Journeys Overview
Think of Journeys like a roadmap for your contacts — you define the stops, and Ambassador handles the tracking. 🗺️ Journeys let you create custom lifecycle stages for advocates or customers, move contacts through those stages using automations, and get clear visibility into where everyone is at any point in time.
What Is a Journey?
A Journey is a collection of Stages that represent meaningful steps a contact moves through over time. Journeys are flexible — you can design them to match your sales cycle, referral pipeline, loyalty program, or any other workflow that matters to your business.
Examples of how teams use Journeys:
- Referral pipeline stages: Lead → Demo Complete → Trial → Conversion → Closed/Lost
- Loyalty advocacy tasks: Case Study Submitted → Testimonial Complete → Reward Triggered
- Onboarding milestones: Enrolled → First Referral Sent → First Order Received
Journeys live under Audience Activity > Journeys in your Ambassador navigation.
Journey Types
There are two types of Journeys in Ambassador 3:
System Journeys are created and managed automatically by Ambassador. Right now, the only System Journey is Advocate Enrollment, which tracks a contact's enrollment status as it changes. You can only move a contact through this journey by updating their status — it can't be manually edited.
Custom Journeys are created and managed by your team. These are the journeys you'll build to match your specific program design.
Journey Settings
When creating a Custom Journey, you can choose whether contacts must complete stages in sequence (stage 1 → stage 2 → stage 3, in order) or whether the sequence is optional and contacts can enter any stage at any time. Check the sequence box during setup if a specific order matters to your workflow.
How to Create a Journey and Its Stages
- From the main navigation, go to Audience Activity > Journeys
- Click the New Journey button in the top-right corner
- Enter a Journey Name
- If contacts must complete stages in order, check the box to require a specific sequence
- Click Add Stage, enter the stage name, and click the green checkmark to save it
- Repeat for each stage — click Add Stage again to keep adding
- When you're done, click Create Journey
How Contacts Move Through Journey Stages
Contacts can enter or move between stages in three ways:
Via Automation — Use an Automation with the "Move to Journey Stage" outcome to automatically advance a contact when a trigger fires (like an Order being created or a deal stage changing). This is the most common and recommended method.
Via Bulk CSV Import — From the Contacts table, you can import a CSV file that moves one or more contacts into a specific stage in bulk.
Manually from a Contact Profile — Open any contact's profile page and look for the Custom Journeys section. From there you can manually update which stage they're in.
Using the Journey Dashboard
Once contacts start moving through your Journeys, the Journey Dashboard (Performance Center > Journeys Dashboard) gives you a real-time view of:
- How many contacts are in each stage
- Where referrals tend to stall or convert
- How stage populations change over time
This is especially useful for debugging referral performance, aligning teams, and validating that your automations are firing correctly.
Good to Know
- A contact can be in multiple Journeys at the same time — Journeys are independent of each other.
- The Advocate Enrollment System Journey is managed automatically. Don't expect to manually control its stages.
- If you're designing Journeys for a B2B, B2C, or ecommerce program, check out the Designing Journeys for Your Program article for real-world examples and design guidance.
- Need help setting up your first Journey? Reach out to support@getambassador.com — we're happy to walk you through it.
- Related articles: Designing Journeys for Your Program, Journeys Dashboard Overview, Automations Overview, Referral Attribution Overview