This article is updated regularly with the latest features and changes to the platform. Note that updates are normally rolled out within a few days of the notification date listed.

Latest Features and Updates

Grow Release Notes (Jul 2024)

Introducing the New Marigold Help Center

AVAILABLE TO ALL USERS

Get the most out of Grow capabilities using our new Grow Help Center with a refreshed look and feel, redesigned layout and navigation. We hope you will love the new site!

You can navigate to all our Marigold product Help Centers by clicking the respective tile on the main Help Center landing page.

Highlights of the new Grow Help Center
A one stop shop for all guides, documents and videos:

• Tiles for quick access to frequently used content and content for specific audiences
• Left hand navigation that allows easy browsing
• Indexing now provided to easily scan, click and drop on the page you want
• New Global Search for quick problem solving

Help from Inside the Grow Application
From inside the Grow application, when you hit the ? you will be directed to the correct article in the help center, based on where in the application you are at the time. This is a different user experience to the old help center as the help content will open in a new tab, giving access to the content you need in an easier to read format and in a single screen or with less scrolling. You can easily flip between the application and the help content, move the help onto a second screen, or arrange as tiles on a single screen for simultaneous viewing.

Temporarily Keeping the Old Site Live
You will see that we have links back to the old site for those who need a bit of time to feel comfortable with the changes. However, again, if you are visiting the old site for Grow, or have it bookmarked, you will see a message and a link to the new site.

We will keep the old site live for a few weeks, during that time we'll announce a date when it is to be taken down, prompting an update to your bookmarks.
Please note: dependent on your local browser settings, you may need to clear the cache for the page to render correctly.

See our Quick video highlights for a quick explainer of the new Marigold Help Center.

Email Notifications have a new home (Jul 2024)

Previously set on the Customize screen, Email Notifications can now be managed from the Settings screen in your experiences.

Deprecation of Sharing tab (Jul 2024)

We have removed the sharing tab from our experience build area for our newer experience types. While it served a specific purpose for a small group of users, we found that the majority of our customers weren't utilizing it as intended. By removing it, we hope to reduce any confusion and streamline your experience.

Inline Answer Display (Jun 2024)

Say goodbye to annoying popups! We've revamped how quiz answer responses are shown. Now, after selecting their answers, customers will see the responses configured directly below each question, streamlining the process and reducing the number of clicks needed to complete a quiz.

Introducing Rewards/Results Carousels (Jun 2024)

We're excited to introduce a fantastic new feature for nextgen product match quizzes and rewards! Now, you can display your rewards/results in a sleek carousel format instead of the traditional stack or grid layouts. This is perfect for showing multiple results, as users can simply swipe left or right to view them all—especially handy on mobile devices. The carousel option is enabled by default for all newly created experiences, and you can easily find it in the design tab of the quiz results and my rewards modules for existing ones. Just make sure your quiz returns more than one result to enjoy this new feature.

Clone Themes to Sub Accounts (May 2024)

Introducing theme sharing for parents of nested accounts. Parent accounts can now create themes centrally and clone to a different account. To take advantage of this new feature, navigate to the themes list and click on the clone icon.

Text Formatting Options (Apr 2024)

We have extended our text formatting options to allow better flexibility with your designs. You can now change the font color, add a highlight color, use strikethrough, add bulleted and numbered lists, and more! Great for those occasions when you need a lighter font color to make text stand out against a darker background. Select a nextgen experience to try it out.

Pexels Integration (Feb 2024)

No images? No problem! Our new partnership with Pexels gives you access to over 3 million royalty free stock photos. These are free to use in your Grow experiences with no need to source images outside of the Grow product and upload them to the experience library.

To take advantage of this new feature, open our image uploader and you'll see a new tab named Pexels. Here you can search for images e.g. cupcakes and you'll see relevant images that you can then select to use in your experience.

Dynamic Preview (Jan 2024)

We are excited to inform you that the preview accessed by clicking the eye icon on the experience edit screen has now become Dynamic for NextGen experiences. 

What this means is that you do not need to apply or save any changes that you make on the editor to see them reflected in the preview. 

Whether you add a new module, rows, or you type a headline or description, add an image, change the styling, or reorder things on the editor, all of these changes will reflect on the preview.

We hope this will make editing and designing great looking experiences easier and quicker. 

Now that the preview is dynamic, we will soon be bringing the preview on the same screen as the page and module editor, so you do not even have to flick making it really seamless to see the changes as you make them. 

NextGen Slide Navigation and Progress Indicator Options (Dec 2023)

As you know NextGen experiences come with slide mode options, in addition to the standard page mode. The slide mode works really well, keeping it simpler, friendly and informing the users of their progress as they go through an experience. It is the default mode for most of our NextGen apps available in the Experience Library and is particularly very well suited to embedded experiences or when they are viewed on mobile.

The slide mode automatically provides arrows/chevrons to navigate between slides (unless auto transition is enabled), and the progress is indicated through the horizontal bars on the top, as seen in the screenshot below.

We have now introduced different options for navigation controls and progress indicators for NextGen slide mode.

For navigation, you can choose between arrows, next/prev buttons or next/prev links. And for progress indicators, you can set them to None, horizontal bars, or dots.

You can simply select and apply the required options on the Design tab just below where you select the slide or page mode.

We hope this enhancement provides you with more out of the box options to design your NextGen experiences when using slide mode.  

Cloudflare Turnstile (Nov 2023)

We have introduced Cloudflare Turnstile as a Captcha alternative. Turnstile delivers a simpler and relatively non-intrusive experience to entrants which stops abuse and confirms participants are real without any data privacy concerns. 

