Overview

An Extole journey is the end-to-end path a participant takes through an Extole program, from first engagement to a successful outcome, mapped as a sequence of events and experiences. Journeys define how your program is structured, how participants move through it, and what a successful outcome looks like for your business.

Understanding how journeys are structured is essential for interpreting program data correctly and choosing the right report for any given question.

Journey types vs. program types

These are related but distinct concepts.

A program type describes the business use case — referral, welcome offer, partner program, loyalty, and so on. This is how Extole is configured for a client.

A journey is the structural path that lives inside a program. A program can contain more than one journey. Understanding which journey type you are looking at is essential for choosing the right report and interpreting data correctly.

There are two journey types:

Participant journeys involve a single person moving through a sequence of steps toward a reward. There is no referrer/referred relationship. The person takes an action, qualifies, and receives a reward. Common in welcome offer and offer-management programs where you are simply rewarding participants for completing a specific action.

Referral journeys involve two people: an advocate (the referrer) and a friend (the referred person). These are the most common journey types in Extole referral programs. Referral journeys have two distinct sides that must never be conflated:

The advocate side captures what the referring person does. Common advocate events are promotion viewed, promotion clicked, and shared. These events measure how many people are actively participating as referrers.

The friend side captures what the referred person does after receiving the referral. Common friend events include share clicked, signed up, and the outcome event. These events measure how many referred people are converting.

The outcome event

The outcome event defines a successful referral for your program. It represents the moment a user has completed the goal — whether that is opening an account, making a purchase, funding a loan, or another action your program is built around.

This event varies by client and program. Common examples include converted, account opened, account qualified, loan funded, member payout, transacted, and friend confirmed. If you are not sure which event represents success in your program, check with your Extole CSM or review your program configuration.

When pulling any report related to successful referrals or conversions, always make sure you are filtering for the correct outcome event for your program. Using the wrong event will return zero results or incomplete data.

Understanding advocate and friend metrics

In a referral program, advocates and friends are two different people taking different actions. This means advocate-side metrics and friend-side metrics measure different things and should not be compared directly.

For example, the number of advocates who shared tells you how many people are actively referring. The number of friends who converted tells you how many referred people completed the goal. These are related but distinct — a high share count with a low conversion count is actually a meaningful signal worth investigating, not a data error.

When pulling reports, make sure you know which side of the journey you are measuring. Mixing advocate and friend events in the same report will produce misleading numbers.

Choosing the right report for journey questions

The type of question you are asking determines which report you need.

If you want to see everyone who completed a specific event in your flow — everyone who shared, everyone who clicked, everyone who converted — an Events report is the right fit. It returns a list of people who performed that action.

If you are looking at conversion data, make sure you know which event represents a successful outcome for your program. This varies by client — common examples include converted, account opened, member payout, and loan funded.

If you want a summary of how your referral program is performing — shares, clicks, conversions, and rewards across programs and campaigns — the Metrics report is the right fit. It can be configured to show the events most relevant to your program in a readable table format, broken down by program and campaign. This is the best starting point for a program performance overview or a regular reporting cadence with your team.

If you want to understand which marketing placements or sources are driving the most traffic or conversions to your program — for example, which referral links, banners, or entry points are performing best — the Top Promotion Sources report is the right fit. This report ranks results by source or placement dimension. Note that source and channel are different dimensions: source refers to where traffic or conversions originated, while channel refers to the sharing or marketing channel. Make sure you are using the report that matches the dimension you need.

If you want to see people who reach an event in their journey, but never completed a later event — friends who registered but never converted, advocates who shared but whose friend never clicked, signups of a specific customer type who never completed a product event — you need a journey funnel report such as Incomplete Journey. This report is specifically designed to model both the event that was completed and the later event that was not.

Quick reference: journey types at a glance