Mautic is a great tool, but due to it’s amazing possibilities it lacks the intuitive UI when it comes to troubleshooting. And that is okay. Once you spend some time with troubleshooting campaigns you will understand how everything works.

It is all about going through the chain of events, and making sure, that every step is properly set up. Mautic gives you help at each step of the way. In this tutorial I’ll start from the most basic questions, so bare with me.

Before we start this troubleshooting tutorial, please answer the following question:

Are your cronjobs running properly?

This is mistake Nr.1. when it comes to campaigns not running. In fact this is the part when most people understand that they need cronjobs at all.

You can check my Ultimate Guide About Cronjobs here or you can see my Mautic Meetup speach about Mastering Your cronjobs.

In short: for a conventional campaign you’ll need all 3 cronjobs to work (check the tutorials above for the full format)

Let’s start with the segments.

mautic:segments:update

This boy will recalculate your segments, so contacts will be added to and removed from your segments. It maintains the pool of contacts you communicate with in your campaign. Every time you re-calculate your segments, contacts might fall in and out from your campaign. Later I’ll show you how to check if someone is a member of a campaign at all.

And this is where your inner Sherlock Holmes needs to open his wings. Start investigating:

Is my contact in question a member of the segment?

How can I see if someone is member of a segment? Super easy:
Go to Segments, and click on the number next to your names:

Check if you can find your contact in the segment. If not, then either your segment cron is not working, or the contact doesn’t qualify to be a member of this segment.

How do I know if someone is added to a segment?

First of all, they will among the segment members. But sometimes you need to know WHEN a contact was added to a segment. It can be important to understand if everything works. You can see this event in the contact’s timeline:

How can I see all segment memberships of a contact?

Open your contact, click on the little triangle next to Close and choose Preferences:

Here you can see all segments this contact is in:

The contact is in the segment, but the campaign is not triggered for him/her.

This can happen if a contact qualifies to be in a campaign by becoming a member of a segment and after finishing the campaign it is re-added again. You would see this contact in the campaign, but it would seem, that nothing is triggered.

A typical scenario is, that you want to test your campaign, you re-add your contact over and over again, and suddenly everything stops working.

This can happen, if you don’t allow a contact to restart the campaign. Go to your campaign, and you’ll find the setting after clicking on EDIT:

I have a longer article about this topic called: Let’s understand how Mautic Campaigns are triggered (detailed test results explained)

Segments are fine, contacts can re-enter the campaign but the campaign steps are still not triggered for my contacts. Why?

We have to make sure we are using the right words here. We have to make a difference between update and trigger campaign actions.

Mautic works similar to a Trabant using a 2 step engine.

Step 1: Update campaign steps (This is when you are landing in a campaign, moving to the next step)
Step 2: Trigger next campaign action for the contact (This is when your actions are executed. Example: tags updated, email sent, etc)
– Repeat

You need both, updates and triggers working fine nicely synched up. This is done by the following 2 cronjobs:

1. Update the campaigns

mautic:campaigns:update

This cron takes the next campaign step for each contact. If the campaign was a todo list, then this cronjob’s task is to move every single contact into a campaign or to the next campaign step. Assigns the next action for the particular contact to be triggered.

2. Trigger Campaign Actions

mautic:campaigns:trigger

This bad boy will execute whatever the previous guy has as next on the list one step at the time. It sends emails (or queues them up), updates field values, moves contacts between segments, etc.

How do I know if I set up these cronjobs properly?

Check my post about cronjobs: Ultimate guide to Mautic cronjobs

If your campaign update is working properly, than you’d see the campaign actions scheduled for the contact in it’s timeline:

If you don’t see similar notifications, but the contact would qualify to be a member of a campaign, then you have an issue. Check your crons.

How do I know if a contact is a member of a campaign?

You can open your campaign, and click on the contacts tab at the bottom:

You’ll see all the members of the campaign there. You can also check all the campaign memberships for a specific contact by going here:

And list all the campaigns:

It turns out, my contact is not in the campaign. What now?

You need to address the problem by the campaign source:

1. Source is a Form: the only reason can really be, that the contact cannot re-enter the campaign. Check if this campaign can be entered multiple times. Also check your campaign:update cronjobs
2. Source is a Segment, and the contact is pushed in at import: check if the contact is in the segment. If no, your import failed, or not completed. Check for import errors.
3. Source is a Segment, and the contact qualified by segment filters: check if contact is in the segment. If yes, then check No.1.
4. I pushed in the contact in a Campaign step: If the person is not in the campaign, although you pushed him in, then check if the campaign step triggered AND successfully run (more later). Can be a cronjob issue.

Okay, my contact is in the campaign, but the next step is stuck.

This is a smart one, it will tell you if something fails, and even give you notifications left and right.
You’ll see a notification at the top:

Mautic gives you a nice overview about your campaign steps. Look at this example (Campaign view):

The grey color will show how many contacts scheduled this step.
Orange will show how many contacts successfully completed this step.
Green will show what percentage of total contacts in this campaign completed this step.

With the help of these metrics you can pinpoint the bottlenecks and resolve them.

Campaign steps work, just email is not being sent out. Why?

Okay, that is a different story. I’ll have a tutorial coming up about it soon.

Is there a step by step guide?

Sure, you can have this step by step flowchart and many other valuable content if you register on my website.