Carousel 7.2 - Linked Bulletins and Impression Tracking

Hi, I'm Chris. And I'm John. We're part of the Carousel Product team. We are excited to introduce, Carousel seven point two. This release of Carousel has two major features. Linked bulletins and improved Impression Tracking. 

First up, Linked Bulletins. This feature allows you to update a bulletin and all of it's 'copies' all at once instead of having to update each individual copy.

For example, let's say you're in charge of managing the signage in 1,000 classrooms across a couple dozen schools. You've been asked to post a message about "Tornado Awareness Week" to each and every classroom. Since your channels don't all share a single district-wide zone, you must create the bulletin and then copy it to a zone on each classroom channel. Carousel 7.0 allows you to do this today pretty easily, and you're feeling pretty good about yourself, up until you realize you spelled it "Tomato Awareness Week". You now have 1000 misspelled bulletins that you need to individually correct. 

Linked bulletins to the rescue! Carousel will now ask if you want to update all those copies with you edit any one of them. The mistake is quickly corrected and no-one will ever know about your over-reliance on auto-correct!

Next up is our improved impression tracking. Impression tracking, sometimes called 'As-Run logs' or 'proof of play' lets you see when a bulletin has been displayed. Until now, we only told you the total number of times the bulletin was displayed, but not when. Carousel now keeps a record of when a bulletin was displayed so you can slice and dice the data however you would like!

In the Carousel user interface, go to the 'Extras' tab when creating or editing a bulletin and turn on 'Track Impressions'. You can also turn on tracking for a bunch of bulletins at once by using bulk actions in the manage bulletins screen. Carousel will now log the dates and times when that bulletin was displayed. You can download the logs in a CSV format that you can open in the analytics tool of your choice, like Microsoft Excel.

For example, let's say you are hosting a conference in your facility. You are using Carousel to show the day's schedule of events. Your sponsors have paid to show their logo on the screens around the conference. You want to see how many times a sponsor message ran during the morning coffee break. Since we are now tracking when bulletins are displayed, we can easily prove that your sponsors message was shown in the timeframe you agreed upon, and convince them to sponsor next year's conference too.

That's it for Carousel 7.2. For more information check out our website. We'll see ya next time!