Overview
Journeys simulate a user interacting with your website's pages, forms, funnels, and more. They report on collect tags, cookies, console errors, and other data. Journeys are used for testing critical paths on a website, such as:
Testing to see if a loan application form is capturing and submitting data correctly
Validating the functionality of a shopping cart funnel
Confirming that tags are collecting the right data in a conversion path
Journey Setup
To create a User Journey, click Create New -> Journey in the left navbar. Fill out the information on the Journey Setup screen as follows:
Sub-folder (required)
The Journey must belong to a sub-folder. Choose one from the list or create a new one by clicking Create a new Folder or Sub-folder.
Journey Name (required)
The name should be unique and descriptive of the action it imitates. For example, “mysite.com Purchase,” or “Marketing Lead Form Submission.”
Journey Run Scheduling (required)
For custom schedules and other advanced scheduling options refer to the Audit & Journey Scheduling help document.
Frequency: Select how often you want the Journey to run. Be careful with a higher frequency because if you have a low amount of traffic through that path, your analytics could be skewed. The best practice is to allowlist the ObservePoint servers or block their traffic from counting in analytics (see ObservePoint Allowlisting and Location List). Paused User Journeys will not run unless they are manually activated or the frequency setting is updated. Manually activate a Journey by clicking the Run Now icon () on the Journey's ellipses. If your Journey runs too many times in a row with errors, it will pause automatically
Starting Date (required): By default, this is set to the current date. Override this to start the Journey at a future date. If the frequency is set to Paused, the Starting Date cannot be selected.
Starting Time: Select a time of day for the Journey to begin running. If a Journey is still running when the next scheduled time to run passes, the new run is skipped so the current run can finish. In that case, an email is sent with a message to consider changing the frequency. If the frequency is set to Paused, the Starting Time cannot be selected.
File Substitutions
It allows you to test scripts/libraries on pages in your production environment without actually inserting the script/library onto the page. See the File Substitutions for more details.
Location (required)
Choose a location for this User Journey to run from. ObservePoint can run User Journeys from many locations around the world. In most cases, the default location will suffice unless you have a geographic or time-zone issue you need to work around.
Custom Proxy
Journeys can be configured for other locations as needed to run a User Journey from a specific location not listed here. Choosing this option on the Location field lets you enter your own proxy.
Complete Webhook URL
A webhook is a way to set up a notification system so that when the ObservePoint servers have completed a Journey, another application can be notified. The field to enter the Webhook URL is under Journey Setup for Journeys. Whatever URL you enter for the Webhook URL, the Journey triggers that URL when it is complete. The URL entered for the Webhook must be an HTTP endpoint that receives
POSTrequests.
Blackout Window (optional)
Blackout times prevent Journeys from starting at a certain time of day, eg: when the site undergoes regular maintenance. For Journeys scheduled to run more frequently than once a day, a blackout time skips any runs scheduled to execute during that period and will resume after the blackout time has passed.
User Agent (required)
Select the user agent, or the browser and operating system you want the Journey to imitate. All page requests from a browser also pass along the User-Agent string to identify the browser and operating system to the web server. A Chrome browser running on Windows is different from a Firefox browser running on iOS, and the web site could respond slightly differently for each.
A best practice is to copy multiple Journeys and change the user agents in order to test different how the server responds to each.
Journeys use Chrome browsers on Linux operating systems. Changing the User Agent string only changes what the server sees as the browser, it does not actually change the Journey's browser or operating system.
VPN
If enabled, Virtual Private Networks allow outside access to secure content. The VPN settings must be configured by an administrator and are enabled by contract (see Scanning Secure Content).
Send Notifications To (optional)
Enter the email addresses of each person who should be notified when the Journey fails to complete or the first time it runs successfully after a failure. In addition, rules can have an email address to notify users if the fails (see Creating Rules).
Global Rules (optional)
Select a rule to be applied globally within the Journey. A global rule only has to execute successfully one time during the Journey to pass (see Applying Rules to Audits and Journeys). Rules on a step (see below) must execute on the step they are applied in order to pass.
Browser Width Override (optional)
Enter a width for the viewport of the browser you want to imitate. For example, if you choose Android 5 Chrome as your user agent, set the browser width to 360, or the number of pixels on your target device screen width.
Email Alerts (optional)
When email alerts are turned on, the people listed in the Notifications box are sent an email when the Journey fails to complete or when a Journey completes successfully after having failed.
Monitor This Journey
Checking this option notifies the Script Services team to keep an eye on your Journey. ObservePoint will remediate any issues with your Journey within 48 hours. Use action names for each step to document your expected results. Once all the required fields are filled in, click “Continue” to advance to the Actions panel.
Note: Using Monitor Journey number of requests will be reduced when your Journey has an action failure and is repaired by the Journey Support team.
