Day CQ 5.3 Aims to Brighten the Days of Techies and Marketers Alike

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Feb 1, 2010

Continuing to build up on the bright developments that we saw in CQ 5.1 and 5.2, Day Software (news, site) released the newest version of their Communiqué Web CMS/DAM/Social Collaboration product.

Day’s CTO David Nüscheler and CMO Kevin Cochrane gave us a tour of the top new features in CQ 5.3.

Day’s latest minor release includes more than 600 enhancements over CQ 5.2.0 code base. Changes start right from the welcome screen that now has descriptive buttons for both previously existed and new functionalities.

CQ 5.3 Welcome Screen

The UI is mostly unchanged from CQ 5.2 with the exception of some tweaks and additional columns.

CQ 5.3 Personalization, Segmentation and Targeting

CQ Targeting is a brand new module that allows marketers to create, manage and measure their online marketing efforts (campaigns, landing pages, etc.) and customer targeting and segmentation.

Day Software has built a segmentation engine that allows users to adjust segmentation rules by referral keywords or general surfing patterns.

CQ 5.3 Segmentation Editing

Developers can create specific custom traits to provide marketeers with more specific targeting. Those traits are managed using the Clickstream Cloud, which shows a specific user profile.

CQ 5.3 Clickstream Cloud

Navigation and click stream behaviors and patterns can be captured, measured and analyzed even for anonymous users to tune in targeting. All profile information that is captured is stored in the central repository.

Personalization is not easy to do well. Many Web CMS vendors have tried it in a variety of approaches. According to Day, they wanted to make personalization more dynamic and scalable with all the action happening on the client side vs. server side. Personalization comes as part of CQ Social Collaboration module.

Privacy concerns? Forget about it, privacy is more dead than ever. Day’s CQ 5.3 can capture external browser history and geo location. Just like the links you click on in a browser turn different color and your browser knows that next time they’re displayed, CQ 5.3 knows which website you came from and which websites you visited in the past. Knowing browser history and mouse cursor movement is possible thanks to the dynamic, client-side nature of Day’s personalization.

This approach also is more friendly to horizontal scalability, as there’s no need to add more hardware. Cherry on top is what Nüscheler calls “a completely revolutionary approach” to personalization caching. Personalization in combination with multivariate testing and voila: get the impressions, click-through rates, etc. and simulate the best performing version of your page.

One of the nice features in CQ 5.3 is built-in support for A/B and MVT for optimization of content, so that marketeers can not only attract visitors, get insights into their behaviors, but also get a higher chance of converting them.

CQ 5.3 MVT