They say that April showers bring May flowers, but they also bring exciting enhancements from the PathFactory team! Dive into our latest release to learn about our simulive video capabilities in VEX, feature improvements to Microsite Builder and standard forms, a new content analysis dashboard in Website Tools that supports our mission to be THE Content Intelligence Platform, and more!
See the following video for a quick overview of what's new
Platform Updates
Country and state/province field improvements within standard forms
Previously when adding these fields to our standard forms, they were displayed to visitors in an open text format. This allowed for any value to be submitted which could result in inaccurate data. To ensure that accurate data would be collected for these fields moving forward, we have updated them to drop down formats where the entry is not accepted if it does not match the list criteria.
Address and city fields now available within standard forms
Improve your visitor profile when using PathFactory’s standard forms with the ability to add city and address fields. These are open text fields that you can require your visitors to fill in for sending post event thank you gifts, marketing swag, training material or for other use case applications.
These fields of data will be shown in your track form capture analytics and will also be available as fields to select within your form capture webhook.
Note: Country must be selected when editing the form before you can add the city or address fields.
Index, no follow option now available in search engine directive list
We have added the option of “Index, No Follow” to the search engine directive lists for Content Tracks, Explore Pages, Microsites and VEX Events. This allows for your webpages to appear in search engine results but the links on the page will not be followed by search engine crawlers. For example, if you have a resource center that includes links to Content track and you only want the page to be crawled, not the underlying content, then you could select this option.
Add multiple roles per user
Within the User Management section of the platform (which only Admins have access to), you are now able to assign multiple roles to a user. This capability was developed to support further role and permission enhancements that will be made available in upcoming releases.
For now, if you were to assign more than one role to a user, the one with the highest level of permissions will take precedence. For example, a user with Author and Reporter roles will have the same level of access that an Author only user would have.
Campaign Tools
Microsite Builder now incorporates track level overrides
When pulling a Content Trackinto a microsite, any overrides that you have set at the track level for that content will now be what is displayed in the microsite, rather than the settings applied for the content at the content library level, which was the previous behaviour. This includes thumbnail image, title and description overrides.
Microsite Builder track and featured blocks can open in a new tab or as an overlay
We have added the capability to have your featured content or Content Track blocks open up in either a new tab or as an overlay on your microsite landing page! Now you have even more flexibility in choosing the navigation experience you want to provide your visitors.
In the block settings, there is a new section called “Open content track” with these options available to select along with the original redirect behavior.
If you open the content in a new tab, the Microsite header will appear if you have it enabled. If you open the content in an overlay it will not appear.
Content type and topic tags available within Microsite Builder landing page content thumbnails
Our customers love the fact we make content type and topic tags visible on content thumbnails in our Explore pages, so we wanted to carry this behavior over to Microsite Builder and make it even easier for your visitors to find what interests them.
Navigate to the bottom of your microsite setup tab to see the checkboxes where you can select if you would like these tags to appear on your content. These are unchecked by default.
To change the appearance of these tags, navigate to the applicable appearance configuration in the appearances section of the platform settings cog. From here, select the Microsite Builder tab where you will be able to edit the font type, label background colour and text colour.
Track language field merge available for external code and forms
If you are a customer running global campaigns, we’ve added the ability to pass a track's language name and code to any custom elements added to your page through external code. This will allow you to translate any custom UI elements. We’ve also included these field merges in our blind form submit so that you can report track activity by language name and code in your web analytics platform. These language field merges can be used as below:
{{language.name}} {{language.code}}
VEX
Simulive video support now available
We are excited to roll out this new functionality which allows you to display pre-recorded videos in a “simulated live” format! Now you can promote your event sessions as live without needing to do live broadcasting the day of. It’s a great way to host sessions across multiple time zones and you are still able to pair the simulive video with other functions of live events, such as Q&A discussions with a moderator, chat tools etc.
PathFactory’s simulive capability will allow a visitor to pause the video, adjust the volume, seek backwards and select the “live” option to go to the relative time in the video. They will not be able to seek forward and if they enter the session late, they will be taken to the relative “live” time in the video automatically.
To enable this functionality for your pre-recorded video, navigate to your applicable live session in VEX and hit the configure button. Scroll to the Live Session section and select the “Content Library” option for Live Content Type. From here, you’ll be able to see a checkbox option labelled “Make Video Simulive”
Note: This feature is not supported for Vidyard videos or Vimeo Basic videos. Vimeo Plus, Pro, Business and Premium videos do work however.
If the session time has ended but the session is still in a live format, when a visitor enters the session they will see a note over the video lightbox that says “This video has ended.”
If the session time has ended and the session has been converted to on-demand, when a visitor enters the session they will see the regular player controls available for an on-demand video.
Ability to have multiple session start and end times
In order to help scale out your live event sessions and reduce your workload, we have added the ability for a single live session to have multiple start and end times. This is helpful if you are looking to broadcast the same session more than once as you won’t have to clone and update the session each time.
When creating a live session, you will still select a default start and end time, but you will be able to add more start and end times on the configuration page.
Configuration Page
All session times will be listed on the registration page. If a visitor tries to access the session outside of the designated session times, they will be taken to the session waiting room.
Website Tools
Content Analysis Dashboard
In an effort to continue bringing ‘Content Intelligence’ further to light, in Path Analytics you will find a new Content Analysis Dashboard. It provides a detailed view of your overall content inventory and a deep audit of your content. Content analysis dashboards help you get a better understanding of your content attributes including the estimated reading time of each content asset, complexity of the content, content summary, keywords and key phrases, language, when was the content created and/or last updated, gap analysis such as missing og_images and much more. You get a view both at the individual content level and the aggregate level.
Think of this as a health check on the status of your content, just your content. We believe better content metadata attributes will lead to better content engagement. And when engagement data and content metadata are combined you can make better marketing and business decisions about what content to create, refine or sunset because it’s effectiveness has waned. Think about your shopping experiences on Amazon or an online grocery story. The attributes of the bottle of Coke Zero are there, including the fact that there’s no sugar, there are glamor shots of the packaging and some sell copies. Take that experience and apply it to Content Intelligence. Now you will know whether you are developing content that is discoverable, addresses the keywords you use in SEO and other applications such as accessibility (alt text for images).
Analysis & Recommendation of iFramed/embedded PDF from websites
Many B2B websites deliver their contents via embedded PDFs or allowing visitors to download the content to consume. Website Tools now supports analysis and recommendation of web pages with such embedded or iFramed PDFs.
Recommendation Carousels show complete Titles
Truncating titles while displaying recommendations for the next best set of content can lose some critical information. With this new product update now your content titles shown in recommendation carousels will not be limited to two lines and thereby will not be truncated. The height of carousels will automatically adjust to show the complete titles.
Improved options for Thumbnail Images
Users can now explicitly choose to render recommendation thumbnails with either the automatically extracted OG_images from their analyzed content or from user uploaded fallback images. In case your content does not have OG_image(s), the platform will automatically switch to use the fallback images.
In addition, users now can store up to 5 fallback images (instead of just one) for better end-user UI experience. PathFactory platform automatically redistributes images via round-robins so that Guide or Concierge do not show the same images next to each other.
That’s all for the April release! We hope you enjoyed these updates and we look forward to rolling out more exciting features/improvements in May. You know what they say… April (product release) showers, bring May (product release) flowers.