This resource defines key terms and concepts essential for effectively using the BlueConic Customer Data Platform (CDP). Understanding these terms will empower you to navigate the platform with confidence, personalize customer experiences, and ultimately maximize the value of your data. Whether you're a new user or a seasoned pro looking for a refresher, this glossary will serve as your go-to guide for all things BlueConic.

AI A/B testing is an experimentation process where two or more versions of a variable (such as web page content, offers, emails, etc.) are shown to different segments of website visitors at the same time to determine which version performs the best. In A/B testing, A refers to the ‘control’ or original testing variable and B refers to the ‘variation’ or new version of the original testing variable. BlueConic offers an Advanced A/B testing notebook that lets you select a BlueConic dialogue and examine how variants of this dialogue would perform against it.

In BlueConic, the Aggregated Data Manager (ADM) is a dedicated “super tenant” that enables multi-brand organizations to sync first-party data from their “sub-tenants.” This centralized dataset enables users to surface insights and perform modeling across tenants, while ownership over activation of that data can remain with individual businesses, regions, or brands. For example, each brand can manage customer segments and connections to their specific systems for their use cases, but a centralized analytics team can calculate a CLV score across all brands for an individual customer. Learn more about using the Aggregated Data Manager in BlueConic.

A profile is considered an anonymous profile if it does not contain data that uniquely identifies a customer or visitor and matches them to their behaviors. In BlueConic, anonymous user behaviors are still tracked and once that individual becomes identifiable, those profiles are merged. Ways to convert anonymous profiles to known profiles include setting up listeners to collect identification data or including forms that visitors must fill out with contact information.

The AI Workbench in BlueConic combines the power of machine learning with rich profile data to perform analysis, gain new insights, and further enrich individual profiles. Using built-in Jupyter notebooks, you can build and train machine learning models to analyze BlueConic data and return new, richer data to user profiles that can be used for segmenting and other CDP use cases. You can use AI Workbench to run machine learning models with data from BlueConic profiles, timeline events, segments, lifecycles, and dialogues.

A batch process or connection runs in sets or groups on a regular scheduled basis. BlueConic connections can either run in batch mode or in real time. In the platform, batch scheduling options range from once every three minutes to once a month, and the result or changes from each run can be found in the “Run history” table of the connection.

A behavioral profile property is a customer attribute that is related directly to actions and interests, rather than known facts. These values track how frequently customers are active on your site, their level of activity, the intensity of their visits, and relative increase or decrease in activity (momentum scores). Behavioral profile property scores range from 0 to 100 and are created by BlueConic automatically, making it easy to compare profiles on the same scale. You can use these profile properties for behavioral customer segmentation in BlueConic.

A BlueConic ID is a unique string of letters and numbers given to each profile that is automatically generated and used to identify individual profiles from each other within the platform. The BlueConic profile ID serves as a unique identifier.

Channels in BlueConic are unique websites, interactions, applications, or accounts where the real-time, online conversations between you and your customers take place. Channels are a key concept in BlueConic and allow users to define where visitor streams should be monitored. When setting up listeners for data collection in BlueConic, you can specify which channels you want to monitor for data collection. You can also set up dialogues with online visitors for each of your channels.

Connections in BlueConic are data integrations with other systems, such as marketing platforms, email service providers, customer relationship management platforms, and more. BlueConic Connections let you integrate your customer profile data with existing data sources to help make the most of your technology stack. Depending on the configuration settings, BlueConic connections export data to other systems, and import data from other systems into BlueConic. BlueConic offers several kinds of connections, including named connections to major platforms, universal connections to SFTP, S3, and Webhook, and firehose connections to event-streaming services. Some connections offer data processors to transform or filter data during import or export. See the list of BlueConic connections for a summary of connectors and integrations with other platforms.

BlueConic provides tools for managing personalized content recommendations. The content store is a pool of content items to be recommended, gathered using the BlueConic Content Collector Connection. This connection collects data about your content and stores it in a BlueConic content store, which feeds personalization in BlueConic. See the CDP use case for delivering 1:1 content recommendations. For details on the BlueConic content store, see Data storage in BlueConic: Content stores.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that represents the total net profit a company makes from any given customer. CLV is calculated as the average order value multiplied by the average frequency rate of purchase. Using CLV metrics can be a valuable tool to identify, target, and grow customer transactions. BlueConic provides a prebuilt AI Workbench model you can use to calculate CLV for a segment of customer profiles.

