Version 3.3-2 of LISTSERV Maestro has several new features in the User Interface, with benefits for every user and for the data administrator. This section gives you detailed information about the following new features:
The Job Comparison report lets you dynamically compare the tracking events for two or more jobs (up to 12 jobs can be included). Job Comparison reports can be run to compare separate standard jobs or to compare the variants of an A/B-Split Job, which can help you figure out the best variant for the job.
To compare two or more standard jobs, go to the Completed Jobs screen, click on Mail Job, select
Multiple Job Action, and then select
Enable Multiple Job Actions. Select the jobs that you want to compare, and then select
Mail Job >
Multiple Job Action >
Job Comparison Report.
The Job Comparison Report Settings Screen opens.
To compare the variants of an A/B-Split Job, go to the Completed Jobs screen and select the A/B-split Job (not one of its variants) that you want to work with. The A/B-Split Job Details screen opens. From here, select
Mail Job >
Comparison Report for Completed Variant Jobs.
The Job Comparison Report Settings Screen opens.
Sum of events – A bar graph that summarizes the number of recipients that clicked on each URL or opened up the email (the number and size of displayed bars depends on how the statistics are bundled, see choices below).
Note: The rest of the options available on this screen will vary depending on the report type you selected.
Count all events – All events are counted, whether they are generated by the same recipient or by different recipients.
Events per hour – Each interval will count the events collected during a given hour.
Events per day – Each interval will count the events collected during a given day.
Events per week – Each interval will count the events collected during a given week.
Note: With small intervals, the curve will be smoother because there are more intervals to display. However, using more intervals will mean that the calculation of the report will take longer.
No accumulation – Each interval will only show the events counted from the beginning of the interval to its end. This means that the curve will rise and fall, depending on the event occurrence during each interval.
Accumulate interval values – Each interval will show the accumulated number of events counted from the very beginning of the report period until the end of the interval. This means that the curve may only rise, but never fall. However, as events get more and more sparse with each proceeding report period, the curve will become less and less steep, until it tapers out into an (almost) horizontal line.
Open-Up Events – This option bundles all open-up events together into one variable charted on the report.
Number of Sent Messages – This option adds the number of messages that were sent with the job as a constant reference value to the report.
Number of Bounced Messages – Another constant reference value is added to the report. This value shows the number of messages that were sent with the job but were detected as bounces. (See "About Bounces" below.)
Number of Unbounced Messages – This constant reference value shows the number of messages that were sent with the job and were not detected as bounces.
The Job Reports Tab displays the individual reports of all included jobs in the comparison report. Only one individual report is displayed at a time. Select the job for which you want to display the individual report from the
Show report for job drop-down menu at the top of the tab. The displayed report is similar to the normal report that can be displayed for a completed job via the Reports tab on the job's Completed Job Details screen.
The comparison tabs are the heart of the job comparison report: There can be any number of these tabs and each tab can be used to create an individual comparison of the data sources from various of the included jobs in the report.
Additional comparison tabs can be added by clicking the Add New Comparison Tab icon that appears on a separate little tab at the top. When you click this icon, a new comparison tab will be created. This tab can be used for individually configured comparisons of the tracking events of several of the included jobs. There can be any number of such additional comparison tabs, for various comparisons (see below for details).
Click the Back to Job Comparison Report Settings Page link at the top of the page to go back to the settings screen, which is where you can change the general settings for the report (for example the report type and the type of the included data sources).
To close a certain comparison tab, click the Close Tab link at the top right of the tab.
Each freshly created comparison tab is initially empty and waits for you to select the jobs and report data sources to compare. For this selection, use the
Job Selection for Comparison panel that appears at the right side of the window whenever a comparison tab is the active tab.
On this panel, select the jobs that you want to compare by selecting their corresponding checkboxes. For each selected job, you may then also select one of its data sources to be included in the comparison chart. So for each selected job, there will always be exactly one data source that is included. Each job has an associated color which is displayed as a colored margin at the left on the selection panel. This color will be used to represent the selected data source of this job in the comparison chart. Depending on the type of the report, the data source will appear either as a colored line (in a "distribution over time" chart) or as a colored bar (in a "sum of events" chart).
