February Updates

Starting February 2024, Gmail has started enforcing guidelines for brands that send over 5000 emails per day to Gmail users to regulate unsolicited emails and to make it easy for Gmail users to unsubscribe from such emails.  To comply with these guidelines, we have rolled out one-click list unsubscribes.

What does this mean for your brand?

• No changes to your custom unsubscribe links: When users click on any unsubscribe links that you include in your email, they will be taken to your preference center as earlier
• Gmail unsubscribe button: Additionally, when a user clicks on the ‘list unsubscribe’ button in their Gmail inbox, they would be able to opt for  a 1-click unsubscribe directly from their Gmail inbox without having to first visit your preference center as mandated by Gmail.

Currently Available

Google is updating their EU User Consent Policy in response to changes to the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) , which goes into effect March 7, 2024. This new change requires advertisers to disclose certain information to their EEA and UK end users, as well as it requires advertisers to obtain the necessary consents from the users.

In order to comply with DMA, Google Ads will require all brands who advertise to European citizens on any Google platform to share the following user consent data:

• Consent for sending user data to Google for advertising purposes
• Consent for personalizing the advertisements

To comply with Google Ads’ requirements, Blueshift has added the following standard attributes to the customer profile:

• google_ad_user_data (type: boolean)
• google_ad_personalization (type: boolean)

You can now send your customers’ consent signals to Blueshift using these attributes.  When you syndicate any audience with Google Ads, Blueshift will automatically report the data from these attributes to the appropriate consent fields in Google as follows:

• true would map to Google’s GRANTED consent status
• false would map to Google’s DENIED consent status
• null  (i.e. not setting a value) would map to Google’s UNSPECIFIED consent status

The aforementioned customer consent attributes will show up on the customer profile under the ‘Ad Preferences’ section.

If you are on our EU instance (i.e. if you access Blueshift via the URL https://app.eu.getblueshift.com), this feature will be automatically enabled for your account. If you are not on our EU instance, please reach out to your CSM if you would like the DMA compliance feature to be enabled for one or more of your accounts.

Coming Soon (In February)

We will be rolling out some updates to the Google Syndications screen to make it easier for you to stay compliant with EU’s Digital Markets Act.

If you do not design your email templates in house or you design them on a third party platform, you can now directly upload a zipped folder containing your email HTML and creatives to Blueshift.  On the email index screen, click on the ‘+ TEMPLATE’ button and select the  ‘File Upload’ option. You will see a modal where you can simply drag and drop the zipped folder. Blueshift will automatically:

1. Upload the images to the Blueshift CDN
2. Create an HTML email template with the contents of the HTML file
3. Replace the local image references with the corresponding CDN URLs (from #1 )

With this enhancement to our audience insights reports, you will now be able to slice and dice your customer base and top and bottom line metrics by numerical and date attributes on the customer profile. When you select to group the results of an audience insights report by a numerical or date attribute, Blueshift will give you options on how to bin the results viz

1. How many groups/ bins

     2. The minimum and maximum values for each group/ bin

Historically, Blueshift has not appended any URL tracking parameters to links sent via the In-App channel. To bring consistency with other channels, all links sent via the In-App channel will now include URL tracking parameters. This means that:

1. If the link is not a deep link but a link to an external website, you will be able to attribute the visits to the website based on the URL tracking parameters that you used in your In-App campaign.
2. Since the URL (for example http://hooli.com) will now also include URL tracking parameters (for example http://hooli.com?utm_campaign=blueshift&utm_medium=inapp), your mobile app must ignore these extra parameters for the link redirection to work as expected.

We have added  a new API endpoint that will allow you to GET the details of any customer list, including seed lists, when you specify the customer list ID.

You will now have access to your very own Blueshift AI assistant right within the Blueshift application.  The AI assistant is powered by GPT4 and has been trained on all Blueshift knowledge articles. You can ask the assistant  any questions about the platform capabilities, limitations etc. using natural language queries. The AI assistant will search through the Blueshift knowledge base and will present a summary of its findings or step by step instructions along with references to the detailed help articles.

To access the AI assistant, simply click on the ‘Inbox’ icon on the top navigation panel. It will open up your message inbox. Click on the ‘Ask a question’ button and type in your query.