Reporting, Testing, and Governance
AJO reporting covers journey reports (entry, exit, errors, drop-off per activity), campaign reports (sends, deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces), and channel-specific metrics. Key concepts: deliverability metrics (bounce, complaint, unsubscribe), engagement metrics (open, click, conversion), and journey-level metrics (profiles entered, in-progress, completed, failed). Test profiles and proofs validate rendering and personalization before send. A/B testing compares variants; holdout audiences measure incremental lift.
Governance covers access control (product profiles, permissions, sandboxes), data governance (consent, data usage labels, DULE policies), audit and change management, and frequency rules to prevent over-contact. Consent must be respected at send time; suppressing unsubscribed or opted-out profiles is mandatory. Sandboxes isolate environments; product profiles map users to permissions.
The traps: (1) confusing sent with delivered (delivered excludes bounces); (2) assuming opens are reliable - image-blocking and privacy features inflate/deflate them; (3) forgetting that test profiles must match the audience schema and that proofs do not count in reports; (4) confusing A/B test (variant comparison) with holdout (no-message control for lift); (5) ignoring consent and frequency capping in governance questions; (6) assuming reports are real-time - most have processing latency.
Worked example
A campaign sends to 10,000, with 9,500 delivered, 4,000 opens, and 500 clicks. Open rate = opens / delivered (4,000/9,500 ≈ 42%), not opens / sent. Click-to-open = 500/4,000 = 12.5%. A holdout of 1,000 non-contacted profiles lets you compare conversion lift.
Rule of thumb
Always compute rates against delivered, not sent, unless the metric definition explicitly says otherwise. And never send to profiles without valid consent.