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.
Welcome to the April product updates! In addition to questions about product features, we get a lot of inquiries about how to position a CDP in your martech stack. So, we were delighted with the FAQ that David Raab (inventor of the term and definition of "customer data platform") wrote about that topic recently. It covers everything you always wanted to know but might have been afraid to ask, like the difference between CDP, DMPs, CMS, and data warehouses or what skills do you need to run a CDP. We highly recommend giving it a read!
Email your dashboards! Schedule them, even!
BlueConic contains a wide set of beautiful insight visualizations – small widgets that you can combine into a dashboard – and boy are they popular. You can now email dashboards to yourself or others, and you can schedule them to be sent regularly! Features include:
- Easy setup: expand the settings area of a dashboard by clicking the (+) sign at the top. Check out 'Email schedule'.
- You can schedule dashboards to be sent to yourself and others. Recipients do not have to be a BlueConic user to receive dashboards.
- The email is equally consumable on desktops, laptops, tablets, or mobile phones.
- Any insights can be included, including custom insights built by your own developers or by your service partner.
- You can get an email schedule overview by clicking 'Email settings' from the personal settings menu (click the small person icon in the top right).
- Recipients can easily unsubscribe using the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
This will continue to be something we adjust and change based on feedback, so please let us know what you like, don't like, and/or want to change!
Product and Content Recommendations
By popular demand, we added two new features to product & content recommendations, which work together to:
- Collect additional metadata. Sometimes you want more data from content than the default set that BlueConic retrieves: for example, price or a subtitle. The new metadata would be used to filter content or to use it to present it to the visitor. With this capability, you can add additional metadata visually or using a JQuery expression. Metadata can come either from meta data fields inside the HTML of a webpage, or from the page itself.
- Filtering on metadata. On the one hand, you have to trust the algorithms, but sometimes you also want to influence algorithms. For example, you only want to show articles from a certain category, or only low priced products. You can now filter on any metadata (including manually added metadata) to do exactly that.
Profile Import 2.0
Our most used connection is profile import, where you can either schedule or manually load a CSV file containing profiles exported from another system, such as a CRM, ESP, or internal data warehouse. Because it's so widely used, we decided to renew it with the following features:
- Completely new User Interface which is much more intuitive to use and understand. This interface modification will be made in other connections soon!
- Uses our new Bulk API (see more on this below) so it's an order of 5 to 10 times faster.
- Makes it much easier to import uncommon date formats.
- Additional small changes like improved error handling or the option to load delimited fields embedded within a delimited file.
Connection updates
As the leading CDP in the market, it's very important that you, the customer, can use connections with other systems to leverage the value of BlueConic as readily as possible. That’s why we’ve tweaked and updated several connections:
- Our previously announced Bulk API is now out of beta and into production. See documentation here.
- ExactTarget, where you can now also import data and select data extensions to export data into.
- Support for Optimizely's expanded platform called Optimizely X.
- And added a brand new connection with CRM provider Omeda.
All the little things
We're also constantly reviewing the small stuff, and we've made some additional improvements of note, including:
- You can see all listeners, connections, and dialogues in the simulator instead of only the ones that are configured for the page you are looking at. Less confusion about why your newly created dialogue does not even show up in the simulator!
- You can run only one scheduled batch connection. We added that you can always manually start (one) other batch connection at the same time, and you will get clear feedback on the queue of batch connections yet to be run.
- And in the category of "no BlueConic user left behind": our on and off icons were the same except that "on" is green and "off" is red. This was challenging for color blind people (up to 8% of us!) so we fixed it by changing the look of the red one to make it easier to tell the two apart.
Coming Soon
Some upcoming new features we are working on:
- We are working on connections with IBM's SilverPop and with Salesforce's Krux, and many more connections are coming right after those two!
- A new insight is on its way that can help you annotate your insights; it's called Content Insight.
- New content recommendation algorithms for the recommendation engine.