Does Journey Builder evaluate Contact Data in Real Time?

Question

I have created a journey for our registry members that contains eight email sends over the course of 8 months. Our registry members' statuses can change from "available" to "deleted/ineligible/temporarily unavailable" at a moment's notice.

We only want to send to people whose statuses are "Available". To do this, before every send I've set up a decision split using the "Registry_Status__c" field. Anyone whose status is "Available" will receive the send. Anyone who is not available is placed on a path that circumvents the email and joins after the email send.

The journey isn't showing any validation or test errors. We use Marketing Cloud Connector which is configured correctly. The SQL query that populates the DE (entry point) runs roughly every 15 minutes and contains a WHERE "Registry_Status__c" equals "Available" call.

Theoretically, anyone entering the journey should be "Available", but I am wondering if Journey Builder evaluates changes in contact data as a contact progresses through the Journey. If someone's status changes to anything other than "Available" at any point in the journey, will the aforementioned decision splits (based on contact/attribute group data) recognize the change and put them on the correct path?

Answer 1

Yes. But that depends on how you are configuring your decision split.

When you create Filter Expression, you see 2 options to do that: Journey Data and Contact Data. If you are taking attributes from Contact Data, you will get updated values. But if you are taking Journey data to create the expression, the values that the contact would have carried while entering into the journey will be same throughout even if Data Extensions are updated.

Also, to create expression using Contact Data, you are required to create an attribute group that would link Contact Key with your Data Extension's primary key. You can do that by going to Contact Builder --> Data Designer --> Create Attribute Group. Please follow this link for more information on creating an attribute group: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_cab_create_an_attribute_group.htm&type=5

Once your attribute group is created, you will see that when you click on Contact Data while creating expression. From there you can use attributes on which you need to create decisions.