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Welcome to the May 2017 BlueConic product updates! This month we would like to point you to a great article explaining how Randall Reilly, an amazing customer of ours, uses BlueConic. It’s so worth a read! If you also have a story to share about your use of BlueConic, please let us know. We’d love to feature it here!

Our engineering team delivers releases every three weeks, which are rolled out cumulatively. Many of the features below will be rolled out in Release 50 during the week of May 8^th. If you are especially eager to use anything mentioned, feel free to check back to confirm whether it will be included next week or at some point in the upcoming weeks. As always, you can track progress of releases on https://status.blueconic.com/.

Recommendations

New fun for the recommendations engine!

• We added a new algorithm: “Recently Viewed Items.” You might be familiar with the separate “Recently Viewed Items” dialogue. This is a much more powerful alternative with templating, filtering, and the ability to combine it with other algorithms. Certainly worth a look if you’ve used the ‘recently viewed items’ dialogues in the past!
• There was a static lookback window of 5 hours for some algorithms, including “breaking”, “viral” and “recent high CTR” algorithms. Some customers wanted to be able to control this time frame, so that’s now possible.

Insights

The Insights area is used a lot, so we tweaked small things to make them better by adding:

• A placeholder for empty insights. Now, when you add an insight but there is no data yet, it looks a lot friendlier and you can see what kind of insight it actually is is.
• Content insight. A new insight where you can add memo’s, TODO’s, extra context or other text you find useful for an insight. This works great in combination with the option to email your dashboard to you or your coworkers every week!

Profile switching

A common challenge with profile merging is the use case of shared devices, like a shared family iPad in a household, where multiple people log in into their own accounts, which might trigger accidental merging of all family members’ profiles into one profile for the whole family. Or a BlueConic customer that uses several test accounts on their website and then realizes that the profiles belonging to those accounts are now suddenly merged into one big profile.

To improve data collection and profile merging in these situations, we have added a new mechanism to profile merging when a profile already has an identifier (like a username, customer ID, or email address). When BlueConic collects an identifier for a profile that already has another identifier, a real-time merge will not take place. Rather, the profile will switch. For those who like the details, it works as follows:

• When a new identifier is collected, and stored in a profile property that already contained another identifier, a new (empty) profile is automatically created and the new identifier is stored in the new profile
• Because of standard profile merging rules, if there are other profile(s) that have the same identifier, it is immediately merged into the new profile
• This only works on web, not for batch connections/through our REST API where identifiers can be changed or overwritten in bulk for other reasons
• There is no configuration needed; this works by deafult!

 This mechanism will be available mid-May.

Connection news

Lots of new and updated connection news this month:

• A brand new IBM Marketing Cloud (formerly known as Silverpop) connection, with both batch export and import options
• A client side Krux connection
• We tweaked the Mailchimp connection a based on customer feedback; you can now select which segments you want to send to Mailchimp, instead of sending them all, which was becoming a very long list for some of our most active customers
• A new connection with Bronto, with both batch export and import. This connection introduces something new which will be built in other connection as well! The Bronto connection features support for multiple goals, so you can easily setup multiple exports or imports for various use cases.

All the little things

We’re constantly reviewing the small stuff, and we’ve made some additional quality of life changes. This time we have lot of them, so here we go:

• We identified and corrected an issue with control group clickthrough rates, where over-reported clicks sometimes made control groups appear as though they were performing better than they were.
• We introduced a new way of adding a rule a few months ago, with lots of positive feedback. Based on this, we updated “rules adding” mechanisms everywhere
  
• Last month we made it a bit easier to open complex objects like the recommendation object in a dialogue. Now you don’t even have to edit the dialogue. You can just double click on a recommendation widget to open it directly.
• Sometimes dialogues are enabled but are not displayed because of Where tab restrictions. We now see a yellow icon when this occurs.
• Standard and certified plugins are now automatically updated. No need to go into the gallery to update them!
• You can now configure dialogues to show only up X times per session/day/week/month, with a minimum interval in X seconds/minutes/hours/days. More targeting precision ftw!

 All above features will be available mid-May.

Coming Soon

Some upcoming new features we are working on:

• We’re researching the best way to send out our recommendations through your ESP
• Ever had to enable to disable a lot of dialogues or wanted to delete a lot of profile properties? Good news: bulk changes feature is coming!
• We’re actively working on a WhatCounts connection
• We’re also working on a Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM connection

Thank you for your interest! Any questions or feedback, please let us know! See you in June!