Rebuild Account Journey History

Context

Rebuilding your Journey history allows you to define and save Journey Stages to your data retroactively. Usually this should only be performed if you’ve changed the entire configuration of your Journey funnel Stages. Demandbase uses an algorithm to rebuild the historical trend data. For example, define new MQA Selector criteria and the Journey Builder can tell you how many accounts match your new MQA definition—both historically and currently.

When you rebuild your Journey history, Demandbase evaluates historical engagement data to calculate which accounts would have been in each new or updated stage, allowing you a more sophisticated level of analysis of your Account Journey.

Rebuilding Journey history is a data-intensive process that may take hours to complete, depending on the size of your database and the complexity of your journey stages.

When you rebuild Journey history, you reconstruct the Stages of accounts in the past and irreversibly lose the cumulative view of account Journey progression as originally defined. Therefore, use Rebuild Journey History rarely and with caution, such as when you're setting up Demandbase or when you have done a complete funnel overhaul.

Best Practices

Perform minor tweaks (for example, changing the threshold for becoming MQA) to Journey Stage Selectors as needed, maybe once per quarter, but don't rebuild Journey history after minor tweaks. 

Perform major rework of Journey Stages rarely (maybe once every two years), in conjunction with a re-examination of how prospects and customers are segmented when going to market. Rebuild Journey history if a significant change in the meanings of stages has occurred. For example, if you make major changes in first-party data fields (typically data in your CRM) or changes in Selector criteria applied to first-party data, you might want to rebuild the Journey history to compare Account Journey progression “apples to apples” historically.

Tip: If you’re unsure as to whether you should rebuild Account Journey history, reach out to your Demandbase contact. 

Prerequisites/Preparation

You must have Demandbase Admin privileges.

Define new Journey Stages. See Getting Started with Journey Stages.

Be prepared to wait several hours for the results.

Steps

1. From the left navigation bar, go to  Settings > Journey > Account Journey Builder.
2. Click the three dots in the top right corner and select Rebuild Journey History.
   
3. Read the prompt that indicates you’re about to delete and replace all historical Journey records with newly created records if you proceed with a rebuild. Note that rebuilding the records can take hours to complete, depending on your database size and complexity of your Journey Stages.
   
   • If you don’t want to proceed with the Journey rebuild, click Cancel.
   • If you’re sure that you want to proceed with the rebuild, copy the number of records that Demandbase expects to impact, enter the number in the field, and click Rebuild.
     
     

Outcome

When Demandbase displays the Rebuild Complete message:

• Check  Settings > Journey > Account Journey Builder to see the progress and completion of the rebuild. When the rebuild is complete, Demandbase shows the revised number of accounts in each Journey Stage.
• Go to  Journeys to see how the Journeys dashboard reflects this new evaluation, account by account.