Use the Select All and
Unselect All links at the top of the panel to quickly select or unselect all jobs in the list.
By choosing the right combination of selected jobs, and for each job the selected data source, you can build your own individual comparison chart, which allows you to directly compare the data that interests you. And, by adding more comparison tabs, you can create several of these comparison charts. You can then quickly switch between these different charts by switching between the different comparison tabs.
For example, on one comparison tab you could compare the open-up data sources of several jobs, while on another comparison tab you could compare the click events for a certain link that appears in several jobs, or any other useful combination.
If you find a certain comparison chart especially useful, then you can use the Create Report icon at the bottom right of the comparison tab to create and save a standard tracking report that contains the selected jobs and data sources. You can then execute and view this report via the normal Tracking Reports list at any time, without having to go through the job comparison report interface again. (This option is only available if you have the necessary user rights and if at least one job is currently selected.)
Note: If you are working with a small window size, then the job selection panel may overlap the actual reporting tab. In this case, to be able to view the full reporting tab without having to scroll horizontally, simply hide the job selection panel by clicking the
Hide Selection Panel link at the top right of the panel. Of course, while the panel is hidden you can no longer change the selection of jobs and data sources, so to show the panel again, click the
Show Selection Panel link that appears below the report on the reporting tab whenever the selection panel is hidden.
LISTSERV Maestro 3.3 gives you the ability to add up to 20 reports to the Dashboard. Each report is displayed in its own section, showing a "miniaturized" version of the report.
Click [OK] to add the report. To see the report on the Dashboard, click
Back To >
Dashboard. The report section will be located at the bottom of the Dashboard. To move the report, use the up and down arrows. If you have more than one report displayed on the Dashboard, you can also display them side-by-side. To do so, simply click the up or down arrow for one report until it is on the same level as the other report. Once the reports are on the same level, you can move them left or right using the side arrows.
To view more details on the report, simply hover your mouse over the report. To view the full report with all details on its own screen, simply click on the report. Once you have opened the Dashboard report, you can change the view settings; however, these changes are only temporary and only apply to the current report details. To apply these changes to the report on the Dashboard as well, select
Report >
Apply Settings To Report On Dashboard.
In the Report Type sections, select one of the following:
|
•
|
Sum of events – A bar graph that summarizes the number of recipients that clicked on each URL or opened up the email (the number and size of displayed bars depends on how the statistics are bundled, see choices below).
|
|
•
|
Event details – Offers details about each single event for download. Includes event timestamp, browser platform, client address, and other valuable statistics.
|
|
•
|
Recipient details – Offers detailed statistics about the recipient behavior for download. The detail level of the downloaded statistics can be configured freely for each download. This type of report is only available if personal or anonymous tracking was selected.
|
Note: The rest of the options available on this screen will vary depending on the report type you selected.
If the Result Calculation section is available, select one of these options to define how the result shown on the Y-/X-axis of the graph is calculated:
If the Unique or Total Events section is available, select one of these options to define if unique events or all events are counted:
|
•
|
Count all events – All events are counted, whether they are generated by the same recipient or by different recipients.
|
If the Interval Size section is available, select one of these options to define how many events will be grouped in each interval:
|
•
|
Events per hour – Each interval will count the events collected during a given hour.
|
|
•
|
Events per day – Each interval will count the events collected during a given day.
|
|
•
|
Events per week – Each interval will count the events collected during a given week.
|
Note: With small intervals, the curve will be smoother because there are more intervals to display. However, using more intervals will mean that the calculation of the report will take longer.
