can help you explore the possibilities for your customer journey strategy.