How to Configure

Just like captcha, Clouflare Turnstile is now available within the settings area of any experience under the entry fraud prevention section:

Simply select the 'Always apply Cloudflare Turnstile' option and your experience will have the Cloudflare Turnstile protection turned on for all entrants. 

Participants Experience

Participants to the experience will see the Couldflare Turnstile when they submit their entry. They may need to select a checkbox to confirm they are human as opposed to solving a captcha challenge, resulting in a better user experience and higher conversion while still offering protection against bots and malicious actors.

Value exchange is an important element of connecting with the users but could also act as a magnet for fraudsters. This additional feature adds to our various fraud prevention measures, which are useful particularly when tangible and valuable rewards are granted as part of the value exchange.

If you would like further information on our fraud prevention measures and best practices, please get in touch with your account representative. 

Spin The Wheel (Sep 2023)

We are happy to announce the launch of the most popular game format experience, Spin The Wheel, as an out of the box App. 

This comes with all the capability and flexibility provided by the Grow platform and works with the existing rewards functionality and controls.

How It Works

The Spin The Wheel is a new module that can be added to the form in the last row which also contains the submit button. It works as follows:

• The user submits the form
• The wheel starts spinning and stops on the reward returned as per the reward rules, or no reward / no win
• The confirmation page, including the My Rewards module, is revealed after a short configurable pause

The following sections describe how to configure the wheel and its segments, and link up the wheel segments with the rewards or no reward

Creating the Spin The Wheel Experience

The easiest and quickest way to build the Spin The Wheel experience is through the default Spin The Wheel app. You can find it in the experience library in either of the Games or NextGen categories:

Click on create and go through the wizard to create the Spin The Wheel experience. 

You can then go ahead and edit the experience

The default app has a landing and entry page with the form and the wheel, and the confirmation page.

The Spin The Wheel module is a new form module, already added into the form in the default app. 

The layout of the default app works best but you can move and position the Spin The Wheel module as needed as long as it remains in the last row of the form (because the wheel spins when the user submits the form).

Wheel Settings

The Wheel module can be configured and designed using the following settings:

Pin Settings

Pin Color: choose from a palette

Pin Position: Left, center or right of the wheel

Animation Settings

Spin Time in seconds

Spin Speed: Slow, medium or fast

Pause Time: The pause between the wheel stopping and confirmation being displayed

Wheel Segments

You can remove the segments or create more segments by cloning and editing existing segments. Each wheel segment can have either a text label, an icon or both.

You can select the background color of each segment, apply text formatting to the label, and link up the segment to one of the rewards setup within the experience.

The reward returned to the user will be based on the rules and setup of the rewards, and the wheel will stop on the matching segment.

• If there are multiple rewards returned, the wheel will stop at a segment which is mapped to any one of the returned rewards
• If there are multiple segments mapped to the same reward, the wheel will stop at any of the matching segments
• If there are multiple segments mapped to ‘no reward’, the wheel will stop at any of those segments if no reward is returned

Note: The default app has eight segments listing various rewards but only one reward is defined. The other segments are mapped to no reward. This is to provide a template and you can create and map rewards as required.

Test and Launch

Once you have configured the wheel and the experience, you can test it in preview. Please note that you will need to publish the experience to activate the rewards. Failure to do so will always return no reward during testing.

When you are happy with the experience, it can be deployed in the usual manner using any of the four publishing modes available for NextGen experiences.

We hope that you like this wonderful new addition to the experience library and find it useful. 

If you have any questions or need further information, please feel free to get in touch with your Customer Success Manager or Account Representative.  

NextGen Quizzes (July 2023)

We are excited to launch NextGen Score and Category Quizzes with brand new apps and functionality. 

NextGen Score Quizzes use the same mechanic as Macro score quizzes but benefitting from the adaptive capabilities and some of the advanced features, publishing modes, and rich editing options.

NextGen Category Quizzes have been built with a brand new mechanic which is much more intuitive and aligned with real life decision making, for example as product picker or recommenders.

The following sections describe each of these wonderful new additions and how you can make the most of these:

NextGen Category Quizzes (Recommenders / Product Pickers)

NextGen Category quizzes (product picker, recommender, etc) are designed with a new much improved mechanic which is based on how people make choices in the real world whether they are shopping for something or making day to day decisions. This makes them very intuitive and aligned with the related use cases and are very easy to set up and build. 

You will find a new NextGen Product Match Quiz in the Experience library which can be used to quickly create a NextGen score quiz as the starting point.

The Mechanic

The mechanic builds on natural behaviour and centers around the attributes of results or outcomes, for example products. The quiz questions are used to elicit the user’s preferences or requirements for those attributes, similar to filters. For example, what colour or type they prefer, what is their budget range, what category they need, etc. The options for each question are matched with the outcomes, for example let’s say the quiz is to recommend a model of car. The questions could be around the fuel type, budget range, colour, body type, etc and then the matching car or cars are recommended to the user.

Quiz Questions

By going into the build section of the experience, you will find two new modules in the Form section of the experience as follows:

• Category Single Answer Question: These work like radio choice and allow the user to choose one response from a list of options. This can be made mandatory (user must provide a response to progress) or optional.
• Category Multiple Answer Question: These work like checkboxes and allow the user to choose one or multiple responses from a list of options. 

Quiz Results/Outcomes

Quiz results are created within the Quiz Results module on the confirmation page. You can create and design the copy and content of the outcomes and match them to the options for each question. The system will determine the matching outcomes which will be displayed to them based on their score on the confirmation page using the Quiz Results module.

