Note: You've landed on some older release notes from our early days. Learn about current BlueConic features and CDP use cases in the BlueConic Knowledge Base.
Most recent BlueConic product updates
For current BlueConic product updates, visit the BlueConic Release Notes section.
March has arrived, so spring is almost here (at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). Before we get into product release news, we have to include something we are so incredibly proud of: BlueConic is now in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs, and this is in no small part by all the amazing work done by you, our loyal customers! Thanks!
Without further ado, here are the latest product features for March 2017:
Product & Content Recommendations
We redesigned the Algorithms tab (previous called ‘boosting’), so it’s easier to see what algorithms are currently used and how much they influence the BlueConic content recommendation engine. We also renamed the ‘exception’ tab to ‘Filters’ to make it clearer what you do there. When changing settings, the change is immediately reflected on the page you are on, so you can visually see what’s happening.
We also made it easier to edit recommendation settings. Recommendation widgets are now highlighted, and the edit button is always visible. Pro-tip: you can also directly open the settings by double clicking on them. Bonus pro-tip: this works for other objects, like images, as well!
Bulk API
It’s critically important for a CDP to digest and/or export massive amounts of customer data as efficiently as possible. That’s why we’ve added a Bulk Profile API, currently in Beta. Why are Bulk APIs useful?
- Developers can use them to quickly send thousands of profile updates to ‘upsert’ profiles into BlueConic. Upsert? It’s a combination of UPdate and inSERT! If a record already exists, it’s updated. Otherwise, it’s added.
- Connections will make use of the new APIs to import and export profiles, which will improve performance for operations involving many profiles. The first connection to make use of the bulk API will be our Profile Import Connection, but you will see it arriving at other connections soon as well.
We expect to finalize the bulk API in the coming 2 months. Contact your CSM or experts at blueconic.com if you want to use the beta version.
Connection Updates
As the leading CDP in the market, it’s very important to us that you, the customer, can use named and universal connections with other systems to leverage the value of BlueConic as readily as possible. That’s why we’ve tweaked and updated several connections:
- Salesforce
Our Salesforce connection is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange, which is not only convenient and accessible for Salesforce Pro users (who can only install official AppExchange apps) but the connection is now also officially vetted by Salesforce from a security standpoint. - Salesforce
We also added support for Person objects in and the connection can optionally trigger lead assignment rules when a new lead is created in Salesforce - Google Ads Customer Match
If you use child accounts in Google Ads Customer Match, you are in luck: it’s bundled with our connection! - PostUp
We already had an export connection with PostUp, but we’ve added the import capability as well.
All the little things
We always sweat the details. Some smaller improvements of note:
- We tweaked the ‘new object’ popup. When creating a new object like dialogues, connections, or listeners, you can search through the various options and you can also activate not-yet-used types without going to the plugin gallery (see ‘Show all’). When you want to add a new connection, you can optionally also start the connection discovery wizard.
- We enhanced configuration of the ‘where’ rules on the dialogue tab, so that a preview URL is always visible and clickable.
Coming Soon:
We will continue to wow you with new features:
- Get ready for a whole new way to receive BlueConic insights and your favorite dashboards via a daily/weekly/monthly email! You will even be able to have these sent automatically to colleagues and non-BlueConic users. Stay tuned for more.
- Even more recommendation enhancements, the most exciting is perhaps an option to easily collect additional metadata fields and use them for presentation of your recommendation or to filter on those fields.
- A faster profile import connection with a sleek new UI, an option to import custom date-time fields, multi value field support, and more.
- ExactTarget connection improvements will include a new UI, import capability and selection of data extensions.
- Update for our Optimizely connection to support their awesome new Optimizely X platform.
- Lots of brand new connections!
That’s it for this month! Thank you for reading. Please let us know if you have any questions on these updates or if you have suggestions for a future release.