When viewing the path of a contact in an automation, you may see that they have been manually added:
This happens when a contact has been manually added to an automation via one of the following methods:
- Admin action: meaning the contact has been edited, individually or in bulk, by any user
- API: meaning through a custom integration, or integration built by third parties
- The automation action 'Start an automation': this action adds contacts to an automation specified by you
- The action "Add to automation" via a link: you can add the 'add to automation' action to a link in an email. If a contact then clicks on the link in the email, the contact is added to the selected automation.
It is not possible to determine which of the above methods added the contact manually to the automation.