Last Updated: February 2019
In 2018 we had some big goals for DSS, and we’ve been busy bringing them all to fruition! Some changes offer really cool new functionality, while others are behind the scenes, working to improve your site speed,
Duplicate Offers
Want to run A/B split testing on an offer or campaign? You can now easily duplicate your offer pages, including the Meta description, Headline, and Content. When duplicating a page, DSS will automatically populate these fields, but you will need to create a unique Title for every page.
Because this creates duplicate content on your website, DSS will also automatically set these pages to “Do Not Display on Site” and “Block search engines from indexing this page.” This will prevent search engines from penalizing your site for duplicate content and eliminate confusion for users who are trying to access your offer.
All of the other settings for this offer will remain the same.
Case Results Enhancement
You now have the option to add a preview of your individual case results on the case results overview page!
Because many attorneys face restrictions when it comes to sharing case information, we wanted to give you a chance to create simple, to-the-point case result summaries. You will see standard fields for Title and Headline, but you will also notice Award Summary, Award Values to Sort By, and Link to Page. Entering Title, Headline, and Award Summary will display only those three fields, and adding an Award Value to Sort By will let you display your case results from highest amount to lowest. To have this case result listed last, simply leave the field blank. Use the “Link to Page” option to link to another page on the site, like a testimonial or additional information on the case type, and assign this result to a Service Area or Category.
Assigning Content to a Service Area or Category
In DSS you have always had the option to assign your content to a service area or category, which helps keep things organized and pulls related content into the modules on those pages. If you don’t assign your content to a service area or category, it will be organized under “general,” which is a big missed opportunity! We wanted to emphasize the importance of assigning your content, so we made this a required step when publishing articles, blog posts, FAQs, etc. You can still categorize your content as “general,” but now you have to mean it! This will improve the user experience for all of your site visitors and keep them on your site longer—looking at information relevant to their needs.
Import Enhancement
When importing contact records into DSS, you will now receive a notification with a list of any invalid or missing email addresses. This gives you the opportunity to correct those before continuing with the import, or disregard them and upload with the knowledge that you will not be able to communicate via email with those contacts.
Enhanced CRM Email Blast and Newsletter Reporting
We’ve enhanced the CRM Email Blast and Newsletter success pages to better explain the criteria used in determining the estimated number of email addresses that your email will be sent to.
After saving a marketing email, you may have noticed that the “Success” page tells you how many email addresses your message will be sent to.
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You can then click “contact search & edit page” to access this specific contact list, defined by the criteria in your email blast or newsletter.
Send Campaign Emails to Multiple Addresses
When setting up a campaign in DSS, you’ll almost always want to associate it with a tag so you can automate the “drip” process. Sometimes, however, you want to specify which email address to send that campaign to. For example, if you have a campaign running after a user downloads your free book, you may want to create an automated email that sends to your internal staff telling them to call this person to see how it’s going. You can now send these campaign emails to more than one email address! Just use a comma or semicolon to separate email addresses.
Improved Pagination in Search Engine Results
We added additional information to all clients' robots.txt files to improve how search engines crawled our content overview pages' pagination. What does this mean for you? Great question! The bottom line is: we’re constantly improving the overall health of your website.
Improved HTML5 Video
With this enhancement, we made the video players on your sites work better, provide a better user experience, and give you more control over your video playlists. In the past, when a user clicked a thumbnail of a video, that video would automatically start playing from the beginning—even if the user clicked the thumbnail of the video they were currently watching. Now, DSS knows to retrieve its playback position so the video will open in a lightbox and auto-play from that exact point.
You will also notice in the player’s control bar two new arrow buttons on either side of the play/pause button. These display and are clickable depending on the number of assigned videos on that page and the current video’s position in the video playlist.
Improved Structured Markup Data for Video
We added better schema to all of your videos to improve the amount of data and information Google has on each video. This improves both crawling of your videos and how Google can display videos in search results! So, the big win here is that your video pages are now displaying as video thumbnails in Google, not just as YouTube video thumbnails. It’s this new and improved video schema that tells Google what to display, and where. See this sweet enhancement in action in the screenshot here:
Generate PDF Thumbnail
You can now automatically generate a thumbnail of an uploaded PDF for display on the overview page, which means that uploading things like newsletters auto-generates a nice image of said PDF!
