MobileConnect reporting for Journey Builder sends broken after the June release

Question

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 like Content-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 the SMS Message Detail Report is showing the Content-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:

1. Assigning the campaign name from the Campaign section which turned out to be impossible since Content Builder SMS messages are not displayed there
2. 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:

1. Activate the Journey with SMS messages created in Content Builder
2. Quickly find the message you want to assign to a campaign in Mobile Connect among the many Content-Generated-Messages and copy the name.
3. In the Campaign section find the campaign you want to associate the message to
4. In the Add to Campaign dropdown select Mobile 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?

Answer 1

The issue has been fixed with the January 2020 release:

Find Your SMS Analytics Faster with the Updated Message Name

When you use MobileConnect with Journey Builder, you have full control of your SMS message name in Journey Builder. SMS messages sent through Journey Builder now use the Activity Name as the Message Name in all reports and data extracts. The Activity Name gets populated with the content name, but you can edit it in the activity.

and

Track Your Cross-Channel Content with SMS Campaigns in Journey Builder

You can now add campaigns to the SMS activity in Journey Builder to track your cross-channel content.

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Setting up reporting

The screen below shows places needed to configure to set both the text message name and the associated campaign.

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Upon activation a new text message of the Outbound - Interaction Template is created in Mobile Connect that will use the proper text message name and have the campaign name associated: