Orbit release notes 2025

Our Orbit development team works using fortnightly sprints. This helps us get the newest features to you as soon as they are ready.

13 February 2025

Version 2.1.19

Headline feature

Multi-dimension charts in audience workbooks

We’ve now further extended audience workbook visualisations to include multi-dimension charts.

Multi-dimension charts are a combination of column, bar, line, and area charts, that can be clustered, stacked, stacked 100%, or a combination (Combo) thereof:

These full-screen charts also now take advantage of our fully redesigned properties side panel.

Two dimensions and one measure:

  • Clustered column

  • Stacked column

  • 100% stacked column

  • Clustered bar

  • Stacked bar

  • 100% stacked bar

  • Clustered line

  • Stacked area

  • 100% stacked area

Two dimensions and two measures:

  • Clustered combo

  • Stacked combo

  • 100% stacked combo

This enhancement further aligns audiences and dashboards, as we work towards providing you with a seamless analytics user experience. We want you to be able to access all the tools you need ‘in a pinch’, for ease of use, wherever you are in Orbit.

See Multi-dimension charts in audiences.

New features and improvements

Campaigns

Using saved FastStats expressions in campaign message personalisation

You now have the ability to use any saved FastStats expressions as personalisation content fields in your Orbit campaign messages.

Using pre-defined FastStats expressions into your Orbit campaigns enables more dynamic and customised content.

This feature is useful for:

  • Linking fields for specific campaigns

  • Creating offer codes

  • Defining image sets based on segments

  • Writing conditional statements for personalised content

Note: Available for Analyser bundle and above.

For more detail, see the FastStats help content for expressions and FastStats expressions in Orbit message personalisation.

Bug fixes

Connect

  • We've fixed a bug requiring datetime database columns to be converted before they're loaded correctly. When using an SQL, Snowflake, or PostgreSQL data source with a datetime, the data wouldn't load to the EAV correctly, and would need to be represented at source.

  • You will no longer encounter a timeout when replacing or updating a data source, causing your process to crash without an error message being displayed. This fix addressed an error messaging issue in the connect user interface.

Dashboards

  • Categorical colours are now cached per session across themes, as well as systems and variables. This ensures that pie charts with different dashboard themes retain their correct colours after refreshing Orbit.

  • We’ve fixed a bug preventing sparse cube results from not being drawn and displayed in the UI. In dashboards, when you made a cube using Booking Date vs Postcode, in the inspector cube results were present but the UI stated ‘No data to Display’.

Audiences

  • A range error no longer occurs when you add dimensions with many categories to a cube. This range error would previously cause a crash after adding a second dimension to your cube.

  • Single dimension and combination (combo) charts now have greater ability to automatically increase the spacing of data labels, preventing overlapping issues occurring with chart labels presenting a lot of detail.

  • We’ve found and fixed an issue that caused incorrect results when you selected 'Omit Unclassifieds' on a cube that has multi-dimensions on the same axis. Extra bands/cells were incorrectly displayed outside your original selection, also affecting counts on any follow up audiences created from these extra cells.

General

  • When downloading large exported files from Orbit, you no longer encounter a timeout before completion. Previously, exporting a file of around 100MB could cause the process to stop without downloading the file to your browser.

  • Single sign-on (SSO) now works successfully through OpenID Connect, even if your Base URL parameter is blank. Previously, switching the protocol to SAML and back to OpenID Connect could leave Base URL empty, causing login failures.

29 January 2025

Version 2.1.18

Headline feature

Expanded audience counts in campaign journeys

We’ve enhanced the audience visibility in Orbit’s journey builder, giving you deeper insights into how your campaign logic affects audience sizes. You can now view detailed audience counts in both draft and published campaign modes, making it easier to refine and evaluate your campaigns.

Key improvements:

  • Audience counts in draft mode: See gross, net, and drop counts while working on draft campaigns, not just after publishing.

  • Detailed breakdown of drops:

    • Exclusions: Individuals removed due to exclusion rules

    • De-duplication: Overlapping individuals excluded from multiple groups

    • Volume constraints: Limits applied to the number of individuals in the campaign

      Note: These include any campaign volume constraints and target segment limits.

    • Entry constraints: Restrictions from contact strategies, such as "one person per campaign per month"

Enhanced audience counts improve transparency and efficiency by showing how exclusions, constraints, and strategies impact your audience. Detailed breakdowns of gross, net, and reduced counts are visible in the Target segment side panel, with timestamps to track when figures were calculated. You can refine your audience in draft mode and trust the updated counts to reflect changes accurately, streamlining your campaign-building process.

For more detail, see Adding audiences.

New features and improvements

Campaigns

Campaign-linked dashboards

Introducing campaign-linked dashboards, a powerful way to track and analyse marketing performance directly from your campaigns. These dashboards function like regular ones but come pre-populated with key campaign metrics, saving you setup time. Whether you need real-time insights or periodic analysis, they adapt seamlessly to your reporting needs.

Use a Tracking Dashboard to monitor live email campaign responses and ROI, making quick adjustments. For strategic reviews, create a Reporting Dashboard to assess segmentation performance and revenue trends in quarterly reports. Both dashboard types are fully customisable, enabling tailored insights with added metrics, filters, and themes.

Key benefits:

  • Get started quickly with pre-configured metrics like communications, recipients, and revenue, saving you setup time

  • Flexibility to customise dashboards by adding data, filters, and themes for tailored insights

  • Data integration that supports real-time SQL data for immediate updates or FastStats data for detailed reporting

Campaign-linked dashboards simplify performance tracking, helping you make data-driven decisions faster. Share and refine them with your team for maximum impact.

For more detail, see Campaign-linked dashboards.

Audiences

Audience as a cube dimension

You can now use an audience as a dimension in audience workbook cubes. This allows you to further analyse an existing audience workbook cube by switching out a dimension, to use an audience as a dimension ‘on-the-fly’.

For example, you could take an existing audience with a dimensions of region and gender, then switch out the gender dimension for an audience dimension of respondents. This new audience dimension allows you to display a breakdown of people who have or have not responded to your campaign, drilling further down into your original audience and gaining additional insight into your respondents.

For more detail, see Audience as a cube dimension.

Bug fixes

Campaign

  • Personalisation parameters in push notifications were not being replaced with corresponding audience field values. The replacement logic now correctly substitutes variables like {{LastName}} with actual values.

Dashboards

  • Number card targets using a previous period now produce correct results, as expected. Previously, a target tile date comparison with a dynamic date range of ‘The Last Month’ could produce an overlap of one day from the source period to the comparison period.

Connect

  • We've resolved an issue that prevented certain names from being used for data sources. Previously, if a name contained special characters (e.g., symbols), the dialog would close when you clicked Create, without displaying a warning or creating the data source.

14 January 2025

Version 2.1.17

Headline feature

Message objectives: Track and optimise campaign performance

Campaign objectives now enable you to set specific goals for each message in your campaigns, allowing you to track their real-time performance. With this feature, you can easily monitor key actions, such as registrations, purchases, or app downloads, and assess how individual messages contribute to your overall campaign goals.

Key benefits:

  • Automatically track responses to monitor actions for each message in real-time

  • Set multiple calls to action to track several objectives within a single message

  • Measure revenue impact to assess the financial contribution of message responses

  • Set target timeframes for each objective that validate automatically

  • Leverage flexible data sources for comprehensive tracking across various data tables

Campaigns often feature multiple objectives for each message. For instance, you can track both pre-orders and event registrations within the same message, helping you evaluate each call to action individually.

Note: This feature is available with a Campaigner bundle and above.

Note: This feature is dependent on the Apteco software Q4 release.

For more detail, see Message objectives.

New features and improvements

Campaigns

Stop all campaigns

You now have the ability to stop all your Orbit campaigns. This acts as a failsafe to instantly halt all active campaigns.

You can then resume your campaigns, with each returning to its prior state and schedule. This feature is ideal for addressing critical issues like failed data builds or ESP outages with immediate action to prevent errors or incorrect messaging.

For more detail, see Stop campaigns.

Push notifications

You can now use push notifications as a channel in Orbit campaigns. This new channel type allows you to engage with your audience directly through their devices, delivering timely and targeted messages across your multi-channel campaigns.

Key benefits:

  • Instant delivery: Ensure your message reaches your audience in real time

  • High visibility: Notifications appear directly on a device’s screen, bypassing cluttered inboxes

SMS template builder appears with SMS channel

The SMS template builder is now displayed for use when an SMS channel has been set up in Orbit. This update applies to all SMS integrations.

View campaigns you’re not licensed to use

As a campaign user, you can now view a campaign that contains features you don't have a licence to use. However, you cannot use any features you’re not licensed for or save any changes you make.

Audiences

Value display limit in audience visualisations

In audience visualisations, you can now choose to show all values or limit the number of values displayed to the top or bottom n values.

For text variable dimensions, the option to use category display is now removed, and value display is the only available option.

This value display setting is now configurable at the overall visualisation level, not per individual dimension.

See Value display limit.

Omit zeros set to true by default

We’ve changed the way that omit zeros works for donut, pie, and funnel charts in audience workbooks. Omit zeros is now set to true by default for improved user convenience.

Administration

Folders tab for file upload

System administrators now have access to a folders tab on the file upload UI, enabling more efficient addition/deletion of file directories.

Bug fixes

Campaigns

  • When naming constraints, you now retain the changes you've made previously.

  • Swapping between campaigns on a slow connection no longer causes diagram errors to occur.

Dashboards

  • Dashboard row filters applied to a user/group/system no longer cause a timeout on API calls when fetching varCodes.

Audiences

  • We've fixed an issue preventing audience workbook cubes from displaying the correct percentage option.

Administration

  • We’ve found and fixed an issue that prevented the system availability monitor being correctly created for instances hosted within Apteco Cloud.