The BlueConic customer data platform (CDP) collects first-party data on individuals throughout the customer journey and across sessions and devices. BlueConic can build customer profiles progressively in real time for all the thousands or millions of visitors, prospects, and customers who visit your website--whether anonymous or known. BlueConic unifies these profiles with profiles available in existing systems like your CRM or email database. Profiles can have an infinite number of data points, which are unified and stored for each profile within your BlueConic database.
Learn more: Visit BlueConic University
See the Introduction to Unified Profiles video in BlueConic University.
What is progressive profiling?
BlueConic does progressive profiling, or profile enrichment, by building up customer profiles over time with relevant data from your martech stack. When a website visitor visits channels in your domains, a profile is created for them that includes information about their activity. Over time, you learn more about each visitor's interests and behavior, enabling you to target them with relevant dialogues that fit their needs.
Based on profile merging rules, when it is determined that two visitor profiles in your BlueConic profile database belong to the same person, their profiles can be merged together. This leads to a single profile that contains rich information, making it easier to target the visitor now, based on the full breadth of data stored in the profile.
Navigating to BlueConic Profiles
Select Profiles from the BlueConic navigation bar to open the Profiles window, where you can browse all the first-party data that's been gathered for individual profiles.
How to search customer profiles
You can search your database for relevant profiles by searching on a unique identifier or by segments of profiles:
How to view your existing customer profiles
Select Profiles & Groups > Profiles from the BlueConic navigation bar. The Existing profiles section shows a list of all profiles that match the search criteria, or that are part of the segment you selected, displayed in a table:
This list shows profiles and several of their profile properties. You can customize which profile properties are listed in the display. Use the Columns menu to select which values to display in the overview; search for profile properties and select the ones you would like to include as columns in the display.
Note: Even if you are in a role that does not have PII access (as established via BlueConic Settings > Access management > Roles), you can still search for profiles using PII properties. All matching results will be visible, yet individual PII values will be hidden. For more on PII, review the article Data sensitivity and visibility settings for PII.
Viewing details on the Profile overview
Select an individual profile in the existing profiles list to see the profile in detail.
The profile detail page opens in the profile overview panel. It shows a real-time summary of first-party data in the profile. Use the options in the left-hand column to view profile details, privacy management information, timeline events for the current profile, and a list of all profile properties associated with the profile.
Profile overview
The profile overview shows a visual summary in the UI of the data available in the profile:
Some quick facts about this profile's online behavior
Segments this profile is part of
Lifecycles (and their lifecycle stages) this profile is part of
Groups this profile is part of
Note: The Groups section appears in the profile summary only after you've created a Group in BlueConic and added profiles to it. Contact your BlueConic Customer Success Manager to learn more.Behavioral scores that show this customer's frequency, level of activity, intensity, and momentum
Locations that this profile has visited
Interests related to the profile, including those collected by the Interest Ranker Listener
Associated connections to other marketing systems that this profile has been associated with
Exporting BlueConic profiles
If you want to export entire segments of profiles at once, you can use one of dozens of BlueConic connections and set up an export connection goal to choose the segment.
Profile privacy management
Select Profile privacy management to see the current privacy settings for the profile, such as legislation, permission level, objectives this profile has either consented to or refused, and privacy event logs for this profile.
BlueConic profile timeline
The Profile timeline view shows a log of events marked as "Timeline events" for the current profile. You can import Timeline events from your external systems using BlueConic Connections. You can use Timeline event rollups to query timeline events and store that data in a profile property.
Use the All event types dropdown menu to select BlueConic Timeline event types to view.
All profile properties
Select the All profile properties tab to display a table showing all profile properties.
By default, only profile properties with a value are shown. Clearing the checkbox lists all profile properties without a value too.
If a profile property contains PII (personally identifiable information), those values are visible only to BlueConic users whose role has permission to view PII content.
Users whose role has permission to Edit profiles can modify, delete, or download profiles.
Modify: In the All profile properties tab, select a value to modify it or add additional values for a profile property.
Delete: Use the Save dropdown menu in the top right corner and select Delete. Note: This deletion is permanent.
Download profile: Use the Save dropdown menu in the top right corner and select Download profile to receive a JSON file containing the profile and all values associated with it.
FAQs
Is there an easy way to view or edit the information stored in a customer or visitor profile?
Yes, follow these steps to manually edit a profile property value in BlueConic:
Select Profiles & Groups from the BlueConic navigation bar to see a list of profiles in your tenant.
In the All properties pane, search for the relevant profile and click into it to view the profile property values stored in each profile property.
To manually edit or add profile property values for a single profile (or a very limited number of profiles), click into the Value(s) column to make your edits.
After editing or adding values, select Save to save your changes.
How can I find out where my customer profiles originated?
When profiles are created or imported, BlueConic registers details about whether your customers first arrived over the web (mobile or desktop), via a mobile app, or from other systems through a connection.
Customers' origins are stored in three Origin of profile properties. These three profile properties store origin data in three levels of increasing granularity (from type to source to detail level).
Profile property | Desktop web | Mobile web | Mobile app | Connections |
Origin of profile level 1: Type | web | mobile_web | mobile_app | connection |
Origin of profile level 2: Source | Host name | Host name | App ID | System name |
Origin of profile level 3: Detail | Entry page | Entry page | App name and version | Connection object UIID |
For example, if a customer's first touch point was via a connection, these values would be stored as "connection" (Origin of profile level 1: Type), the connection used to import their data (Origin of profile level 2: Source), and the connection ID (Origin of profile level 3: Detail).
When merging profiles, BlueConic uses the oldest value for origin and for entry page it uses the first visit day. Additionally, the Profile Origin insight gives you a detailed view of where your customer profiles originate.