If the Result Accumulation section is available, select one of these options to define whether or not values should accumulate from one interval to the next:
|
•
|
No accumulation – Each interval will only show the events counted from the beginning of the interval to its end. This means that the curve will rise and fall, depending on the event occurrence during each interval.
|
|
•
|
Accumulate interval values – Each interval will show the accumulated number of events counted from the very beginning of the report period until the end of the interval. This means that the curve may only rise, but never fall. However, as events get more and more sparse with each proceeding report period, the curve will become less and less steep, until it tapers out into an (almost) horizontal line.
|
In the Show Report Over section, select the type and the bundling of events to appear in the report:
|
•
|
Open-Up Events – This option bundles all open-up events together into one variable charted on the report.
|
In the Additional Statistics section, check any of the following options to have additional statistics appear in the report:
|
•
|
Number of Sent Messages – This option adds the number of messages that were sent with the job as a constant reference value to the report.
|
|
•
|
Number of Bounced Messages – Another constant reference value is added to the report. This value shows the number of messages that were sent with the job but were detected as bounces. (See "About Bounces" below.)
|
|
•
|
Number of Unbounced Messages – This constant reference value shows the number of messages that were sent with the job and were not detected as bounces.
|
The Download Report Results screen for most LISTSERV Maestro reports has been changed to accommodate the PDF download feature. To download one of these reports as a PDF, simple click the new
[Download as PDF] button.
When you move the mouse pointer over the chart, a special interval marker is displayed. This marker appears as a red line in the middle of the interval, with a little box at the top that contains the boundary dates (and times) of the interval. With the help of this marker you are able to pick out a certain interval in the chart even if the interval size is very small (so that each interval is only a few pixels wide). You can then click on any interval to view details about it. The information box of the marker that usually only contains the boundary dates/times is expanded and shows additional details about the selected interval. Click anywhere on the report to close the more detailed information box.
When the Recipients Statistics option for the Delivered Recipients Statistics Report is set to
Per Job in Period, the bar diagram is displayed with the job ID and job title of each job above each bar. In LISTSERV Maestro 3.3, the job ID is now clickable. Once you click it, the corresponding Completed Job Details screen opens.
For distribution reports, this ordering affects the order in which the data sources will appear in the legend. It will also affect the order in which the lines in the chart diagram are drawn. This means that the line of the first data source is drawn first, the line of the second data source second, and so on. This order may be of interest if you have data sources with similar values, where the lines are drawn on top of each other, so that lines which are drawn first are "hidden" by lines which are drawn later. By reordering the data sources, you can define which lines are drawn later, making them more likely to be visible in such cases.
When defining a report, the Data Source General Properties screen defines the name of the data source and its color. This screen now contains an advanced set of colors to choose from.
LISTSERV Maestro 3.3 supports the new LISTSERV list header keywords that were introduced in LISTSERV 15.5. LISTSERV Maestro will also write the list headers of HLLs using these new keywords. The new LISTSERV list header keywords are:
For each dataset or hosted list, you can now individually define a Welcome email and Farewell email, which is sent to the user whenever the user joins/subscribes or unregisters/unsubscribes. These new emails are optional. For HLLs, when you define a Welcome or Farewell email, then you are actually defining the corresponding mail templates in LISTSERV for the matching LISTSERV list. For datasets and HRLs, Maestro keeps track of these mails by itself.
To access these new emails, go to the Recipient Dataset Details screen, click on the dataset/HRL/HLL you’d like to work with, and then click on the Membership Area Layout tab. The Welcome and Farewell emails will be located in the
Subscriber Notification Mails section.
To enable one or both of the new emails, click on the Welcome Mail link and/or the
Farewell Mail link. The Customize Page Layout screen opens, which is where you will define and deploy valid content for the Welcome/Farewell email. To define, click on the
Edit Source icon. The Draft Version and Production Version tabs are displayed. Enter the content for the email on the Draft Version tab. Once you are finished, click the
[OK] button. If you are satisfied with the email content and wish to enable it for use, click the
Deploy as Production Version icon. This will also make your content available for viewing on the Production Version tab.
When browsing/editing subscribers of a Hosted Recipient List (HRL)/Hosted LISTSERV List or members of a dataset, there is now a new column that lets you know when that subscriber/member subscribed to the list or joined the dataset.
To see this new column for a member in a dataset, go to a dataset in the Recipient Warehouse, click
Dataset, and then select
Browse/Edit Confirmed Members. The Manage Members of Recipient Dataset screen opens.
