Release 2020 D is now live! We’re excited to announce that we are now powering our default account identification capabilities using 6sense, added query string management, increased bot filtering, added support for reverse proxies, and more!
6sense Account Identification
As of this release our default Account Identification provider for all customers is now 6sense, which has been automatically enabled for all customers at no additional charge. This means visitors to your PathFactory Content Tracks and Explore Pages will automatically be identified as accounts by 6sense as of April 16th and beyond. All historical reporting data will not be impacted by this change. We expect improvements to the reliability and accuracy of traffic identified to accounts by 6sense, over and above our previous provider.
If you had previously integrated Demandbase with PathFactory with your own API key, you will continue to use Demandbase as your account identification provider. No action is necessary on your part. Otherwise, you have automatically been migrated to 6sense as of this release.
Account Identification data is used within PathFactory in all account-level views, including:
Path Analytics
This includes reports in the Accounts tab, and various panels in other reports.
PathFactory for Sales
All anonymous traffic to Content Tracks and Explore Pages will automatically be identified by 6sense and is included in the PathFactory for Sales Account, Opportunity, and Dashboard views.
Segments and Routes
All non-Geographic fields within Segments are now powered by 6sense for any PathFactory customer not using our Demandbase integration. If you had previously configured a Segment in PathFactory and wish to use it, you’ll be required to rebuild it. If you need assistance, please contact your PathFactory Customer Success Manager or Solutions Architect and they will be more than happy to guide you. All segments that are invalid due to being built with a data source that is no longer valid will be in a new section called Invalid Segments and will be marked Disabled.
Similarly, if a route uses an invalid segment it will also be marked as such, with a highlighted red box and warning label.
If any traffic to a route contains an invalid segment it will be directed to the Fallback Destination for that route.
IP-to-Geo
In addition to the Account Identification capabilities of 6sense, we’ve also updated our IP-to-Geo service to power more accurate identification of geography based on the IP address a visitor comes from. This is used in various different analytics views, in our Cookie Consent Features, and in Segments and Routes.
Custom Query Strings
We have added a new tab with organization settings called Custom Query Strings, where PathFactory users can define a list of frequently used Query Strings that can easily be appended to the URL of a Content Track or Explore Page, or automatically appended to emails sent from PathFactory for Sales.
When on a Content Track or Explore Page and you click on share, you are presented with this new dialogue box where you can choose which query string you wish to deploy your URL with.
We’ve automatically enabled a query string for your Marketing Automation Platform in your Custom Query String list, so when deploying an email campaign you’ll want to choose that query string when you click on share.
This new feature will help marketers more consistently email merge tokens meaning more known traffic entering PathFactory from your Marketing Automation Platform. It will also allow for more consistent use of analytics query strings such as UTMs.
With this change, we’ve deprecated one section within PathFactory, and updated another. The Custom Email Address Merge Field setting inside Organization Settings is now deprecated. This new Custom Query String functionality supersedes it.
The updated section is the Copy Email Tracking Link button, which is superceded by a new Share button. When clicked, the new Share button pops up a new Share Link modal window as described above.
Previous Copy Email Tracking Link button:
New Share button:
Reverse Proxy Support
Reverse Proxies allow PathFactory customers to show their Content Tracks and Explore Pages on their parent domain rather than a subdomain. For example, if your company was ABC, today you your content track URLs might show up like this:
https://abc.pathfactory.com/content/asset
Rather than use a custom subdomain like resources.abc.com, a reverse proxy would allow you to use a URL such as abc.com/resources.
This feature is not configurable by end-users of PathFactory. If you wish to explore using a reverse proxy please contact your CSM for more information. Please note that you must have access to edit your DNS record in order to use a Reverse Proxy.
Updates to Bot Filtering
Our aim is always to minimize the amount of bot traffic showing up in your reporting and analytics. To better filter that traffic out, we’ve added a new exclusion to all PathFactory environments, filtering any session with “utm_TrafficCategory=Server” in the URL. Terminus uses this in it’s advertising platform to identify crawling bots. All data, reporting and analytics after this release will filter this traffic out.
Session Expiry for Security
When you’re doing work in the PathFactory authoring environment, we time out all sessions after 20 minutes of inactivity for security purposes. This happens without warning and users are redirected to the log-in page. With this release, we’ve improved the user experience by prompting you when you’re within 5 minutes of being logged out due to inactivity. You’ll notice the pop-up below while working in PathFactory and all you need to do is choose Continue Session or close the modal within 5 minutes of it appearing to extend your session.
Dispatch Jukebox Events
This one is for the developers out there. We’ve opened up our Jukebox tracking script to allow developers to hook into the events we capture in your visitors’ browser such as interacting with elements of a content track, opening and submitting a form, moving a mouse or scrolling, or opening, closing or hiding a tab. For more information read the Nook article.
Upcoming
As so much of B2B marketing has changed in recent weeks, PathFactory is shifting our short-term focus to how we can support creating a better event experience for B2B marketers. To learn more about how we’re leveraging our existing infrastructure to create a new Virtual Event Experience, please reach out to your CSM today.