The challenge
- How to get campaign names (and possibly SMS names) to be displayed in the
SMS Message Detail Report
for SMS messages created in Content Builder sent out of Journey Builder?
The Impact of the June 2019 release
The new release made it impossible to create text messages from the
Outbound - Interaction
template and forces users to create SMS messages in Content Builder if that message is to be used in Journey Builder.It's also impossible to assign a campaign (not tags) to this type of asset in Content Builder (no option in the interface), so we are facing a real issue that no new SMS sent out of Journey Builder has a campaign tag.
To make issues even worse, when a journey (that includes SMS from Content Builder) is activated, a new SMS of the
Outbound - Interaction
template is created with totally random name likeContent-Generated-Message-20190624T050819-5c0a6ac8-e6d0-46c0-8c4c-a07fac988f40
. This clone is then being sent out contacts and this name will be visible in the reporting which is bad because this tells you nothing about the SMS apart from the personalized message which is not a good base for analytics.When you configure a text message in Journey Builder, in Advanced Options you can see a field called
MobileConnect Reporting Name
which basically shows the name of your SMS message from Content Builder and a random 32 character-long key. I tested this and theSMS Message Detail Report
is showing theContent-Generated-Message...
instead of value represented in this field.To sum this up we lost both the campaign name and the name of the message from the
SMS Message Detail Report
which makes the any advanced analytics impossible.
Attempts to assign the campaign
To solve the campaign name issue I tried the following:
- Assigning the campaign name from the Campaign section which turned out to be impossible since Content Builder SMS messages are not displayed there
- Assigning the campaign name via API with the following API call: POST /hub/v1/campaigns/{id}/assets. This succeeded and I had the asset assigned to the campaign, but it was not displayed anywhere in the interface, but API calls to the asset returned information about the campaign assignment. I added this message to a journey and activated. The newly created SMS clone in Mobile Connect does not retain the campaign information
Workaround
Right now the only the only way to assign a campaign seems to be be this:
- Activate the Journey with SMS messages created in Content Builder
- Quickly find the message you want to assign to a campaign in Mobile Connect among the many
Content-Generated-Messages
and copy the name. - In the Campaign section find the campaign you want to associate the message to
- In the
Add to Campaign
dropdown selectMobile Messages
and find your message with the copied name and assign it to your campaign.
This is not good for several reasons:
- Increases the time spent on each journey
- Requires at a wait activity (at least 1 hour according to best practices) to be present in the journey path before the SMS activity to allow the MC user to assign the campaign with the workaround
- The manual campaign assignment process will probably have to be repeated with each new version of the journey.
Has anyone else had this problem and found a easier workaround?