Privacy Settings
Send GPC Signal
Sending GPC Signal is a critical part of validating the various opt-in/opt-out user states required to ensure privacy compliance. To enable this setting on your Journeys simply toggle on Send GPC Signal. Report data reflects tags, cookies, and other technologies loading while in this state. More information here.
CMP Accept All / Reject All
Enable this feature for testing the important user states of “Accept All” or “Reject All”. This feature needs to be configured for each domain that is being visited in a Journey, this should be set as your first action. This action will navigate to the starting URL you provided, clear cookies, and then execute the action you created. More information here.
Block 3rd Party Cookies
Enable this setting to test how your website will respond when 3rd-party cookies are blocked from loading. This will allow you to mimic the behavior of browsers that do this today, so you can be confident in your end-user experience.
Setting Up Actions
Actions are commands the Journey executes on the web pages to imitate what a user would do on the site. For Audits, an action executes on each page or on the pages defined in its filter. Actions can range from simply clicking a link to executing multiple lines of custom JavaScript. Each Action is executed in the order listed and can be re-arranged as needed. Click the Actions tab to set them up.
Note: An ID attribute is required for many of the action types described below in order to locate an element to act on. However, if you do not have an ID on the element, you can use a Name attribute, an XPath, a CSS selector, or the HTML element itself. Name attributes are less reliable than IDs because they are not required to be unique on a page while IDs are. An XPath or CSS selector can point to a unique element or not, depending upon how they are constructed.
When resolving an Identifier, the system will look in the following order:
ID attribute
Name attribute
XPath
CSS selector
HTML
XPaths can use regular expressions. See Finding an XPath or CSS Selector for more information on using them.
Action Type (required)
The first Action always navigates to a specific web page, which becomes the first page of the Journey. A new Action Type can be set on any subsequent steps. Eight types of interactions can be performed:
Navigate To: Open the page specified in the URL field. Paste the URL on which you want the User Journey to begin. A Journey will always start with a navigation action.
Click: Press down with the mouse on a link or button. The ID, Name, XPath, or CSS selector of the element must be entered in the Identifier field.
Input: Enter data into a text element on the page. The Identifier field is the ID, Name, XPath, or CSS selector of the text element and the Value field contains the text that you want to be typed.
For example, if you were logging into a site, you would type your credentials into the username and password form fields on the web page.
Masked Input: Use this for passwords or other secure text just as you would the Input action. The Masked Input text is saved and retrieved in a secure encrypted format and cannot be discovered by opening the Journey later and examining the Masked Input action field.
Note: Each Masked Input value is stored using industry-standard AES encryption to prevent anyone from viewing it, including ObservePoint employees, even if they have access to ObservePoint's database where it is stored.
Select: Click on a Select list item. The Identifier is the ID, Name, XPath, or CSS selector of the select list. The Value is the item in the select list. Locate it by inspecting the HTML of the list and looking for what is listed in the Value attribute for the line you want to select.
Check/Uncheck: These either select or deselect a radio button or checkbox. They also require an ID, Name, XPath, or CSS selector on the radio button or checkbox item.
Execute: Run a line or more of JavaScript. The code must be well-formed JavaScript placed inside the JavaScript field. Most JavaScript commands work here, but best practice is to try them out in the browser’s JavaScript console in advance to make sure they work. Other JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery also work.
Watch: Enter the number of seconds in the Value field that you want the page to sit after running the last action. This is helpful when you need a video to play for a limited time so you can see the tags firing from the playback. When the time elapses, the User Journey will go to the next step.
Switch to iFrame: Prior to interacting with iFrame selectors add this action and provide an appropriate selector. By doing so, ObservePoint will step into the iFrame and see the tags that fire as a result of interactions.
Note: you will need to leave the iFrame, to return to the original page.
Leave iFrame: After you have added a Switch to iFrame action type if you want to interact with elements outside of the iFrame, add the Leave iFrame action type.
Action Set: To add an Action Set from the Action Set Library select this then select which set of steps you want to add. For more details see documentation.
Add Action Wait Time (optional)
This feature adds wait time after an action. When an action triggers tags that take time to process (e.g. a form submission), this tool adds a delay before the step ends and the screenshot is taken.
Journey actions do not wait for network silence, except for the "Navigate" function.
The standard wait time is 8 seconds for every Journey action. Any user-specified wait time is in addition to this 8-second wait time.
Note: Wait time is subject to change and will be updated regularly.
Prevent Nav (optional)
Each Action can be prevented from navigating to its expected page by turning on Prevent Nav. It acts as an override switch to ignore the URL field or any other element that results in loading a new page. This is useful for situations where you want to click on a link to record the analytics but not go to the destination, such as for a download link.
Rules (optional)
Rules can be applied to each Action to validate the data at each step of the Journey. Rules are created in the Rules Library (see Applying Rules to Audits and Journeys for instructions).
Once all the Actions are configured, click Save and Finish.