You can set a maximum number of matching results (1 or more) to the user or display all matching results. When there are more matching outcomes than the maximum, the outcomes will be picked based on their order in the Quiz results setup.   

Use Cases

Category quizzes are used where there are no right or wrong answers but it is more about finding out the user’s preferences and recommending or providing results matching those preferences. Therefore, the use cases for category quizzes are recommenders, product pickers or fun quizzes like Personality type, etc. They can be used for a variety of use cases and you can use the outcomes to provide relevant rewards or calls-to-action, e.g. offering a discount on matching results, including a further call to action to explore or buy the matching results. You can also include calls to action when there are no matching results, for example “Oops there does not seem to be a great match. Why don;t you explore our full catalogue” or encourage them to try again as appropriate.

NextGen Score Quizzes

NextGen Score quizzes fundamentally work in the same manner as macro score quizzes. You will find a new NextGen Challenge Quiz in the Experience library which can be used to quickly create a NextGen score quiz as the starting point.

Quiz Questions

By going into the build section of the experience, you will find three new modules in the Form section of the experience as follows:

• Single Answer Question: These work like radio choice and allow the user to choose one response from a list of options. This can be made mandatory (user must provide a response to progress) or optional.
• Multiple Answer Question: These work like checkboxes and allow the user to choose one or multiple responses from a list of options. 
• Text Answer Question: These require the user to provide a text answer 

You can assign scores to each response and the total score for the user is calculated based on their responses.

Quiz Results/Outcomes

Quiz results are created within the Quiz Results module on the confirmation page. You can create and design the copy and content of the outcomes and assign score ranges to them. The user’s quiz result will be displayed to them based on their score on the confirmation page using the Quiz Results module. 

In addition to the quiz results, you can also provide Rewards to the users based on their quiz scores by using the ‘Award based on Quiz Score’ toggle within reward settings and adding My Rewards module on the confirmation page.

Use Cases

Score quizzes are used where there are right or wrong answers and scores based on them, i.e. it is evaluating the knowledge or skill of a user. However, it does not always need to be a challenge and is more fun when used in the context of a brand or product. For example, asking the user questions about movies, stars or books. Or asking the user questions related to your brand or products. You can also encourage the users to try again and improve their scores making this a fun and challenging activity.

Scratch Card (May 2023)

We are excited to bring this latest enhancement to rewards for NextGen experiences. Now, you can bring some curiosity and excitement to the rewards (or no rewards) granted to a participating user by enabling the Scratch Card overlay within the My Rewards module. 

Just to recap, the My Rewards module can be added to the confirmation page and has the following key settings:

• Content: This allow you to create an introduction to the rewards, for example: 'Thanks for participating, please see your results below', etc. You can use some or all of the settings from among tagline, headline, description, CTA, Image, etc.
• Reward(s) Granted / No Reward Granted: This allows you to define a message when one or more rewards are granted (e.g. Great! You've won something), or when no reward is granted (e.g. Oops! Better luck next time)
• Rewards: Finally, the actual reward(s) granted are displayed as per the configured rewards

With this latest addition, there is an optional setting to Enable Scratch Card Overlay. If enabled, the Reward(s) Granted / No Reward Granted is not immediately revealed to the user. Instead, the user will see a scratch card which will reveal whether the user has won rewards or not. If the user has won one or more rewards, the actual reward flows in a few seconds later.

You can configure the overlay image, reward and no reward reveal images, an optional cursor image and the delay between the card being scratched and the actual rewards being displayed.

An example of how you could use this is as follows:

• Rewards: Define and configure your Rewards as usual
• My Rewards: Add the My Rewards module on the confirmation page.
  • Content: Thanks for participating. Scratch below to find out whether you've won a prize
  • Enable Scratch Card Overlay. Upload appropriate image for the overlay, reward granted (e.g. a gift box), no reward (e.g. an Oops image)
  • Reward Granted copy: E.g., Here's your exciting reward
  • No Reward Granted copy: E.g., Better luck next time / Try again (if multiple entries are allowed). You could also include, for example, a call-to-action to other offers or products.

We hope you find this enhancement useful and it increases the engagement, brand affinity and participation in your NextGen experiences by bringing an element of fun to the participating users.

If you have any questions or need further information, please feel free to get in touch with your Customer Success Manager or Account Representative.  

Experiences Privacy Management (May 2023)

We have released Experiences Privacy Management solution. This is now available for macro experiences and will be available for nextgen experiences shortly.

Experiences Privacy Management solution provides 3 options during publishing of any experience as follows:

Option 1 - None

Experiences platform will not implement any privacy management and all the functionality dependent on cookies will work without any restriction

Option 2 - Experiences privacy management center

Experiences platform will implement a preference center which will be displayed to the users to obtain their preference. The experience/campaign will disable any features for which consent is not granted. Recommended for microsite deployments where there is no custom solution

Option 3 - Custom privacy management using the api

Experiences platform will accept user’s privacy management settings from the parent page or a 3rd party privacy management solution using a simple api. The experience/campaign will disable any features for which consent is not granted. Recommended for Embedded experiences or where a 3rd party/bespoke solution is used for privacy management.

The selected option for each publishing destination will will be visible and can be changed at any time by clicking on the cookie icon or by going into publish settings:

Cookies Used by Experiences

The experiences platform will automatically disable the relevant cookies and their dependent features depending on the user’s consent for various categories of cookies. For example, the social sharing module will be disabled if the user does not provide consent for marketing cookies. 