Data sensitivity is a setting for BlueConic profile properties, groups, and Timeline event types that enables organizations to control access to data based on user role. For the data sensitivity setting, there are two options, PII or non-PII. The default setting for new items is non-PII, except for unique identifiers which are always set to PII. When BlueConic profile properties, groups, and Timeline event types are first set up, you can specify which items are unique identifiers and whether items will contain PII or non-PII. Once created, onlyuser roles with access to PII will be able to see the values of those items. Learn more aboutcontrolling access to PII in BlueConic.

Dialogues in BlueConic are online conversations with a customer or visitor to your website, mobile app, or other channel. Based on a visitor's profile or behavior, you can trigger dialogues that directly start a conversation with your customers. They range from forms and pop-up windows to overlays, toasters, notification bars, and many more.

In BlueConic, an external tracker is a data collector that can be used to monitor customer or visitor activity outside of your domains. For example, a tracker can record whether someone has viewed a newsletter, email, or web page or whether a hyperlink has been clicked. It can also be used in social channels to track the social origin of visitors to your channels. Within one external tracker you can define several tracking elements.

The term first-party data refers to consented customer data (demographic, behavioral, contextual, etc.) for visitors that interact with your channels. Examples of first-party data include online or offline data for website visitors, email recipients, social media followers, and in-store shoppers. First-party data is the cornerstone of the philosophy and technology at BlueConic. To emphasize the importance of first-party data, BlueConic released the First-Party Hostname Console (FPHC), which ensures that web browsers will appropriately recognize your web content, cookies, and the BlueConic script as first party.

In BlueConic, groups are used to organize, segment, and target profiles in a set that share a common attribute or are assigned a common profile property. Group types include households, accounts, companies, or a custom group that aligns with your plans. Individual profiles can be associated with groups when profiles include the group ID as a special profile property.

Hostnames are used in computer networking to assign a label to a device or channel that communicates across the World Wide Web. In the platform, the BlueConic First-Party Hostname Console (FPHC) enables you to create a unique, first-party BlueConic hostname for each BlueConic channel. This ensures that web browsers will appropriately recognize your web content, cookies, and the BlueConic script as first party.

In BlueConic, interest ranking is the process of assigning individual profiles potential interests based on actions they take. By using an interest ranker, you can add interests to a visitor's profile based on a points-based system. Points for an interest are scored based on the visitor's behavior, which includes actions like viewing content, clicking something, coming to a website from a specific referring URL, and landing on a URL that contains a specified string. Once an interest has been added to a visitor's profile, you can create segments to target customers and visitors based on these interests. Learn more about keyword interest rankers in BlueConic.

In BlueConic, a profile is considered a known profile if it contains data that uniquely identifies a customer or visitor. For example, a profile with name, contact, and device information. BlueConic users can always measure their ratio or percentage of known profiles using the Profile Recognition Dashboard.

Lifecycles in BlueConic are defined, step-by-step processes that help you orchestrate customer journeys across channels using your first-party customer data. As your customers interact with your organization, your brand, or your channels, they travel on their own individual journeys. Marketers can identify key milestones and touchpoints along that road based on unified data available in a profile. Lifecycles use stages to sequence each potential interaction across channels, and use BlueConic dialogues and connections to orchestrate integrated, cross-channel marketing programs.

The term lifecycle orchestration refers to one-to-one marketing where all interactions with current and potential customers correlate with where they are in their customer journeys. Lifecycle orchestration enables companies to react to customers’ changing behaviors and actions in the moment by presenting custom-tailored, timely marketing messages to them within a matter of minutes or hours.

Listeners in BlueConic are data collectors that can be placed on specific pages or features of your channel to gather behavioral information from customers and visitors. Once this data is collected, it is added to those individual profiles to enhance important profile properties. Types of listeners in BlueConic include behavior, form, funnel, interest, and scoring listeners.