Pagination Updates for V3 Sites
We improved our pagination solution for overview pages so they could perform better in SERPs (search engine result pages) and have a better user experience on the sites.
Change CRM Contact Search Filter
We made changes to the CRM Email Blast and Newsletter success pages to better explain the criteria used in determining the estimated number of email addresses that will be sent to. For example, your success page may have previously said:
“The Email Blast was saved. We strongly encourage you to test the Email Blast before sending it to 19 contacts.” But if you clicked on the link to the CRM contact search page, it would show 23 contacts. This was happening with contacts that had the same email address.
In addition, the link on the success page that points to the CRM Contact search page has been improved. Now, the recipient criteria (any assigned and/or excluded tags that the user defined on the item) is automatically applied, the filter accordion is opened, and the filtered results are shown with a helpful alert message above them.
Preventing Invalid Email Formats
We added additional validation when uploading contacts to the CRM to avoid invalid email formats. If an email isn’t formatted properly upon uploading—like example@foster or [email protected]—you will receive a notification with a list of those invalid formats, letting you know you can either correct them, or the email field will be left blank.
Google Maps Locations Uncapped
Previously the Google Maps Store Locator was limiting the number of locations displayed in the sidebar. This fix was to update the location finder to allow for up to 100 locations.
Bug Fixes
Uncapped Store Locations in Map Feature
Previously, clients with the map feature on their “locations” page were seeing the number of listed offices capped at 10, so websites were not displaying more than 10 offices. This cap has been removed and all offices are now visible.
ReCAPTCHA Fix for Unsupported Browsers
There are a handful of browsers that do not support the latest version of Google’s reCAPTCHA tool. We’ve reverted back to the slider reCAPTCHA option for those browsers, but for all supported browsers, we are still using the latest and greatest!
Lead Classification Fix
The lead classification tool is an awesome feature in DSS that we strongly encourage everyone to use, so when several of you provided feedback on a frustrating little hiccup, we jumped into action!
When updating classified leads on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd (etc.) page, hitting “save” jumped back to the 1st page. This made the feature hard to use and even made some of you give up on using it entirely. We understand! That’s why we not only made the obvious fix, but we enhanced the functionality as well. The results table no longer resets when closing the lightbox; we made a major overhaul to the user experience of the checkbox logic and action button handling.
Fixed Bug With Javascript Causing 404 Errors
During an improvement to our javascript handling, a related link was being scanned on some clients’ sites by Google and reported non-existent pages as errors. We updated our robots.txt files for all websites to prevent Google's crawlers from crawling and reporting an error in Google Search console.
Email Save Fix & Attachments for Email Campaigns
A few of our users were having frustrations with emails not fully saving when they were editing in DSS. Some clients would edit an email, click save and then click send before the email they had just edited had fully saved. We improved the way our email system works to have DSS double check that email content changes a user made are fully saved before sending email to their list. Some clients were also experiencing issues with attachments in email campaigns failing to send. That issue has been fixed.
Campaign Date Filter Improvement
Previously, when you selected a date range in the email campaign reporting section, it reported on the total numbers for all campaigns created during that date range. DSS will now report on all metrics for all campaigns during that time frame to better align what the report was trying to accomplish previously.
Send Campaign Emails to Multiple Addresses
Typically this field would be left blank as you want the email to go to the contact, but when using it for fulfillment, a client pointed out that they couldn’t add multiple people for the email. Prior to this update, only one person’s email could be added in the send field for a campaign email, now you can add a number of email addresses!
New Global HTML Classes
Some browser fixes we had implemented were only applying to a specific version of Microsoft Edge. We made the necessary updates in order to better target Internet Explorer browsers that were experiencing the issues.
Private Mode on iPads Using Private Mode in Safari
A bug was discovered that existed only for iPads, and only when viewing sites in private mode in Safari. We capture users’ site interactions and movements in local browser storage in order to report them back for DSS lead information. In this unique setup (private instance of safari on iPad), there was an error. It has been corrected!
ReCAPTCHA Fallback for Unsupported Browsers/Devices
For a very small percentage of devices, reCAPTCHA was not working as expected. It’s now fixed!
