Apex

Building your first Adaptive Journey

This walkthrough takes you from a template to a published journey you can measure.

Prerequisites

  • An Apex workspace with events flowing. The Quickstart gets the snippet live. This guide needs user_signed_up (or your signup event) from the SDK or Server Events API.
  • At least one published communication under Communications. If you do not have one yet, create an email from the communications hub and publish it.

You can mix marketing and transactional letters in the same journey. Each Send uses the pipeline of the letter it points at. A transactional Send still needs a recipient-initiated trigger (signup, invite, password reset). A welcome series on user_signed_up can carry both.

Step 1: Pick a template

Open Communications → Adaptive Journeys → templates (/dashboard/communications/journeys/templates).

For a first welcome series, use Welcome (new signup) or Activation onboarding. Click Use template. Apex clones it into a draft and opens the canvas.

Step 2: Customize the canvas

The journey page has three parts:

  • Canvas (left) — the graph. Click a step to select it.
  • Step drawer (right) — communication, channels, and routing for that step.
  • Info — name, description, segment, conversion event, and audit.

A typical Activation onboarding draft looks like:

  1. Trigger: user_signed_up
  2. Send (email): welcome
  3. Wait
  4. Branch: On a rule (did they activate?) or On engagement (did they open or click the welcome?)
  5. Send: re-engagement if not
  6. Exit

Click the welcome Send. Pick your published welcome letter. Leave email checked.

Click the Branch. Leave it On a rule for your first journey (for example, has the activation event fired). To route on opens and clicks, switch the branch to On engagement. See Engagement Branching.

Do not look for an Adaptive Branch toggle. That authoring mode is retired. To compare two letters, add an Experiment step instead.

Save. The dirty badge clears.

Step 3: Set the conversion event

Open Info. Set the event that counts as success (the toolbar still says Set goal). For Activation onboarding that is usually activated or the event your workspace uses for first value. Set the window (default 7 days).

That event is what Calibrated Impact measures. Opens and clicks cannot be the conversion event.

Step 4: Dry-run

In the toolbar, click Dry run.

  1. Pick a real person (search by email or pick from recent).
  2. Run the simulation. No letters send.
  3. Read the trace: sent, skipped, or blocked, and whether {{first_name}} resolved.

Workspace owners can toggle owner overrides to walk a path that opt-out or holdout would block. Each override writes an audit event.

Step 5: Publish

Click Publish. Apex writes an immutable version and starts new executions on it. People already in the journey stay on the version they started.

Publish does not refuse transactional letters, and there is no Free / Starter / Pro journey cap. Usage is metered. A transactional Send on a passive trigger (a schedule, or "has not done X") will not publish. Pair that letter with a recipient-initiated trigger.

Pick Production, Beta, or Dev for who this version is On for. Those are the same environment chips as the rest of Apex.

Step 6: Watch it work

After people enter:

  • Executions show who is running, succeeded, or stopped.
  • An Experiment step (if you added one) shows which letter is winning.
  • Calibrated impact compares people who got the journey to the global holdout. Lift is honest only after both sides have enough people.

The first day or two is noisy. Wait for a few hundred people before you trust the lift.

What's next

Related

PreviousBillingNextDriving product adoption