Google recently announced to faze out third party cookies on chrome browsers by 2022 (no exact date has been announced). So what does this mean for Site users?

Selligent Site only uses third party cookies to track anonymous profiles over different domains or when a visitor deletes the first party cookie from his browser.

When third party cookies are no longer available, tracking of anonymous users will only be possible on a single domain. Cross domain tracking for universes with multiple domains will no longer be possible. There is however no impact on tracking of known contacts over multiple domains as identification of a know contact is done in a different way. (Selligent identification and customer identification).

Multiple enhancements have been made to the Send-time Optimization (STO) feature to improve the calculation and use of the optimized send-time for a contact.

The activation and configuration of STO for a journey has been moved from the Advanced section of the journey properties to the basic properties. The option ‘Send at optimal (predicted) time for each consumer’ can be found in the Scheduling section:

When activated, an Advanced link is shown, and when expanded, a drop-down allows setting the time zone. This time zone is used to determine when the end of the day is reached, i.e. when all messages need to be sent out at the latest. Unless modified, this drop-down defaults to the time zone of the marketer enabling the setting.

Other enhancements include:

• An STO profile is now available for all contacts that have at least 1 interaction. Previously, profiles were only created for contacts having a minimum number of interactions over a given time period.
• STO profile data is collected for the last half year after activation of STO. Previously, all data from the time of activation of STO was used.
• A fallback STO time has been introduced. This fallback STO time will be used for contacts who have had no interactions and therefore do not have an STO profile. This fallback STO time is based on the best send-time for the audience. It is visible from the journey properties under the time zone setting drop-down.

• Whether a contact has an STO profile or not can now be used when filtering an audience. When STO is activated for an environment, the STO scope becomes available in the Audience filter. Filtering on the existence of the profile can be applied as follows:

As a result of all the enhancements made to STO, the extended STO profile is no longer visible from the Lists section in SMC for all new users of STO. However, clients who were previously using STO will still see the STO profile and segments will keep working.

The STO profile for a contact is based on a weighted combination of the best send-time for the contact and the best send-time for the audience. This improves the functionality of the feature in cases where:

• A contact has insufficient interactions, and we cannot be confident about their hours of activity.
• Or when a consumer has a lot of interactions, but there is too much variability in the activity per hour causing no individual hour to stand out.

Note: Clients using the previous STO version, will be gradually upgraded to the new version close to the release date. During the time frame between the SMC release and the STO upgrade, messages will continue to be sent out randomly for consumers without an STO profile. Once the upgrade is complete, a fallback STO time is available and visible from the journey properties related to STO. From then on, consumers with no STO profile will be sent messages at the fallback STO time.

To improve the preview of messages using Custom Events data for personalization, it is now possible to select a specific Custom Events record after selecting a test user for the preview. This allows the preview to better represent what the final message will look like by taking into account all personalization values.

When custom Events records are available for the selected test-user, they are listed below, with a maximum of 25 records. When no Custom Events records exist, the user is informed.

Smart Audience Filtering

When defining a Smart Audience, it is possible to set the maximum size of the audience, as well as limit the targeted audience based on filter criteria. This way, you ensure you target only the contacts with the best match. This feature was introduced in the Riberry release.

In this release, the size of the potential audience is calculated and displayed when configuring the audience filter, providing the marketer more insight on the effectiveness of the filter. Based on the filtered audience, an indication is also given of how many of those contacts have interacted with the brand and what the size of the expected output segment will be.

Using this information, the marketer can adapt the filters and see the result of their changes before launch. However, depending on the size of the audience, it can take from 30 minutes to several hours to calculate the results. While the results are processing, a spinner icon will be shown.

Catalog Search

On the Products Insights tab, when searching for items in the product catalog, the user can specify a number of catalog properties. In this release, the “item_url” property is added to the list of properties that can be searched on.

Rich push messages are push messages that contain either an image or Smart Content. Now, similar to the behavior on iOS, images in rich push notifications are also visible as a thumbnail in the Android notification banner. Once clicked, a full version of the image is shown.

• In the previous release, data imports were enabled for imports into audience lists and 1:1 linked lists. When defining these recurring imports the usage of this 1:1 linked list in the import is recorded, and the linked list will be unable to be deleted. The usage details are available from the Relations overview for an Audience list.
  
  
  
• Custom Events lists contain a series of default system fields in addition to user defined custom fields. The State field is a system field and import into this field is no longer allowed.

