I find myself wishing each campaign step menu had it’s own “test” button, specifically Action nodes. And more specifically, with the Send a webhook action (as pictured below) it would be so nice to have a “Send test payload” button. Wouldn’t it be great to set up a campaign Action, fill it in with test data and click a “Test” button to help identify specific issues?
I think these groups of people would benefit from this idea:
Everyone who wants to just build without piecing together the puzzles in the error logs.
Why I think they would benefit from this idea:
Save time! When a step in a campaign doesn’t work, we can see that it didn’t work, but it’s much more difficult to understand why it didn’t work - at least for someone at my experience level.
A good practice in Mautic is to run small campaigns and to rely as much as possible on segments.
You use a segment to trigger your campaign.
Depending on the conditions of your campaign you push your contacts into other segments.
Then these segments trigger other campaigns.
This allows you to isolate the functioning of each campaign and to find problems quickly.
This makes it easier to maintain the campaigns.
I would put it to use for sure. I find myself wanting to use the feature but it doesn’t exist. (In Integromat for example, i often test individual nodes to make sure it functions properly…)
With regard to Condition nodes in campaigns this same “test” button could populate a temp list of all that would fit the conditional criteria.
We had this discussion at work this morning. We are thinking to have a test button that would run a test on the whole campaign based on the data already in the database.
Our idea is that it would run a test on that campaign only (maybe limit the total lead count if it is a large segment)
When the test completes we display a modal window with the results of the test that will show the number of executions at each stage and what happened (example: 12 records when through a condition)
The reason for this is that we want our marketing department to have full confidence that the campaign will perform as expected. This would do that and point out any issues.
The only problem is that you have to ensure that you do not modify any data. Of course you could provide the data manually but that would mean the marketing team has to know how the data is structured from a backend perspective.
sorry for the late reply, been pretty busy. You certainly can and I would encourage that for smaller campaigns/segments.
One issue is that the test segment is going to have what I call dirty data. It will be up to the campaign creator to ensure that the test segment has the expected data in various states to run through the campaign as expected. The test feature would give more than just insights as to potential problems but could give insight as to how the campaign might actually perform when it is ran live.
Decisions.com does this wonderfully (it is not a marketing tool, but a no code thing that I didnt like working with). when you ran a test it would go through each step and highlight the ones it went through. You could then click on each step to see what went in and what came out and follow it all the way through.
So the feature would allow you to simulate page visits, form submissions, show dynamic content, send emails, where it would simulate clicks on certain links, send webhooks and mock response on webhooks?
Sounds nice, I would probably use it, but I can’t imagine any way to build it economically and maintain it with all the plugins, that influence campaign outcomes.
If I want to stay realistic, it’s easier to understand how campaigns work, and be able to create a test segment / user / actions to follow up with campaign steps.
I would love to see a feature, where you could see the campaign tree and the next scheduled action / decision flow colored somehow for a certain contact. This info is not so easy to get now on the contact level.
Don’t hate me, just honest opinion. I see many great ideas here (that is one of them) but even smaller scale ideas are not completed. Many ideas, few hands actually coding.
I still think a basic validation payload should be sent when a campaign with a “Send a webhook” action is saved. A simple request to the destination with just headers would be fine. This seems to be standard for most platforms.
A test button would be a fancy “upgraded” version to this solution.
No hate at all mate, I love discussions and getting different ideas opinions from others. I see it from a developers point of view and the more we discuss the easier the process can be to make an idea into a reality.