When starting to implement your CDP use cases in BlueConic CDP it's recommended to start by importing and collecting the minimum viable data (MVD) you deem necessary to execute those use cases — not all customer data types and data sources. Learn more about identifying the minimum viable data for your CDP use cases.

Notebooks in BlueConic are AI models that are written in Python and built in Jupyter and can be used to perform analysis, gain new insights, and further enrich profile data. in AI Workbench. Notebooks can be prebuilt within the platform and used without writing any code or customer built.

Objectives in BlueConic are goals that can be used to manage actions within the platform, such as privacy and consent management, across your connections, dialogues, trackers, listeners, and segments. Objectives help you keep track of the purposes for which you store data and for which purposes actions are taken.

PII, or personally identifiable information, is information that can potentially identify individuals, such as data that serves as a unique identifier for your customers and visitors.

Plugins in BlueConic are add-on functions that can be used to extend the features of the platform. The standard, certified plugin connections integrate BlueConic data with dozens of other systems, platforms, and data sources. You can also create custom connections to plug into BlueConic, or use custom integrations.

BlueConic provides tools for managing personalized product recommendations. The product store is a pool of content items to be recommended, gathered using the BlueConic Product Collector. This Product Collector gathers data about your content and stores it in a BlueConic product store, which feeds personalization in BlueConic. See the CDP use case for delivering 1:1 product recommendations.

Profile cleanup refers to the process of merging profiles that belong to the same individual, as well as deleting older profiles that do not match a current user or visitor. BlueConic lets you adjust profile cleanup rules to suit your use cases.

In BlueConic, profile merging is the process of identifying two profiles that belong to the same individual and consolidating them into one profile. As customers and visitors interact with your online channels, BlueConic creates profiles for both known and anonymous visitors. Individual users might have several different profiles because they visit on different devices and browsers. Using theprofile merging feature in BlueConic, disparate profiles can be combined and unified usingdeterministic or probabilistic methodologies and match on any combination of unique identifiers. In order to successfully merge profiles, it is important to actively collect unique identifiers so that merging rules can be created around them.

Profile origins are special BlueConic profile properties that provide detail and visibility into where and when a customer first became a profile in BlueConic. When profiles are created or imported, BlueConic registers details about whether customers first arrived over the web (mobile or desktop), via a mobile app, or from other systems through a connection.Profile origins are stored in three origin of profile properties: type, source, and detail.

A profile property is a key/value pair that stores information about a customer or visitor within a profile. Profile properties receive data from various parts of BlueConic, for example from listeners that collect data, from customer input in dialogue forms, from connections that integrate with other systems, from AI Workbench notebooks, and so on. Examples of profile properties include email address, location, username, company, consent status, CLV, CRM ID, etc.

The data stored in a profile property is known as a profile property value. The default maximum size for a profile property value is 64KB, which results in a 65,536 character limit for text-type properties.

Progressive profiling is the process of building on the same persistent profile, session after session, making your customer information progressively richer over time. When a website visitor visits channels in your domains, a profile is created for them that includes information about their activity. This allows you to, over time, gather more data about each visitor's interests and behavior, enabling richer targeting with relevant dialogues that fit their needs.

Propensity to churn is a metric that estimates the probability of a customer to terminate their relationship with a brand. Using propensity to churn metrics can be valuable to identify at-risk customers and keep them from discontinuing their service. BlueConic provides two prebuilt AI Workbench notebooks relating to customer churn:predict propensity to churn andanalyze propensity to churn.

The phrase ‘in real time’ refers to a process or connection that runs within milliseconds so that it is available virtually immediately. BlueConic connections can either run in batch mode or in real time.

BlueConic offers a fully documented REST API for developers creating applications that communicate with BlueConic. These APIs offer access to a wealth of resources to interact with BlueConic visitor profiles, segments, interactions, and audit events via OpenAPI and OAuth 2.0 authorization flows making the interconnection between various services secure, intuitive, and reliable. See the updated BlueConic REST API v2 at rest.apidoc.blueconic.com.

