Welcome to the BlueConic product release notes. We update this page with each software update of the BlueConic platform.
BlueConic platform status
Visit status.blueconic.com for current status updates for the BlueConic platform.
BlueConic Release 81 Updates, September 2021
BlueConic updates for Release 81 (R81) will be delivered to servers from September 10-September 16, 2021. New features and updates include:
- Feature updates for Lifecycle Reporting, including new ways to visualize lifecycle and stage metrics
- New Product Connection (SFTP) connection for importing data for BlueConic product recommendations via CSV
- New Facebook Leads and Twitter Ads connections
- Improvements to the Firebase and Sailthru connections
- Additional documentation for the create/update profile property section of the BlueConic REST API
Improved Lifecycle Reporting features
There are several additions to Lifecycle Reporting in this release, including new ways to drill down for details on important lifecycle statistics:
- Lifecycle stage metrics: For each lifecycle stage, you can drill down to see details on stage transitions, as well as the number of profiles currently in the stage, number of stage progressions, and drops for the time period selected.
- Lifecycle entries and dropouts: To the right of the Lifecycle visualization, click the entries or dropouts number to see details on the stages where profiles entered or dropped out of the lifecycle.
- Lifecycle completion rates: You can see the total number of profiles that completed the lifecycle, as well as a breakdown showing the stages from which profiles completed the lifecycle.
- New dashboard insights showing key lifecycle and stage metrics: With the Lifecycle (Stage) KPI Insight, you can zero in on a key metric for your lifecycle results. With the Lifecycle Stage Transition Table, you'll get performance data for your lifecycle as a whole, as well as information on how profiles transition between stages or to complete the lifecycle.
Examining transitions for a Lifecycle:
Examining profiles entering or dropping out of a Lifecycle:
Examining Lifecycle completions in detail:
Click the Lifecycles completions metric to see metrics on which stages generated Lifecycle completions. Here you can see that 492k profiles moved from Stage 8 to completion, and 200k profiles from Stage 6 completed the lifecycle.
Coming soon: New Lifecycle Insights
The BlueConic Lifecycle KPI insight shows the results of a BlueConic lifecycle (or an individual stage of a lifecycle) based on one key performance metric (KPI). This will help you gain insight into lifecycle (or stage) completions, completion ratios, progressions, progression ratios, dropouts, dropout ratio, drops, drop ratios, or the number of profiles present in a lifecycle.
The new Lifecycle Stage Transition Table will provide reporting on how customer profiles move through a BlueConic lifecycle. You can see, for example, how profiles move between the different stages, to help you understand user behavior (for example, are customers taking shortcuts or skipping stages?) and to identify possible pain points where customers typically drop out of the lifecycle.
Note: To learn about the various metrics for measuring your Lifecycles and their stages, see the BlueConic Lifecycles Glossary.
New Product Connection (SFTP)
The new Product Connection (SFTP) enables you to import product data stored in CSV files from an SFTP server. You can use this product data in BlueConic for product recommendations. With the product store cleanup feature, you can remove discontinued or out-of-stock items, for example.
To learn more or to have this connection installed in your tenant, contact your Customer Success Manager.
New Facebook Leads Connection
You can use the new Facebook Leads Connection to enrich your BlueConic profiles with data from forms in Facebook Leads. To learn more, and to have this connection installed in your tenant, contact your Customer Success Manager.
New Twitter Ads Connection
With the new Twitter Ads Connection, you can send audience information to Twitter Advertising from BlueConic. To learn more, and to have this connection installed in your tenant, contact your Customer Success Manager.
Improvements and updates to BlueConic Connections
- Updates to the Sailthru Connection including the ability to export all values as typed values and support for Sailthru smartlists.
- Enhancements and UI improvements to the Firebase Connection.
Contact your Customer Success Manager to learn more.
Additional REST API documentation
We've added additional documentation for the create/update profile property section of the BlueConic REST API. See the Create/update profile property section for details on the parameters and their values: https://support.blueconic.com/hc/en-us/articles/202528082-BlueConic-REST-API#create-update-profile-property
Release 80, July 2021
Product updates for BlueConic platform Release 80 (R80) will be delivered to servers from July 10-July 15, 2021.
Lifecycle Reporting
To assess the performance of your marketing Lifecycles in BlueConic, you can examine your results in the Lifecycle Reporting window. Use these metrics to analyze how customers are interacting with lifecycles and stages you've created.
To open the reporting window, click the Lifecycle Reporting icon at the top of a customer Lifecycle in BlueConic. The Lifecycle reporting view provides a range of valuable lifecycle and stage metrics for your marketing lifecycles. Note that Lifecycle Reporting will begin to collect usage metrics with the installation of BlueConic release R80 for your existing and new Lifecycles.
For details see Lifecycle performance and reporting.
Additions to the BlueConic Python API for Lifecycles
You can now create AI Workbench notebooks for Lifecycles reporting. Our developers created Python APIs to get the Lifecycle performance for a certain time period, as well as Lifecycle performance over time (split up in intervals). See the AI Workbench Python API documentation for details.
Enhancements and improvements to SFTP and S3 Connections
The plugin development team has enhanced the UI and improved performance of the SFTP connection and the Amazon Web Services (S3) connection, including:
- Group import goals added to both SFTP and S3 connections, including the option to use data pre-processors in your tenant.
- You can now drag and drop individual group, import, and export goals to re-order and set priority within each category of goals. The SFTP or S3 connection will import or export data based on order of goals within each category.
- New option to link Timeline event or product data to profile data.
- You can add a “.done” suffix to the file being imported and any linked files once it’s finished processing.
- You can specify that you’re using a “change file” to indicate you are only importing new data, which can speed up the import.
- For existing SFTP and S3 connections, the option to “Export all profiles (including unchanged profiles)” will be selected by default. For new SFTP and S3 connections, it will be deselected by default, so only changed profiles will be exported.
- The connection Run history now shows the last five created or updated profiles, with clickable links to profiles on the Profile tab. This feature will enable you to see how and whether profiles were correctly updated or created.
- When adding multiple mappings simultaneously, you can use the add multiple mappings option to set merge rules to multiple fields.
- Support for PGP encryption will be added to the S3 connection in the coming weeks. Contact your Customer Success Manager if you have questions or to learn more.
New Snowflake Connection
The new Snowflake connection allows you to enrich BlueConic profiles with data from Snowflake and vice versa, via an Amazon S3 server. This connection supports scheduled batch import and export.
New Firebase Connection
You can use the new Firebase connection to enrich BlueConic profiles with data from Firebase subscribers and vice versa.
Two additions to the BlueConic REST API
Our developers have made two additions to the BlueConic REST API:
- The 'cursor' query string parameter was added to the get segment profiles method. It defines the starting point of the page for pagination. When cursors are used, each page (except the last page) returns a "nextCursor" value, which can be used to retrieve the next page. This is the preferred pagination method, especially for large segments, and it cannot be combined with "startIndex". For details, see the Get segment profiles section of the BlueConic REST API.
- The 'collapse' query string parameter was added to the get one profile method. You can use "profile.segments" with collapse to exclude segments from being generated which reduces overhead and speeds up results. For details, see the Get one profile in the Profile methods section of the REST API.
Profile import performance improvements
Our development team significantly enhanced the speed of profile imports. All profile imports will scale and proceed more efficiently.
Other updates
- You may notice we've redesigned the emails sent from BlueConic: These are the same helpful messages but with a fresh look.
- To open and close the metadata section at the top of the BlueConic window, you now click a grey chevron instead of a + or - sign: