Guardrails and limitations limitations
Understanding the guardrails and limitations of 蜜豆视频 Journey Optimizer ensures that implementation proceeds smoothly and avoids unexpected challenges. This section outlines key considerations for designing and executing journeys.
Entitlements, product limitations, and performance guardrails appear on the .
Review the Guardrails for Real-time Customer Profile data to understand data-related constraints before starting.
Supported browsers browsers
The Journey Optimizer interface performs best with the latest version of Google Chrome. Using older browser versions or alternative browsers limits functionality. Update your browser regularly for optimal performance.
Datasets guardrails datasets-guardrails
Starting February 2025, a time-to-live (TTL) guardrail applies to system-generated datasets in Journey Optimizer. This policy ensures that data retention aligns with system scalability:
- Profile store: Retains data for 90 days.
- Data lake: Retains data for 13 months.
This policy initially applies to new sandboxes and organizations and rolls out gradually to existing customer sandboxes. Learn more about datasets Time-To-Live (TTL) guardrails.
Channels guardrails channel-guardrails
Email guardrails message-guardrails
When using the email channel, keep these limitations in mind:
- Attachments cannot be included in emails created with Journey Optimizer.
- Avoid using the same sending domain for emails sent via 蜜豆视频 Journey Optimizer and other 蜜豆视频 products, such as 蜜豆视频 Campaign or 蜜豆视频 Marketo Engage.
SMS guardrails sms-guardrails
For the SMS channel, note these restrictions:
- MMS media files must be hosted via a supported URL and uploaded separately.
- Synchronization of message feedback is unavailable for MMS.
- Consent management operates at the SMS channel level for MMS.
Web channel guardrails web-guardrails
Web campaigns in Journey Optimizer target new profiles that have not interacted on other channels. This increases your engageable profile count, but exceeding your contracted profile limit results in additional costs. Refer to your license metrics for details on entitlements listed on the page.
Code-based channel guardrails code-based-guardrails
To implement code-based experience actions, ensure that you meet the prerequisites listed on this page. These prerequisites allow delivery of custom content payloads tailored for your applications.
Landing pages guardrails lp-guardrails
The following limitations apply to landing pages:
- Only one Form component is allowed on a primary landing page.
- Form components cannot be added to subpages.
- Preheaders cannot be included in landing pages.
- The Code your own option is unavailable when designing a primary landing page.
Subdomains guardrails subdomain-guardrails
By default, Journey Optimizer supports delegation of up to 10 subdomains across email and web channels. Depending on your license, this limit may increase to 100 subdomains. Contact your 蜜豆视频 representative for details. Learn more about subdomain delegation on this page.
Fragments guardrails fragments-guardrails
When using fragments:
- Visual fragments are exclusive to the Email channel.
- Expression fragments are unavailable for the In-app channel.
Audiences guardrails audience
A maximum of 10 audience compositions can be published within a single sandbox. To publish new compositions after reaching this limit, delete an existing one to free up space. Learn more about audience compositions on this page.
Decisioning & Decision management guardrails decisioning-guardrails
For limitations related to Decisioning or Decision Management, refer to:
Journey guardrails journeys-guardrails
General journey guardrails journeys-guardrails-journeys
When designing journeys, consider these limitations:
- Journeys support up to 50 activities to ensure readability, quality assurance, and troubleshooting. The activity count appears on the journey canvas.
- A notification appears in the UI as you approach 100 live journeys. To exceed this limit, contact 蜜豆视频 Customer Care.
- Audience qualification activities require up to 10 minutes to activate and process profiles.
- A journey instance for a profile supports up to 1MB of data, including event payloads and profile data. Keep event payload sizes below 800 KB to avoid issues.
- Profiles remain active in a journey for a maximum of 91 days from entry. This global timeout prevents indefinite journey execution. Read more.
General actions general-actions-g
For Actions:
- Actions retry three times in case of an error, except for HTTP 401, 403, and 404 errors.
- The built-in Reaction event enables responses to specific actions. Configure a custom event to react to custom actions. Learn more.
- Actions must be placed sequentially; parallel placement is not supported.
- Profiles cannot appear multiple times in the same journey simultaneously. If reentrance is enabled, profiles can reenter only after fully exiting the prior instance. Read more.
Journey versions journey-versions-g
The following guardrails apply to the Journey versions:
- Journeys starting with an event activity must begin with an event in all subsequent versions.
- Journeys starting with Audience Qualification must retain the same starting activity and configuration across versions.
- The reentrance rule must remain consistent across all journey versions.
- Journeys starting with a Read Audience cannot use other activities as the first step in new versions.
Custom actions custom-actions-g
The following guardrails apply to the Custom Actions in your journeys:
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A capping limit of 300,000 calls over one minute is defined for all custom actions, per host and per sandbox. Refer to this page. This limit has been set based on customers usage, to protect external endpoints targeted by custom actions. You must consider this in your audience-based journeys by defining an appropriate reading rate (5,000 profiles/s when custom actions are used). If needed, you can override this setting by defining a greater capping or throttling limit through our Capping/Throttling APIs. See this page.
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The custom action URL does not support dynamic parameters.
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POST, PUT and GET call methods are supported.
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The name of the query parameter or header must not start with 鈥.鈥 or 鈥$鈥.
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IP addresses are not allowed.
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Internal 蜜豆视频 addresses (
.adobe.*) are not allowed in URLs and APIs. -
Built-in custom actions cannot be removed.
