Hey guys
a simple, but quite profound question:
How do you document your funnels, so that you always keep overview about all the tags, forms, lists, conditions, integration of lead gen plugins, etc?
Is there a recommended way to do that? We have just found out that this is tremendously important, otherwise your get stuck in the mist quite soon.
What’s your opinion?
Thanks for your contribution!
Chris
Hey @dunkelweiss,
great question! I am excited to hear what the community comes back with. Internally we try and document everything using our company intranet, as well as leave copious notes inside the automations themselves.
We don’t have a specific doc structure, other than to use tables for tags, use clear tag prefixes VERTICAL: Ecommerce for example.
I also have several macro automations that span many automations inside the application. I will occasionally draw those with some flowchart software (I use SimpleMind).
I will also include short animations I have created with Keynote to demonstrate how different contacts with different attributes (custom fields, tags, etc) will move through those larger automations.
It does take some time, and I should be much more verbose about all of them, but you are right it is absolutely crucial if you have several people all working on automations.
Hey Jordan @jskole, this is great!
As we are starting building more complex automations (complex maybe only from our perspective, LOL) we found that having a clear structure for lists, forms tags, etc. is extremly important – and the documentation of those as well.
Maybe this could be a topic for a newbie onboarding sequence?
Hey @dunkelweiss,
Definitely! Have you discovered our Education center? We have a couple of getting started guides there, like this one “What are Tags?”.
Documentation is a great topic for our Education department and for onboarding. I will make sure to get it on our roadmap!
Thank you Jordan @jskole for your remark concerning the education center, I will study this! We have jumped into AC in a mad rush, so now we should read some edicational stuff maybe … 
For my clients and me, I build out detailed Evernote Documentation that I can reference anytime from any device with clear sales processes, images, links, sketches, whatever I need. Even if it is just a photo of a white board drawing - works awesome
Following this with great interest as something we’ve been discussing in house. One of our clients has taken it upon himself to draw out a big flow diagram to keep track. Of course it goes beyond just Active Campaign when you also consider Zapier etc, API programming, other cloud apps and internal processes into which AC integrates.
@warp_design Yep, on the first sight this might a side issue, but we found out it is quite easy to lo lo lose track. An issue which is part of this topic is the naming of all the elements in a funnel, on our case, according to our marketing stack:
– Active Campaing Lists
– Active Campaing Forms
– Active Campaing Tags
– Active Campaing Deals
– Thrive Leads Shortcodes
– Thrive Leads Thrive Boxes
– Thrive Leads Lead Groups
– Wordpress Thank you pages
– Wordpress Special Sites for Onboardng-Campaign-Stuff (basically sites hidden from Google, as an exclusive content in an onboarding series).
So – How do you all deal with that?
Great Question. It’s so easy to lose track of specifics in terms of lists, tags, etc. especially when you start to build out a lot of campaigns. We use draw.io to create detailed workflows which include the actual automations, lists the subscriber gets subscribed to, tags, integrations, etc.
I’ll upload a generic one a bit later to give you an example of how we document the process. But basically it’s a very large flowchart. Things to think about in documentation are:
Triggers: What triggers automation
Automation Modules: Are your flows broken up into different automations within AC
Forms: Any forms you’ll need
Lists: What lists people will be subscribed to
Tags: When will tags be applied and not applied
Deals: If you’re using deals, when will you add the deals into the deals section & what points deal status needs to change
Give me a couple of hours and i’ll upload an example flowchart.
Hey Evielyn @mavndigital, that’s great!
I am specifically interested in how you document right these things you mentioned: Which form interacts with a specific tag, etc.
Furthermore I would like to know how you set up naming convention inside of AC. How do ensure that you can easily see which automation is associated with a specific list, tags, etc.
We ran into the problem of getting very long tag names, trying to make it clear where a tag comes from and what it does …
Not so easy!
Best, Christoph