My team and I have been tracking our Lifecycle workflows with Sankey reports.
We’ve been digging into the “Dropoff” we see from each audience and channel.
What we previously knew about drop off metrics on these reports:
- Indicated opt out of Email/SMS
- Indicated moved to another Lifecycle Stage
- Indicated updated contact info or removal of contact info
What we didn’t know about drop off metrics until now:
- This can also indicate GC’s who are sitting in a Delay “pause” who are still actively enrolled in the corresponding workflow waiting to progress to the next comms in the series.
So essentially drop off is a deceptive metric that crosses the streams and does not bring clear understanding of those truly dropped off vs those in a pause pattern still active in the workflow.
I know there used to be a field we could filter to indicate which profiles were actively enrolled in a workflow; however this option was depreciated during a HubSpot update round.
We are at a loss of how to decipher this data without opening hundreds of workflows 1 by 1 and assessing each audience and channel individually.
Any guidance or updates that can be made to make this data set more clear cut?
Hey @LogicWriter,
Thanks for bringing this to the Community, and thanks for the detailed post!
The drop-off are typically the contacts/records that don’t make it from one step to the next. If you haven’t seen it yet, this guide may help clarify how the steps and filters work in the report: Customer journey report steps and filters.
Tagging a few folks who may have hands-on experience with this or a suggestion on how to better identify the workflow status of these records:
Hey @danmoyle, @EugeneAtKiwi, @UlianaV – do you have any additional suggestions for @LogicWriter on this?
Thanks!
Sam, Community Manager
Hi @LogicWriter
That’s an interesting observation. If contacts waiting in workflow delays are being counted alongside actual drop-offs, it makes interpreting the Sankey report much more difficult.
One thing that would really help is if HubSpot separated these into distinct categories, for example:
- Exited workflow (unenrolled, opted out, lifecycle changed, etc.)
- Currently paused in a delay
- Actively progressing
That would make it much easier to understand whether contacts have truly left the journey or are simply waiting for the next step. I’d also be interested to hear if anyone has found a reliable reporting approach without having to inspect each workflow individually.
Illustration of how separating active contacts in workflow delays from true workflow exits could make Sankey reports easier to interpret.
Workflow Audience (100)
│
▼
┌─────────────────┐
│ Active │
│ (Waiting Delay) │
└─────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────┐
│ Progressed │
└─────────────────┘
│
▼
┌─────────────────┐
│ True Drop-off │
│ • Opt-out │
│ • Unenrolled │
│ • Lifecycle │
└─────────────────┘
Hey @LogicWriter ,
Even though there’s no default property for checking workflow enrollment status, you can get that info from Segments. Choose Memberships → Workflow enrollment when setting up the filter for your segment. You can build a segment for contacts based on their workflow enrollment status and use it as a filter on your report.