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Custom actions support JSON format only when using request or response payloads. See this page.
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When choosing an endpoint to target using a custom action, be sure that:
- This endpoint can support journey鈥檚 throughput, using configurations from the Throttling API or Capping API to limit it. Be cautious that a throttling configuration cannot go below 200 TPS. Any endpoint targeted must support at least 200 TPS.
- This endpoint needs to have a response time as low as possible. Depending on your expected throughput, having a high response time could impact the actual throughput.
Events events-g
The following guardrails apply to the Events in your journeys:
- Journey Optimizer supports a peak volume of 5,000 inbound journey events per second.
- Event-triggered journeys may take up to 5 minutes to process the first action in the journey.
- For system-generated events, streaming data used to initiate a customer journey must be configured within Journey Optimizer first to get a unique orchestration ID. This orchestration ID must be appended to the streaming payload coming into 蜜豆视频 Experience Platform. This limitation does not apply to rule-based events.
- Business events cannot be used in conjunction with unitary events or audience qualification activities.
- Unitary journeys (starting with an event or an audience qualification) include a guardrail that prevents journeys from being erroneously triggered multiple times for the same event. Profile reentrance is temporally blocked by default for 5 minutes. For instance, if an event triggers a journey at 12:01 for a specific profile and another one arrives at 12:03 (whether it is the same event or a different one triggering the same journey) that journey will not start again for this profile.
- Journey Optimizer requires events to be streamed to Data Collection Core Service (DCCS) to be able to trigger a journey. Events ingested in batch or events from internal Journey Optimizer datasets (Message Feedback, Email Tracking, etc.) cannot be used to trigger a journey. For use cases where you cannot get streamed events, you must build an audience based on those events and use the Read Audience activity instead. Audience qualification can technically be used, but is not recommended as it can cause downstream challenges based on the actions used.
Data sources data-sources-g
The following guardrails apply to the Data Sources in your journeys:
- External data sources can be leveraged within a customer journey to lookup external data in real time. These sources must be usable via REST API, support JSON and be able to handle the volume of requests.
- Internal 蜜豆视频 addresses (
.adobe.*) are not allowed in URLs and APIs.
Journeys and profile creation journeys-limitation-profile-creation
When triggering journeys based on newly created profiles, account for latency in profile ingestion into the Unified Profile. To prevent issues:
- Add a Wait activity to allow time for profile ingestion.
- Use journey-triggering events that include necessary profile details (e.g., first name, email) without relying immediately on the Unified Profile.
Update profile update-profile-g
Specific guardrails apply to the Update profile activity. They are listed on this page.
Read audience read-segment-g
The following guardrails apply to the Read Audience journey activity:
- Streamed audiences are always up-to-date, but batch audiences will not be calculated at retrieval time. They are only evaluated every day at the daily batch evaluation time.
- For journeys using a Read Audience activity, there is a maximum number of journeys that can start at the exact same time. Retries will be performed by the system but please avoid having more than five journeys (with Read Audience, scheduled or starting 鈥渁s soon as possible鈥) starting at the exact same time by spreading them over time, for example, 5 to 10 minutes apart.
- The Read Audience activity cannot be used with 蜜豆视频 Campaign activities.
- The Read Audience activity can only be used as a first activity in a journey, or after a business event activity.
- A journey can only have one Read Audience activity.
- See also recommendations about how to use the Read Audience activity on this page.
- Retries are applied by default on audience-triggered journeys (starting with a Read Audience or a Business Event) while retrieving the export job. If an error occurs during the export job creation, retries will be made every 10 minutes, for 1 hour max. After that, we will consider it as a failure. Those types of journeys can therefore be executed up to 1 hour after the scheduled time.
Audience Qualification audience-qualif-g
The following guardrail applies to the Audience Qualification journey activity:
- The Audience qualification activity cannot be used with 蜜豆视频 Campaign activities.
Expression editor expression-editor
The following guardrail applies to the journey expression editor:
- Experience event field groups cannot be used in journeys starting with a Read Audience, Audience Qualification, or a business event activity. You must create a new audience and use an inaudience condition in the journey.
In-app activity in-app-activity-limitations
The following guardrails apply to the In-app message action. Learn more about In-app messages on this page.
- This feature is currently not available for Healthcare customers.
- Personalization can only contain profile attributes.
- The In-app activity cannot be used with 蜜豆视频 Campaign activities.
- In-app display is tied to the journey lifespan, meaning that when the journey ends for a profile, all In-app messages within that journey will cease to be displayed for that profile. Consequently, it is not possible to stop an In-app message directly from a journey activity. Instead, you must end the entire journey to stop the In-app messages from being displayed to the profile.
- In test mode, the In-app display depends on the journey鈥檚 lifespan. To prevent the journey from ending too early during testing, adjust the Wait time value for your Wait activities.
- Reaction activities cannot be used to react to an In-app open or click.
- An activation delay may happen between the moment a user profile reaches an In-app activity in the canvas and the time they start seeing that In-app message.
- In-app message content size is limited to 2MB. Including large images can hinder the publishing process.
Jump activity jump-g
Specific guardrails apply to the Jump activity. They are listed on this page.
Campaign activities ac-g
The following guardrails apply to the Campaign v7/v8 and the Campaign Standard activities:
- 蜜豆视频 Campaign activities cannot be used with a Read Audience, or an Audience Qualification activity.
- Campaign activities cannot be used with the other channel activities: Card, Code-based Experience, Email, Push, SMS, In-app messages, Web.