The term second-party data refers to another entity's first-party data. Receiving second-party data is usually done by working out arrangements with trusted partners to share customer data. Second-party data plays a large role in audience extension and audience targeting efforts. The BlueConic-to-BlueConic connection creates a second-party data exchange between BlueConic customer tenants, meaning they can send first-party data to another tenant, making it second-party data.

Segments in BlueConic are dynamic groups of customer or visitor profiles characterized by a defined set of interests, preferences, demographic properties, and so forth. Based on how a customer behaves in your channels and the information you have gathered from them, you can classify customers, either by using a single filter or a sophisticated set of filters to create multidimensional, real-time dynamic customer segments.

A BlueConic session is defined as a period of consistent activity by a website visitor. This term is used interchangeably with "visit" and represents the period of time starting when a visitor enters your channels and ending after 30 minutes of inactivity. If that visitor comes back after the 30 minutes of inactivity, a new session is registered.

The Simulator in BlueConic provides a testing area to simulate how BlueConic will behave in real time on a web page. You can test how BlueConic schedules dialogues, connections, listeners, and variants to be triggered and how your profiles, segments, timeline events, and lifecycles are affected. This is useful for seeing how BlueConic will behave based on your settings before going live. You can use the Simulator on any page that is part of a channel defined for your BlueConic implementation and that contains the BlueConic script on the page. You can view other pages in the Simulator, but you will not be able to manipulate them.

A BlueConic tenant is a specific licensed instance of the BlueConic technology and service, which includes a database for storage. Each tenant encompasses a customer’s discrete database and any owned channels that run the BlueConic script. Wikipedia defines a SAAS tenant this way: "A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance."

The term third-party data refers to data acquired from data sales houses or other large site and system operators. Third-party data is not typically from a single site, rather a consolidation of user data across a set of sites across the web and licensed to third parties for use in data and ad targeting.

A timeline in BlueConic is a log that stores time-based events to capture information about the timing and sequence of events for a BlueConic profile. A timeline belongs to a profile and includes the set of all events belonging together for that profile. Examples of events include orders, email opens, abandoned baskets, and returns.

In BlueConic, timeline events are time-based actions that occur for a profile. Examples of events include ordering a product, clicking a page, or opening an email. A BlueConic Timeline stores events to capture information about timing and sequence of events for a BlueConic profile. A Timeline belongs to a profile and includes the set of all events belonging together for that profile. Learn more about storing event and order data inBlueConic Timeline events.

In BlueConic, touchpoints are marketing interactions that are assigned to each stage of a lifecycle. They support each individual customer journey by presenting only relevant information. You can include BlueConic dialogues and connection goals as Lifecycle touchpoints. Examples include emails, forms, and notifications.

The term unified profile refers to a single source of truth where all data about an individual customer can be found in a centralized place. Using BlueConic connections, you can import and export profile data to synchronize your customer data across your entire marketing technology ecosystem, building more unified profiles and targeting audiences based on smarter segmentation.

In BlueConic, a unique identifier is a profile property value that distinctly recognizes a specific customer or visitor. For example, there are several types of customer data that uniquely identify customers, including email address, login name, customer ID, or mobile phone number. Note that for a profile property to be unique, only one profile should contain the same value. Learn more about unique identifiers in BlueConic.

A use case in BlueConic is a potential scenario of how a person will use a process or system, such as a customer data platform, to accomplish a strategic goal. A use case describes the current state, target outcome, supporting activities, and relative complexity required to successfully reach your business goal. Examples of common CDP use cases include delivering personalized content recommendations or accelerating lead generation campaigns.

User roles in BlueConic are used to grant access to various platform functions. You can grant users access to the BlueConic functionalities that suit their function within your enterprise, and a user can be assigned to one or more roles. Preconfigured user roles in the platform include application manager, content manager, customer insights manager, data scientist, insights only, IT/system administrator, and online marketer. You can also create custom roles for your BlueConic users.

BlueConic counts a visit when a profile comes to a site running BlueConic and continues until the visitor closes the site OR until they have been inactive for 30 minutes on the site. If they are inactive for 30 minutes 1 second and then return to the site, a new visit will be recorded. The Global Listener collects data stored in the Visits profile property. For details see,What kind of information does BlueConic collect?