To see this new column for a subscriber of an HRL or HLL, go to the list in the Recipient Warehouse, click
Hosted List, and then select
Browse/Edit Confirmed Subscriber. The Manage Subscribers of Hosted List screen opens.
Tip: It is also possible to filter the Membership/Subscription Date column by supplying a filter string in the edit box above the column; however, there are special rules that need to be observed when this filter is supplied (see the help page for details).
LISTSERV Maestro 3.3 contains a system drop-in that allows you to check if a given user drop-in actually has a non-empty content or not. The system drop-in itself will always be replaced either by the text "true" or "false" (without the quotes), depending on if the referenced user drop-in has a non-empty content or not.
A non-empty content is a content with at least one non-whitespace character in it. I.e. all content which is either totally empty or which contains only whitespace characters (like space, tab, linebreaks, etc.) is interpreted as empty.
This system drop-in is usually used in a conditional block where its result (which is always either "true" or "false") is used in the condition to decide if a conditional block shall be included in the mail or not. That way, it is for example possible to include a certain block only if a given user-drop is actually non-empty, or the other way round, include a certain block only if the user drop-in is empty.
Where "NAME" is the name of the user drop-in to check (do not specify the name of another system drop-in). The directive is case-sensitive, and it requires this exact syntax, the correct spelling of the user drop-in name, and the correct drop-in enclosing tags.
Assume that you have an auto-repeat job with a user drop-in called "DailyQuote" that pulls its content from a file. The job is sent on a daily basis and the content of the drop-in file is also updated daily, so that each day there is a different quote included. Only on some days there is actually no content at all for this drop-in. Now assume that in the part of the mail where this drop-in is included, there is also some short intro-text, which is only supposed to appear if the user drop-in is actually not empty. Also, if the user drop-in is empty, a suitable replacement text should appear instead. For this a conditional block with the
*HasContent system drop-in can be used (indentations for readability only):
Assume that you have a job with a user drop-in called "Sample" that is included at some location in the mail job, where the drop-in also sometimes is empty. In case that it is empty, there is supposed to appear a certain alert text at another location in the same mail job. For this too a conditional block with the
*HasContent system drop-in can be used (indentations for readability only):
To download a printable PDF version of the job details that are displayed on the Summary tab of the Completed Job Details screen, simply click on the new
download icon that is located in the upper right corner of the Completed Job Summary. Once you click this icon, you are prompted to open or save the PDF file.
To download invalid recipients for a delivered job, click Mail Job, and select
Completed Jobs. The Completed Jobs screen opens. From here, click on the Job ID for the job you’d like to download recipients from. The Completed Job Details screen opens. Click on the
View link in the
Recipients section. The Detailed Recipients Information screen opens.
If you have invalid recipients for this particular job, then there will now be a new download link available. At the bottom of this screen, click either the “uploaded text file contained invalid addresses. Download
here" link (for CSV recipients) or the "The result set from the database contained invalid addresses. Download
here" link (for DB-select recipients). You’ll then have the option to view or save the zipped text file.
Note: This is only available for recipients that were uploaded from a Comma Separated Values file (CSV) or when LISTSERV Maestro selects the recipients from a database.
On the Define Message screen, the Plain Text Preview tab will now use the same charset that is used when the mail is delivered. Because of this, any characters that will not be expressible during delivery will appear as a question mark (?) on the Plain Text Preview tab.
Note: This feature only applies to the Plain Text Preview tab. The HTML part of a message will never contain unprintable characters because characters that are not contained in the selected charset will be included as HTML entities instead (such as, “&#NUMBER;”)
When defining an HTML email, it is now possible to preview the HTML part in a state that simulates the situation where the recipient’s email client has blocked the images. This gives you the opportunity to check whether or not your message is still discernible even if your images get blocked.
There can be many reasons why images are not being displayed by an email client. For example, the email client could initially be blocking the display of linked images until the user manually unblocks them (this is very common with current email clients), or any inline image attachments may have been stripped from the email by the recipient's email server, or the mail client could simply be unable to display any images at all (as may be the case with older email clients). Because of these reasons, it is extremely important that you make sure your message is readable and understandable even if the images in the message are not being displayed. If your message is not discernible, then you should rework your text so that the message is apparent without the images.