For information regarding cookies used by the experiences platform and their purpose, please refer here

API for custom privacy management

The privacy management API can be called from the parent web page or a 3rd party cookie solution to pass on the customer consents, using the following parameters for the four categories of cookies:

• necessary: always true;
• functional: true/false;
• analytics: true/false;
• marketing: true/false;

The experiences platform will automatically disable the relevant cookies and their dependent features depending on the user’s consent passed through the above parameters for various categories of cookies.

If you have any questions or would like assistance in using Experiences Privacy Management, please feel free to get in touch with your Customer Success Manager or Account Representative.  

Branching logic extended to all modules (April 2023)

Previously, branching logic was limited to form fields only. Now, branching logic is supported across all types of modules. Please note that this change applies to NextGen experiences only.

Ability to Hide Coupon Code from Confirmation Page (February 2022)

Now, when you setup a Reward, there is another toggle which allows you to show or hide the coupon code within the My Rewards module on the confirmation page. The default setting will be set to off but you can turn it on if you wish to display the reward coupon code on confirmation page.

For valuable rewards, the recommended practice is to send the coupon code in email, as opposed to showing it on the confirmation page which makes it easier to obtain for any bots or malicious users. Please refer to the Rewards Best Practices when using Instant Win value based rewards.

This feature now allows you to continue to use the My Rewards module on the confirmation page to inform users of the rewards they have won, without the coupon code.

We have also released two further enhancements to Instant Win Rewards as follows:

1. Improved format and support for multiple rewards in reward notification email
2. Support for hourly metering of rewards, providing improved distribution control

Ability to Locate User Entries across campaigns and child accounts (January 2023)

We have released an enhancement to the Data Protection Area (accessed through the main settings menu for authorised users). This enhancement now allows you to find the details of any particular user's entries across multiple campaigns across the logged in account or its child accounts. This is often required for GDPR purposes under disclosure of held data rule. This enhancement now removes the dependence on Cheetah to provide you with this information requested by your users, and you can now obtain this information yourselves.

To obtain this information, search for a user's email address as usual. If there are multiple entries made by the user in one or more campaigns, you can click on Show details to display the details of campaigns where the user entered, and whether their entry won a reward or not.

Web Overlay (Popup) Publishing for NextGen Experiences (November 2022)

We added the Microsite publishing mode to NextGen experiences in September and have now added a web overlay publishing option to NextGen Experiences in addition to the Web Embed, Microsite and Social Story publishing. This will now allow you to publish your NextGen experiences as a popup which could be launched based on calls-to-action like banners, buttons or links, or through any web event like time spent on page, exit intent, interest in or interaction with a particular section or content etc.

To publish a NextGen experience as a popup overlay, select the Web Overlay option as publishing type

In the next step, you will be presented with a list of web channels configured in your account. Select the appropriate channel. And that's it, review the selection and click on Publish to publish your NextGen experiences as a web overlay on the selected channel.

Please note that unlike standard experiences, you are not required to choose the format as the NextGen experiences would adapt to the size and settings of the available viewport whether it is full screen or windowed, or whether it is desktop, mobile or tablet.

Once you have published, you will need to incorporate the popup experience into the particular web channel. Select the help and instructions icon (?) next to the publishing destination.

You will be presented with the code examples and instructions on how to incorporate it into your website or mobile app. This also contains instructions on how to change the settings for the overlay like the transparency, size, closing method, and other settings to help you achieve the desired result.

We hope you find this new publishing mode useful. If you have any questions or would like assistance in using this exciting new mode of publishing, please feel free to get in touch with your Customer Success Manager or Account Representative.  

Microsite Publishing for NextGen Experiences (September 2022)

We have now added a microsite publishing option to NextGen Experiences in addition to the Web Embed and Social Story publishing. This will now allow you to publish your NextGen experiences on a separate microsite, as you could for macro or standard experiences.

To publish a NextGen experience as a microsite, select the Microsite option as publishing type

In the next step, you will be presented with a list of web channels configured in your account. Select the appropriate channel. And that's it, review the selection and click on Publish to publish your NextGen experiences as a microsite on the selected channel.

Please note that unlike standard experiences, you are not required to choose the format as the NextGen experiences.

Currently, you can publish your NextGen experiences on web channels but not on pinned containers which is coming soon.

Rewards Export for NextGen Experiences (September 2022)

Last month, we launched Instant Win rewards for NextGen Experiences (see below). This month we have also added the ability to export rewards granted in any live NextGen experience. This will allow you to generate a time limited password protected csv export of rewards in a similar way as it is available for entries export.

To generate the rewards export, select Entries from the main left hand menu in any experience, then scroll down beyond the export entries section where you will find the rewards export section.

Click on 'Export All' to generate and download the rewards data in a csv file. As for other exports, the file will be password protected and the password will be displayed for a short while on the console, as in this sample screen below.

Instant Win Rewards for NextGen Experiences (August 2022)

Rewards-based experiences are very popular with our customers and their customers alike. The opportunity to reward participation in real-time is appealing and allows you to offer an immediate incentive as a value exchange. Research proves that offering a value exchange in the form of an incentive such as a prize, discount coupon or voucher, increases the overall engagement rate and brand affinity. 

This month, we have rolled out Instant Win reward capabilities to NextGen Experiences which offer several benefits and capabilities powered by the latest technology.

The Instant Win rewards for NextGen Experiences provide the same features and options as for macro experiences with a better more adaptive rewards module which can be added to the confirmation page.

To add instant win rewards, simply select Rewards from the left side menu and then select 'Add a Reward' (Note: Rewards can be set up any time but can only be published when the experience is live)

If you would like to understand more, please visit: 

• How to: Manage rewards in an Experience
• Understanding: Reward distribution
• Frequently Asked Questions: Rewards

Branching Logic for Checkboxes (August 2022)

Last year, we introduced Branching Logic for NextGen Experiences which, along with Tokens, is a very powerful tool to create customized and personalized experiences for the users. Branching logic could already be used to show or hide subsequent questions and fields based on a user’s earlier responses to radio and dropdown questions.

We have now extended the Branching Logic functionality to checkboxes which means you can show or hide fields based on particular selections in checkbox questions, in addition to drop downs and single selection radio questions. 

NextGen Adaptive Mode (July 2022)

We have upgraded the Responsive Web Embed mode for Embeddable NextGen experiences with a much improved Adaptive Web Embed mode. This mode adapts to any viewport size by making use of the available horizontal space and scaling its vertical size depending on the amount of content currently being displayed. This allows you to design and build the experience as you require without worrying about the display, which adapts beautifully and automatically rendering the best experience for the users.

Existing NextGen experiences published in Responsive Web Embed mode continue to function as-is while any new NextGen experiences will benefit from this new adaptive mode which is now available for all NextGen experiences.

To publish a NextGen experience in Adaptive mode, simply select the Adaptive mode while publishing your NextGen experience in a Web Embed mode.

This is another major enhancement to our NextGen experiences to bring you exciting features powered by the latest tech to help you create experiences that look good and work well for your users. If you would like to learn a bit more about creating NextGen experiences, please visit this article.

Tokens (June 2022)

We are pleased to announce this exciting release of Tokens (@). Tokens allow you to personalize an Experience for your users based on their responses. This useful addition to our NextGen Experiences will allow you to tokenize any user response field and use that token in any text label or description.

A user's responses to form questions are automatically tokenized and can be included to personalise any text labels, headline, byline etc for a subsequent field or module by using the @symbol. Therefore, you can make the experience feel more engaging and personal for your users. 

Tokens can be used for any text, but typically they would be used in the headline and labels. For example, if you ask the user's name as a question, you could use that in subsequent questions and messages, e.g. "Ok <Jane>, so what is your address or what is your favourite snack?", or for example "Congratulations <Jane>, you have won a reward".

Not only text responses, you could also use the responses to choice questions like dropdowns or radio selection. For example, if you ask the user to select their favourite holiday type from say, Beach, City or Ski, you could subsequently use their response, e.g. "Hey, so which <Beach> destination is your favourite?".

Tokens, are even more powerful when used with branching logic and can result in truly personal and customised engaging experience for your users.

To use tokens in your NextGen experience, simply type @ in any of the text for any module and you will be presented with a list of possible options from user's response fields occurring earlier in the experience. 

Select the appropriate field and add the token.

When a user goes through the experience, the token will be dynamically replaced with the response provided in the token source field.

We are continuing to invest in our NextGen experiences to bring you more and more powerful and exciting features powered by the latest tech to help you create engaging and beautiful experiences for your users. If you would like to learn a bit more about creating NextGen experiences, please visit this article.

Deprecated - Facebook Confirmation Share Prompt (June 2022)

Previously, you had the following four share options for standard experiences available through the Sharing menu:

• Facebook share prompt
• Twitter share prompt
• Pinterest share prompt
• Facebook confirmation share prompt

The sharing module can be added to any pages/sections of an experience and provides the user with share buttons or icons for the options selected among the first three. For example, if you configured Facebook and Twitter share prompts, then facebook and twitter icons or buttons will be included and the user could click on these options to share the experience on their social media accounts.

However, the last option, Facebook confirmation share prompt, would automatically launch the sharing on submission of an entry without any notification or additional action by the user. Due to changes at facebook, this would now launch in a new tab automatically switching from the experience to this new tab instead of displaying the confirmation page. This resulted in a poor experience for the user so we have deprecated this option.

Although there are no live experiences with this option enabled, it has been designed in a way that any existing experiences with this option would continue to work as before, e.g. if you cloned an experience with this setting enabled to create a new one. However, this option would now not be available on any new experiences. You can continue to include the other sharing options for facebook, twitter and pinterest providing users with 1-click sharing of the experience to increase participation and brand awareness.  

NextGen Experience Sharing (June 2022)

We have now introduced experience sharing for the NextGen experiences. These work in the same manner as for standard experiences and allow you to configure and provide experience sharing options to the users of the experience. To enable sharing for any NextGen experience, simply click on Sharing from the left hand nav, then enable and configure the required sharing options.

Once this is done, you can add the sharing module to any pages and sections of your experience by simply dragging the sharing module from the content section in  the page designer.

You can then click on the sharing module added to the page to edit the design, optionally add a tagline, headline and/or byline, and choose from the icon and button options for the social media channels. Click on the preview button to see how it looks and works, make any adjustments and save.

Users logged into the respective social channel on the browser will directly go to sharing the experience in a new tab when they click on the social media icons/buttons, or if they are not logged in they will see the login screen and then proceed to sharing. 

Experience sharing is a useful means to increase user engagement and increase participation with your experience so we are glad to have added this additional capability to the NextGen Experiences. 

Countdown and Curtain pages for NextGen Experiences (May 2022)

Earlier this year we introduced multi-page support for NextGen experiences and this month we have introduced support for Countdown and Curtain pages. To add a countdown page, curtain page, or both to your NextGen experience, simply click on Add New Page in the build section. You will be presented with the pages and you can simply click on them to add them.

Click on the pages to configure what to display in them, including a timer and additional content. The countdown page can be configured to display until a set date/time and the curtain page can be configured to display after a certain date/time by clicking on the calendar icons next to these pages in the console.    

There's more coming soon for our next generation of experiences so please stay tuned for more. If you would like to learn a bit more about creating NextGen experiences, please visit this article.

Enhanced Hourly and Daily Entry Constraints (May 2022)

Earlier this year, we added the hourly entry constraint to allow one entry per hour, in addition to one entry only, one entry per day, or unlimited entries per user. You can now define the maximum number of times an individual user can enter an experience in an hour or in a day. This is useful to achieve the required level of entries per user for repeat entry experiences such as quizzes, competitions and instant wins where users can try again later. 

When you create an experience, you will have the option to select among the four options as now and if you select hourly or daily limit option, it will be defaulted to one entry per user per hour/day as selected. 

You can then go into the Settings area of the experience, which now has an additional entry box to specify the limit applicable to the hourly or daily option. You can even increase or decrease the limit while the experience is live and it will take effect immediately. 

Enhanced COPPA controls  (March 2022)

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is a law in the US to restrict the collection and processing of personal information from children under the age of 13 without parental consent. If you're publishing an experience that might be of interest to children in this age bracket, you can use our COPPA controls to detect and dissuade those under 13 from entering. 

Simply add a "Date of Birth" field to your experience and enable our "COPPA compliance" setting. When enabled, we will ask the entrant for their date of birth and, if they are under 13, we will notify them that they are not permitted to enter. We will also store information in their browser to block attempts to retry with an alternative date of birth. 

For customers using Next Gen experiences, we now require cookies to be enabled whenever you use COPPA controls. This reduces viable options to retry with an older date of birth after detecting someone under the age of 13.

Multi-Page Support for Next Gen!  (January 2022)

We're continuing our investment in the next generation of Cheetah Experiences which is based on our Micro-Experience (MX) technology. To help customers build richer experiences with additional content, we're introducing multi-page support so you can build out experiences with any number of pages: landing pages, entry pages, rules pages and so on. Best of all, this is supported whether you're building an experience that is displayed as long-form pages, or as horizontal or vertical slides. Each page can take advantage of our extensive library of display modules and can have a very simple layout or one that includes rows and columns in various combinations.

Adding and editing pages is really simple. Just click "Add New Page" to add a new one or click on an existing page to edit it. You can also change its name and display order using the inline controls:

When you edit the page in Screen Designer, you can easily switch between pages using the left-hand menu:

And, finally, your pages appear at the top of your experience, according to the design theme in use:

There's lots more planned for our next generation of experiences so please stay tuned for more. If you would like to learn a bit more about creating MX-based experiences, please visit this article.

Understanding Integration Mappings (January 2022)

Cheetah Experiences helps marketers acquire new users and enrich the profiles of existing users collecting marketing permissions, contact details, personal preferences and purchase intentions as users interact with a variety of experiences. Most customers have enabled real-time integrations to send this information over to Cheetah's EDP, or whichever customer data platform they are using, so that they can respond to the user and determine the next best action, in real-time. 

To help you understand the data that is flowing to your customer data platform, you can now see active integrations in your account and the data that will be sent over. Head over to the "Settings" menu at the top-right of the console and then to "Integrations". Here, you'll see active integrations and you can click on them to review field mappings:

The diagram shows the form fields and entry details that will be sent to your customer database platform and where they will stored in that system. We've broken it down into:

• Form Data
  These are custom fields you can add to your form. The values shown are "Remote Field Names" that should be configured in the "Advanced" tab of relevant fields in order for the data to flow into your customer data platform.
• Other Data
  These are system values that are tracked by Cheetah Experiences automatically. Some of them are sourced from form fields (like name and email) but you don't need to manually set the "Remote Field Name" for these fields... Cheetah Experiences manages this for you. Some items listed in this section may also be internal values that are not generated from form fields, like the time of entry or the type of experience entered.

New Hourly Entry Constraints (January 2022)

In addition to one entry only and one entry per day, you can now limit how often a user can enter an experience to one entry per hour. This is especially useful for repeat entry experiences such as quizzes, competitions and instant wins where users can try again later but you need a sensible, easy to understand rate limit. You'll find this and other entry constraints in the Settings tab for next generation experiences and in the Entry tab for classic experiences.

Introducing Form Carousels & Common Footers (January 2022)

In 2021, we introduced the next generation of Cheetah Experiences based on our Micro-Experience (MX) technology. We introduced support for multi-column layouts, branching forms, horizontal and vertical slide modes, rich text editing and an improved screen designer.

Continuing our investment in this area, we're introducing a couple of brand-new features:

Form Carousels

When you're building an experience that is displayed as a simple page, you can now choose between having the form appear as one long form or as a carousel. In long-form mode, the form is displayed according to its row and column layout. In carousel mode, the each row within the form section becomes a carousel slide with next and previous buttons to navigate. This helps you "chunk" the form into easy-to-digest slides which can help avoid overwhelming a user on initial inspection. 

To use carousel mode:

• Ensure your experience is set to "Page" mode
• Edit the page containing your form and click on the settings icon for the form section
• Set the display type to "Carousel":

Common Footer

You can now add a common footer that appears on all pages of a next-generation experience. The footer supports popular display modules and is useful for legal disclaimers, links and for brand elements. To add a common footer, visit the "Design" tab within a next generation experience and click on the "Footer" option:

If you would like to learn a bit more about creating MX-based experiences, please visit this article.

Next Best Experience (October 2021)

Introducing jointly with Cheetah Personalization

Next Best Experience solution allows you to take advantage of unique capabilities across Cheetah Real-Time Personalization and Cheetah Experiences solutions and provide them with new opportunities for real-time onsite acquisition, enrichment, and engagement. 

Our Real-Time Personalization engine dynamically selects the Next Best Experience and displays it to the user at the right moment to help achieve the best possible conversion rate. The experience is selected based on a number of important criteria. Is the user known? Is it an unknown visitor or is it a known visitor that just hasn’t been identified at that time? User identity is tracked seamlessly from unknown to known, between all solutions in the Customer Engagement Suite.

Your acquisition or profiling experience can then be shown as a pop up experience anywhere on the site based on the criteria you define. 

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, please read more about it in this article and speak to your Customer Success Manager.

Rich text editing for answer options (October 28, 2021)

Some time back, we have introduced an inline text editing tool allowing you to style text easily with B, I, U, <hyperlink> and carriage returns without any need to define it through HTML. We have now extended this setting to all text fields and answer options. Simply click or highlight the text you want to edit and the toolbar will appear. 

Rows with multi-column structure in MX (October 28, 2021)

The NextGen Experience workspace was initially designed to support very light-weight experiences with simple structure. With our ongoing investment to introduce the next generation of Cheetah Experiences, we will now support multi-column layouts and allow for multiple modules to be placed in one row/column. This means, that even in a Slide mode, you will be able to build a content rich experience with interesting layouts and design. We have introduced the following key changes:

• Support for multi-column layouts in content AND form section 
• Ability to place multiple modules in one row 
• Slides can now grow in height and have multiple modules and columns as well 
• Ability to clone rows with modules in it 
• Ability to define custom class name for each row

If you would like to learn a bit more about how to create a NextGen Experience, please visit this article.

Easy way to report on number of remaining prizes (5 October 2021)

We've made it easier for you to understand how many prizes are remaining to give away in a quick glance. When you navigate to the Rewards section of your experience, you can see a list view of all available and active prizes and with this small but mighty enhancement, you can immediately understand how many prizes are remaining from the total number of prizes or if a new file containing more coupon codes should be uploaded. 

To learn more about Instant Win Rewards, please see this article. 

Countdown Module (13 September 2021)

Countdown module is an interactive element that can be added to any page to help entrants understand how much time is remaining until a special event, start or end of a giveaway or any other point in time. Just place the module on any page in your NextGen Experience, define the time you want it to count down to and create some anticipation for your users.

Additional capabilities for Integration Designer (August & September 2021)

The power of Experiences platform lies in the ability to collect first- and zero-party data and insights into consumer behaviour and then to make this data available and actionable through real-time integrations to platforms like our very own Cheetah EDP or Cheetah Messaging or many other platforms.

In July, we have introduced an integration designer (read more about it in this article) and we continue to improve the area. All users can now see all active HTTP, EDP and Messaging integrations in their account. You can also now request to have more than one HTTP integration added to an account. Very soon, you'll be able to also manage integrations on per campaign basis. 

Introducing Always Win  (30 July 2021)

We are constantly evolving and improving our Instant Win capabilities to give you the right set of tools to reward engagement. With this release, we are introducing a new prize distribution strategy called Always Win. Always Win is a unique type of reward that will be always given to users in addition to another odds-based or time-based reward. Imagine you are giving away $5 off as an Always Win prize and then you are also giving 1 in 5 lucky winners a chance to win a grand prize of a free flight. Most entrants will get the Always win reward but some (based on the odds in this example) will be given the grand prize in addition to that. Always Win prizes cannot be combined with Consolation Rewards (it used to be called Everyone Wins). 

Read all about Instant Win in this article. 

Integration Designer (7 July 2021)

The power of Experiences platform lies in the ability to collect first- and zero-party data and insights into consumer behaviour and then to make this data available and actionable through real-time integrations to platforms like our very own Cheetah EDP.

You can now conveniently manage integrations using the Integrations screen in account settings. Read more about the Integration Designer in this article.

Branching Logic now available for all form fields (9 June 2021)

Last month, we have introduced Branching Logic in NextGen Experiences. Branching logic is used to show or hide follow up questions based on the user's response to the current question. You can use this feature to control the flow of questions in your Experience and make the overall data capture feel like a conversation. You can now show/hide any form field based on a logic driven by responses in radio choice or dropdown. Read all about it here. 

Updated granted rewards export and Export API (24 May 2021)

If you are using Rewards capabilities to grant rewards to users, you may know that you can export details of users who have won from the Export area of your Experience. In the past, the export for granted rewards didn't include all the details collected via the form, it was a simplified version of the entry export. With this enhancement, you can now get all available information about the entrant who won a reward from one export and we have also added the possibility to retrieve redemptions data via the Export API. 

To learn more about our rewards capabilities, please visit this article. 

Usability enhancements of NextGen (Micro) Experiences (24 May 2021)

We are continuously working on improving and updating the NextGen Experiences workspace, laying the foundation for the next generation of Cheetah Experiences. The goal is to convert NextGen Experiences into modern, beautiful experiences with improved UI, better design capabilities and lay a solid foundation for experiences that can dynamically react to the user's context. In this phase of the project we have introduced:

• New navigation structure
• Improved usability of the main workspace
• Simplifying schematic preview and improving usability of screen designer

Additional Capabilities for Custom Domains (24 May 2021)

Earlier in the year, we have introduced the possibility to publish experiences to Custom Domains. We are continuously improving this feature and recently, we have added: 

• Possibility to define favicon for you custom domain (please supply an asset 16x16px in png or jpeg format when requesting a custom domain)
• Possibility to add custom Javascript to the parent wrapper page (this maybe handy for additional tracking and analytics)
• You can now add attribution tracking to your experience published to Custom Domains to track source, medium and channel. Read more about it on the bottom of this article.

Branching Logic (10 May 2021)

With this exciting release, we are introducing a branching logic allowing the users to branch out to a certain flow based on their answers. This powerful addition to our data collection capabilities in NextGen Experiences will allow you to decide which fields will be shown or hidden to the users based on their responses, creating a truly customized and personalized experience for the end user, helping our customers to collect only relevant and very granular data that can be then used for further personalization efforts and value exchange.

Read all about it in this Introducing Article. 

Rewards in Reveal Experiences (22 April 2021)

Rewards-based experiences are growing in popularity between our customers and their customers alike. The opportunity to reward participation in real-time is appealing and allows you to offer an immediate incentive as a value exchange. Research proves that offering a value exchange in a form of an incentive such as a prize, discount coupon or voucher, increases the overall engagement rate. Therefore we have rolled out Instant Win reward capabilities to almost all Experiences recently and with this release, we are also adding them to Reveal Experiences such as Countdown Reveal, Scavenger Hunt or Advent Calendar.

Update to MX (22 April 2021)

We are working on simplifying settings in NextGen Experiences to lay a good foundation for Next Generation of Experiences. After carefully evaluating usage, we have decided to remove the support for publishing NextGen Experiences to ad units. You can still publish them as social stories, microsites or generate an embed code.

Recurring rewards and updated documentation (24 March 2021)

Our rewards allocation is getting smarter and more efficient every day. With this enhancement, you can decide whether the same reward can be allocated to the same user only once or repeatedly if all other criteria are met. The default for all new rewards is set to non-recurring, which means that a user can only win the same prize once.

Let's imagine you are running a quiz experience and you want users to enter daily for a chance to get 5% off discount code if they reach a specific score. You are happy for them to receive the same discount code repeatedly, so you can now set the reward to be recurring.

Or maybe you have 5 prizes that users can win based on odds that you set up and you are happy for them to win multiple prizes but don't want them to get the same prize again. You can set the reward to be non-recurring (default), which will ensure that users won't win the same prize again. 

If you would like to understand more, please visit: 

• How to: Manage rewards in an Experience
• Understanding: Reward distribution
• Frequently Asked Questions: Rewards

Updates to MX (24 March 2021)

We are working on simplifying settings in NextGen (Micro) Experiences to lay a good foundation for Next Generation of Experiences. In this first phase, we have made the following changes: 

• Removed "choose format" step from the Experience creation wizard - NextGen Experiences can now be published as social story or web embed simultaneously 
• Removed vertical text alignment support - you can left-center-right align copy but won't be able to move it up or down in the module 
• Removed inverted style support and controls
• We will soon be removing the support for publishing NextGen experiences to ad units

Rich Text Editing (17 March 2021)

We are introducing inline text editing tool and support for carriage-returns in NextGen Experiences to allow you to style text easily on the fly. We will support B, I, U, <hyperlink> and carriage returns without any need to define it through HTML. You will be able to see a small text editing sign in the field that supports rich text editing. Simply click or highlight the text you want to edit and the toolbar will appear. 

API keys now available in Account Settings (4 March 2021)

Public and Private API keys are authentication tokens that are unique to all accounts and are used to validate all API requests. Up until recently, the API key was to be requested from the Support Team but it is now available in the Account Settings area and visible to account Admins. 

Rewards in all Experiences (24 February 2021)

Instant Win Experiences are growing in popularity between our customers and their customers alike. The opportunity to reward participation in real-time is appealing and provides a great opportunity to offer an incentive as a value exchange. Up until now, customers were able to use Instant Win Rewards only in selected Experience types. With this enhancement, we have extended the availability of rewards to all our Macro Experiences. To learn more about how to add rewards to your experiences, please visit this article. Enjoy!

Custom Domains (10 February 2021)

By default, experiences published using Cheetah Experiences are available on platform URLs like https://xd.wayin.com or https://x.wayin.com. As part of our ongoing effort to enhance brand continuity and build trust with your audience, you can now publish experiences to one or more of your own branded subdomains. It’s easy to set up custom domains and, once configured, you can publish multiple experiences to each of them. We encourage you to take a few minutes to read more about this exciting update and to take advantage of it for all of your future experiences.

• To learn more about how you can publish experiences on Custom Domains, please visit this article.
• If you’d like to set up and configure one or more custom domains against your account, please reach out to the Support Team.

Recognizing Known Users (3rd February 2021) 

This enhancement allows Cheetah Experiences to recognize a user via an external identifier (such as Loyalty Member ID or Messaging ID) and work as a unique identifier in place of an email address. We will now be able to recognize users coming to an experience from a link in an email, through a unique URL from a loyalty program or it can be passed to us from a parent page.

 

In the future, this foundation work will enable us to hide/show relevant fields based on the known information as well as to utilize segmentation information for further personalization of an Experience. For more information on how to use Customer ID, please visit this article.

 

Introducing Data Protection Center (14th January 2021) 

Accessibility (November 2020)