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The decision on the table is which questions deserve a journey-level test, and which metric settles them. A Path Optimizer test holds contacts for days or weeks. Once it picks a winner, every new contact follows that path, so a badly chosen metric shapes the journey long after the test has ended.
What Path Optimizer does inside a journey
Path Optimizer is a flow control activity in Journey Builder, the tool in Marketing Cloud Engagement that moves contacts through a sequence of messages and waits. You place it in a journey and split contacts across up to ten test paths. Each path can differ in content, wait times, send frequency or channel. When the test ends, one path wins and every contact who enters afterwards follows it. The journey keeps running throughout, with no new draft for each variation.
We run marketing automation programmes with campaigns that reach two million recipients, and at that scale a test that needs a fresh journey version each time is a test nobody schedules. Journey Builder is part of Marketing Cloud Engagement; Salesforce also sells a marketing product on its core platform, described in Marketing Cloud Next and its editions, and the testing tools differ between the two.
Path Optimizer and A/B testing answer different questions
An email A/B test compares two versions of one message. Path Optimizer compares versions of a sequence. If you want to know which subject line earns more clicks, an email split test answers it faster and with less setup. If you want to know whether three emails over ten days beat two emails and an SMS over a week, only a path-level test can tell you, because the variable is the journey itself.
Manual winner selection widens the scope further. Test paths can include custom activities and channels beyond email. You can then judge them on a result Marketing Cloud Engagement does not track, such as orders in your commerce platform. On Marketing Cloud Advanced (Marketing Cloud Next, Advanced edition), the comparable feature is called Path Experiment, which we cover when comparing Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced.
The winning metric matters more than the number of paths
Automatic selection judges paths on email engagement: opens, clicks or unsubscribes. Opens are the weakest of the three. Privacy features in several mail apps load images automatically, which inflates open rates without anyone reading the email. A path picked on opens can win for reasons that have nothing to do with your customers.
Clicks are the better signal for content tests. Unsubscribes suit a test about frequency, because the risk of sending more is losing the contact altogether. When the goal is revenue, choose the winner manually and measure it where revenue is recorded. Someone has to read the results at the end and make the call. Name that person before the test starts.
