Automation activity and troubleshooting

Each automation has its own activity view: the unified Activity page scoped to that one workflow. Open a flow and switch to its activity view to see every send, open, click, and bounce that flow produced, plus which contacts entered it. This article explains how to read that view and how to diagnose the most common problem — a contact who didn't get an email you expected them to get.

The same events also appear on the global Activity page alongside your broadcasts; see Email activity feed. Use the global page when you're not sure which flow (or broadcast) an email came from, and the per-flow view when you're debugging one specific automation.

Reading entry and exit

To confirm a flow is picking people up:

1. Open the flow and go to its activity view.
2. Look for recent events. A healthy active flow shows a steady trickle of sends that matches how often the trigger fires.
3. To check one person, search or filter the activity for that contact.

A contact enters a flow when they meet the trigger — they join the list, submit the form, or fire the on-site event. They leave the flow when they finish the last step, or earlier if a condition routes them past the remaining steps. If you see no entries at all, the problem is usually in front of the flow, not inside it:

• The flow is paused. Check its status and activate it.
• The trigger doesn't match what's actually happening — for example, the form adds contacts to a different list than the one the trigger watches. See Connecting a form to a list.
• For event triggers, the Zalify pixel isn't installed or the visitor isn't identified as a contact. See Zalify pixel and Reach.

Troubleshooting: symptom → cause → fix

Work through these in order. In every case, start by finding the contact in the flow's activity view so you can see exactly how far they got.

A contact entered the flow but an email shows no send event

Cause 1: the contact unsubscribed. Unsubscribed contacts are skipped at each email step, even if they entered the flow while subscribed.

Fix: check the contact's subscription status on their profile. If they unsubscribed, this is working as intended — don't try to re-add them manually. They must opt in again themselves. See Subscription status and unsubscribes.

Cause 2: the contact is suppressed. Suppressed contacts never receive email from Reach, in any flow or broadcast — typically because of a hard bounce or a spam complaint.

Fix: check whether the contact appears in your suppressions. If the suppression looks wrong (for example, a typo in the address that has since been corrected), see Managing contacts for how to review the record.

Cause 3: a condition wasn't met. If the email sits behind a condition step, contacts who don't match the condition skip it. This is the most common "missing" email that is actually correct behavior — for example, an abandoned-checkout reminder that is skipped because the contact completed their purchase.

Fix: trace the contact's path through the flow and check each condition against their profile data at the time they reached that step. If the condition logic is wrong, pause the flow, fix the condition, and reactivate.

A contact never entered the flow at all

Cause: the trigger didn't fire for them — wrong list, a form that isn't connected, or a pixel event that wasn't recorded for an unidentified visitor.

Fix: verify the trigger configuration, then reproduce the trigger yourself (join the list with a test address, submit the form, or fire the event) and watch for your own entry in the activity view.

Emails send but land in spam, or bounce

Cause: deliverability, not the automation. The flow did its job; the receiving mail server rejected or filtered the message.

Fix: confirm your sender domain is verified and review Deliverability best practices and Verifying your sender domain. Repeated bounces to the same address will suppress that contact.

Sends stop partway through a busy day

Cause: you may have hit your account's sending limit.

Fix: see Email sending limits. Sends resume when your limit allows.

When it's not the flow

If the activity view shows the email was sent, the automation worked. Opens and clicks depend on the recipient's mail client, and open tracking in particular is approximate — some clients block or pre-fetch tracking. For campaign-level performance and revenue attribution, use Ana, Zalify's attribution and analytics product, rather than raw open counts.