• A marketer cannot create a list field with name ‘USER_ID’. This is a reserved field name. This restriction applies to SMC as well as to the API. A warning will be displayed in the validation pane.
• Non editable fields in lists are now displayed differently making it clear to the user what fields can and cannot be edited. Editable fields are indicated by a grey line that turns blue when clicked. Non-editable fields have no lines.

When data synchronizations encounter problems, the Notifications center informs the user of the problem with the possibility to click through to the history of the data sync. Now, to make it clearer that there are unread notifications, the number of unread messages is indicated:

With Satsuma, 4 new dashboards will be released, replacing the existing dashboards and providing the marketer with a more concentrated and structured access to the different metrics. Filters will allow the marketer to drill down to the information required. The following dashboards will be made available:

• A journey comparison dashboard to compare multi-channel performance of different journeys
• A summary for selected journeys providing multi-channel performance metrics for selected journeys over time, per executed day of the week and per domain
• A summary for all journeys providing multi-channel performance metrics for all journeys over time
• A comparison over 2 periods allowing to compare multi-channel journey performance by period for the same journey or different journeys
  

New in these dashboards is the possibility to filter on channel. This gives the marketer the opportunity to compare metrics over the different channels targeted in a journey. For example, in a Custom Journey, when messages are sent over different channels, selecting a specific channel and its metrics will allow the marketer to compare the results for the different channels.

Also, the Reporting section now includes a new metric: Open tracked count. This metric includes the number of messages that have been opened and for which the images have been downloaded. All opens without image download are not included.

Site Enhancements

Pop-in Placement

The Pop-in Placements editor has been improved and contains now an additional option.

The Z-index field specifies the stack order of an element. An element with greater Z-index is always in front of an element with a lower Z-index

Technical note: The Z-index is by default set to 'auto'. If you need to change this, it needs to be a positive number like e.g. '2' or you can leave it blank.

Also, the ESC button now closes the pop-in.

In an effort to keep our audience up to date on any important new developments, additions to the web help or other changes, we have developed a newsfeed, visible on the landing page of the web help and from the Resources section.

The landing page only lists the last 3 feeds, while the news feed in the Resources section provides the full history of feeds with all details.

Two new Use case videos have been added to the library:

• Schedule recurring data Imports
• Manually import an audience from external sources

A new course has been added to the Site curriculum:

• Visitor Insights - This course explains how to leverage the reporting data available about your website’s visitors and their activities. Leveraging Visitor Insights effectively allows you to fine tune your reporting segments and create engagement strategies that increase conversions.

• Values from a Custom Event used in a link (towards a journey) would not work in the messages sent. But they should. So it's fixed now.
• [API] data/search endpoint now uses correct batch size
• [SIMLINK] Batch deletion of sim records during SF sync only deleted the first batch. This has been fixed and now all records all deleted
• [DataExport] export validation no longer throws exception when using unshared list, but now shows a clear validation message when saving the export
• Salesforce api version 50 now supported by simlink
• [Journey][Transactional] Edit stored procedure now correctly opens SP in edit mode. Previously, the user was redirected to the dashboard
• [API] A dot in a brand name no longer breaks smc api usage
• [API] Custom journey input component parameter's had a max length is 25 when used in api call but not in journey itself. This has been corrected and now a max length of 255 characters is allowed everywhere
• Abandoned cart journey created actionlist column PRODUCTS with max length 255. This might not be enough when there are multiple products in the basket and has been changed to NVarchar.
• If a folder ID & List ID are the same, the "folder path" gets set to the root. This has now been corrected
• Disabled users should not be available for selection in notification groups. This was unfortunately not the case but has been corrected so they no longer appear
• Some versions of Chrome caused an issue after login, stating that the information that was tried to be accessed was not secure. This has now been solved
• The Expiration date of mobile messages is now correctly converted to UTC
• When sending multiple mobile notifications with actions and keeping the app open while going through the notifications, only the action on the first opened notification was executed. This has been rectified and now all actions are executed.
• Service accounts in the Admin Config could not be edited. The issue has been resolved.
• [Reporting][Performance] - RetrieveTimeOverview is no longer called twice
• When creating a recurring data import (via lists chapter) scope name is now correctly filled
• [API] Get segments now takes into account list sharing over different organizations
• Row background color is rendered as set in design view
• [Content] Test users now load when user doesn't have access to lists