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October 2016 product updates

Note: You've landed on some older release notes from our early days. Learn about current BlueConic features and use cases in the BlueConic Knowledge Base.

Most recent BlueConic product updates

For current BlueConic product updates, visit the BlueConic Release Notes page.


It is officially feeling like autumn in New England, but the way our engineers work, they keep the heat cranked up here at BlueConic! Hopefully you’ll get that warm feeling inside when you see all the great stuff packed into this month’s update.

*drumroll please…* 

Announcing: Content Recommendations!

We’re very excited about this newest application of the customer data you collect with BlueConic, bringing your site and app visitors individually tailored recommendations of your content. After beating out a point solution recommendations engine for one client (and pretty handily we might add), we know that you’re going to be eager to start using BlueConic in this new way very soon.

Here are the details: this is a real-time, algorithmic personalized recommendation engine, but one that is based on the power of the BlueConic customer data platform, which means that you will:

  • Integrate in dialogues or variants, so you can segment, schedule, customize and A/B test the content recommendations capabilities just like regular dialogues
  • Use BlueConic insights to get deep knowledge about the performance of your recommendations
  • Create the best recommendations because the they are based on profiles and therefore an individual’s actual interests.

Several algorithms can be used simultaneously, like:

  • Breaking News booster; Articles that have been viewed a lot in the last few hours will be boosted in the recommendation algorithm
  • Viral News booster; Articles that have been viewed a lot in the last few hours –and- have been the first article seen of a visitor will be boosted
  • Exceptional often clicked recommendations; Recommendations that have been clicked a lot in the last few hours will be boosted for all visitors
  • Same category; Articles in the same category, based on meta data of the articles, will be boosted
  • Look-alike-articles; Articles that are about the same topic(s) will be boosted
  • Same interest; based on the personal visitor general interest(s), boost articles in that same interest category
  • Collaborative filtering: Boost articles that others like you liked

How to create personalized content recommendations with a customer data platform

BlueConic recommendations are based on the powerful and market leading open source Apache Spark Machine Learning & Data Analytics engine. The best tools bring the best experiences to life.

Content to recommend will be automatically scraped from your website, and you can easily specify content to be excluded content, so no complicated integrations are needed. The recommendations can be nested in already existing interactions, such as a lightbox or slide out. BlueConic provides several templates, and you can create your own HTML templates to fully blend in the recommendations in your website.

With this feature currently in limited availability, we expect to announce general availability within the coming few months, watch this space!

The BlueConic Compass: Object Navigation

Another major addition: we created a new way to navigate objects. All objects (like dialogues, listeners, connections or profile properties) are now displayed in a table that can quickly be sorted, filtered, and manipulated so that columns can be added or removed. We built it for speed, so now you can create exactly the right overview of objects for your specific task in no time at all.

Small is beautiful

In addition to this month’s headliners, we don’t want a whole bunch of other changes to be missed, including:

  • Full Screen mode and keyboard support. To make the most of your screen real estate, press ‘alt-f’ and you enter full screen mode. Pro-tip: press ‘?’ to see all other keyboard shortcuts in BlueConic!
  • Ranges for Insights. Let’s say you have an insight that shows the spread of all ages of your profiles. Bucketing them in groups (‘age 1-20’, ‘age 21-40’ etc.) makes reading those insights a lot easier. So now you can! Take a look at the Profile Property or Profile Property Bubble chart insight to see how it works.
  • Improved Multi Language Support. We improved all kinds of details surrounding multi language support in BlueConic, like improved support in the simulator and while creating multi lingual variants
  • Multiple ID support for Facebook Customer Audiences and Google Ads Customer Match. A few months ago we introduced the Facebook Custom Audiences & Google Ads Customer Match connections. Some customers collected more than one identifier (for example, email addresses) per users, so we now support that too, dramatically improving the chance of a match in one of the two systems!
  • Google Tag Manager. We improved the existing Google Tag Manager connection, with the most important improvement a visual picker of data layer objects. No more Chrome Developer Tools needed!
  • Renewed Facebook Ads UI. The Facebook Ads Connection could have used a bit more shine, so we did that! It’s much easier to understand and set up now!

What you have to look forward to

Here's a quick rundown of some of the things we're working on that should be announced/available soon:

Form Dialogues

The form dialogue is already used a lot to quickly create a simple form on your website. Until now it took a lot of clicking to send an email to either the one that filled in the form, or to someone internally. That option will be added soon!

Connection insights

Wouldn’t it be great to get insight in how many profiles are connected to a record in your CRM or a subscriber in your Email Marketing Tool? We’re working on that, and more!

 

iOS Mobile SDK support for Swift 3.0

Apple continues to rapidly improve their new programming language Swift, now reaching 3.0. So we will update our SDK to support that language


Thanks for reading! As always, you can check deployment status at status.blueconic.com and you can sign up there to be notified of exact release dates.
 

We whistle while we work and love adding updates to our customer data platform for our customers. Drop us a line and let us know if you have ideas! Together, we will continue to improve the best CDP in the market. 

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