What are the numbers at the top, bottom, and in the top right corner of each element in my workflow?
About the numbers
These numbers illustrate how many contacts have entered a particular element of your workflow, how many contacts are in this element right now and how many contacts have already left it.
The number at the top of the element is the overall number of contacts who have entered this element.
The number in the top right corner illustrates how many contacts are currently in the element. You may find it especially useful for elements with a “When to assume the condition wasn’t met” setting available in Properties and for a Wait element.
The number at the bottom of the element illustrates how many contacts have gone past this particular element of the workflow.
After you publish your workflow (that is: make it running), you can observe these numbers to see the dynamics of the entire process. You can also use these numbers to identify steps in the workflow that block it from running.
When the numbers don’t match
The numbers going in and out of the block show how many contacts went through the block in total. When you edit the block, the numbers do not get deleted. If, for example, you start with a block Message Sent for message A, all contacts that got message A will be added into the workflow once the message is sent.
If you then replace message A with message B in the block properties, all contacts that got message B will be added into the workflow once the message is sent. The number on the block will represent both messages A and B together, so it may look like message B was sent to way more contacts than it actually was.
If, however, you delete a block and replace it with another one, the numbers get zeroed and all contacts currently in the block get removed from the workflow. Let’s say you have 30 people leaving one block (condition) and going into action block, which you later replace with another one. That new block has 0 people coming in and 0 people coming out at this point – the 30 people that entered the previous block will not be shown in the numbers of the new block. It may look like those 30 people disappeared, when that may not necessarily be the case.If any email bounced or unsubscribed after they got the email that was set in the workflow, they will have been removed from the automation as well, which is why there is such a difference between who entered and who left the workflow.
Another thing is using Run Multiple Times option. With Run Multiple Times, a contact can go through a block more than once. For example: with action block Assign the tag, we will not assign a second tag. In such case a contact will add to the number of subscribers going in and out of the block, but not the number of subscribers that you can find using Advanced search in Contacts.
Yet another thing is when you add the block. If you had a workflow on for a while and you add a block after someone has already finished it, the contacts that already went past the last block will not be reactivated, so they will not reach the new block and there will be a significant difference between the numbers in the new and previous block and the “missing” emails will be visible in the Completed statistics.
As you can see, there are many cases in which the numbers will not match and that does not indicate that the workflows themselves do not work correctly. Also, if you use the message in multiple blocks or workflows its sends will be higher than what you see in that one particular block.