To preview your message, go to the Define Message screen for your email job. This screen contains the new options,
Preview with linked images and
Preview with inline images, used for previewing your message’s HTML images.
Removing the checkmark from either of these options will have the effect that the corresponding image type will no longer be displayed in the preview, which lets you check how the message would look if this image type were blocked (or stripped) by the recipient's email client.
Notes: These options only work if these image types are present in the email message. In addition, these options only affect the preview of the message. The actual emails will always include the images (either linked or inline, depending on the type of each image) no matter how the options are set here on the HTML Preview tab.
If the LISTSERV list archive is enabled for a LISTSERV list, then postings to this list may also be read in form of a RSS feed (in contrast to subscribing to the list and receiving the messages via email).
If the current recipient definition of the mail job is set to Send to an Existing LISTSERV List with the
Send job as a standard list message to list members option, then the RSS abstract definition will be available on the Define Message screen.
To define the RSS abstract, click the RSS Abstract link. The RSS Abstract screen open. From here, you can define the abstract that will be used for your message, in case your message is read via a RSS feed.
The message you enter must be plain text only and should be a short and concise overview about the full message content. In addition, you should not rely on text formatting like indentations or linebreaks, as RSS feed readers may not display these correctly.
Click [OK] to submit your message or
[Cancel] to return to the Define Message screen without submitting any changes.
The abstract will be added to the message in the form of a special attachment that is of the "text" type and that uses the filename "abstract.txt". This attachment will be recognized by LISTSERV when the message is posted to the list, and LISTSERV will retrieve the text from the attachment and use it as the RSS abstract for the submitted message.
Notes: This attachment will also be visible to all subscribers of the list who receive the message as a normal email. In this case, the attachment will be displayed in the same manner as the recipient's email client usually displays attachments, and the recipient may chose to open and read the content of this attachment. Therefore, when writing the abstract, you should remember that both RSS feed readers and normal subscribers may read this text.
Downloading Reports as a PDF Example
LISTSERV Maestro 3.3 has improved the Event Distribution Over Time tracking report by making the report chart interactive.When you move the mouse pointer over the chart, a special interval marker is displayed. This marker appears as a red line in the middle of the interval, with a little box at the top that contains the boundary dates (and times) of the interval. With the help of this marker you are able to pick out a certain interval in the chart even if the interval size is very small (so that each interval is only a few pixels wide). You can then click on any interval to view details about it. The information box of the marker that usually only contains the boundary dates/times is expanded and shows additional details about the selected interval. Click anywhere on the report to close the more detailed information box.When the Recipients Statistics option for the Delivered Recipients Statistics Report is set to Per Job in Period, the bar diagram is displayed with the job ID and job title of each job above each bar. In LISTSERV Maestro 3.3, the job ID is now clickable. Once you click it, the corresponding Completed Job Details screen opens.When creating or editing a Tracking report, you can now rearrange the order of the report’s data sources using the up and down links on the Data Sources tab.For distribution reports, this ordering affects the order in which the data sources will appear in the legend. It will also affect the order in which the lines in the chart diagram are drawn. This means that the line of the first data source is drawn first, the line of the second data source second, and so on. This order may be of interest if you have data sources with similar values, where the lines are drawn on top of each other, so that lines which are drawn first are "hidden" by lines which are drawn later. By reordering the data sources, you can define which lines are drawn later, making them more likely to be visible in such cases.For sum-of-events reports, this ordering affects both the order of the bars in the bar chart and the order in which the data sources will appear in the legend.Figure 1-10 Reordering Data SourcesWhen defining a report, the Data Source General Properties screen defines the name of the data source and its color. This screen now contains an advanced set of colors to choose from.In addition, the colors used for any built-in Maestro report and any quick report have also been enriched and modernized.Figure 1-11 Updated Color Definition for ReportsLISTSERV Maestro 3.3 supports the new LISTSERV list header keywords that were introduced in LISTSERV 15.5. LISTSERV Maestro will also write the list headers of HLLs using these new keywords. The new LISTSERV list header keywords are:
