Technical FAQs
Before you invest in a new piece of technology, you want to make sure it’ll work with your current systems and platforms. We’ve compiled answers to the most common questions clients ask us about integrations, display, optimization, customization, and publishing. For in-depth technical support questions, just send us a message using the chat feature in the Studio.
Integrations
Q: How does Ceros work with your CMS?
A: The content you build on Ceros can be embedded into your CMS by taking the embed code for your Ceros Experience and inserting it into the HTML of a post or page. If your site is built responsively, your embedded Ceros Experience can also dynamically respond to page size, but you can also embed in a static web page as well.
Q: How does Ceros integrate with email service providers?
A: Email clients are notoriously inconsistent in the way they render your email content for readers. Some clients block images and other non-text content by default; others apply different fonts and spacing to your content. All this goes to say that Ceros Experiences can’t be reliably delivered within an email, but you can create emails that link out to Ceros Experiences. If you want to give viewers a sneak peek of your interactive content, you can always use a GIF creator to show a portion of your Ceros Experience and drop that into your email service provider.
Q: How does Ceros integrate with analytics programs like Google Analytics and Omniture?
A: For Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, there’s a dedicated field where you can drop your UA ID and your container ID respectively within your integrations settings. For other analytics products like Omniture or Mixpanel, you can drop in a tracking snippet in the Custom HTML section of your Experience. You can add link-based tracking parameters to your Ceros content URL as well. On our end, we track in-Experience visitors, opens, views, clicks, shares, and other engagement metrics, which you can view in your Project’s Analytics Dashboard.
Q: How does Ceros integrate with marketing automation platforms (MAPs)?
A: You can drop your marketing automation platform’s tracking code into the Custom HTML field under Settings, which will pass through any Ceros Experiences viewed to your MAP contact records. We also offer integrations with Hubspot, Marketo, and Eloqua to more seamlessly insert forms from those tools into your Ceros Experience.
Q: Can we leverage UGC (user-generated content) in our Ceros Experiences?
A: Yes, you can easily embed UGC in Ceros. To learn more, check out this article.
Q: Can we integrate lead capture forms into Ceros content?
A: You can pull in an existing lead capture form created with your marketing automation or CRM platform using our built-in integrations, as well as using the Embed Object Tool for third party platforms outside of the integrations we offer. You can also lightbox in lead capture forms from your marketing automation platform to capture information as part of a call-to-action within the piece.
Q: What can we do with the Ceros Software Developer Toolkit (SDK)?
A: Our Experience SDK enables you to dynamically personalize and add logic to your Experiences. To learn more, check out our developers website.
Q: Can you view Ceros in a Native Mobile or Tablet app?
A: Yes, Ceros content is standard HTML5 and can be used in a webview component the same as any other website.
Display
Q: Is Ceros content responsive?
A: Ceros takes advantage of Adaptive Layouts as a design-centric alternative to Responsive design. As designers we appreciate the simplicity of Responsive design, but Responsive is not always the best solution for many applications, especially when you need to tailor your content for different audiences. While designers may need to invest a little more time upfront making each separate Layout, the overall benefits are clear; creating audience specific content, whether desktop or mobile, shows much better engagement and also empowers designers to think about how each audience will consume your content allowing for near-endless design customization.
Q: What kind of code does Ceros output?
A: Ceros outputs Experiences as HTML5 and JavaScript.
Q: Can we embed Ceros Experiences in our website, blog, or third-party site?
A: You can! Upon publishing an Experience, you’ll receive two embed codes you can drop into any HTML editor: one for embedding full height, and one for embedding at a restricted height with internal scroll bars. This article covers more details about how to embed Experience.
Optimization & Personalization
Q: How does Ceros ensure an optimized content loading Experience?
A: All assets and media are compressed and served from Cloudflare, our CDN. Images are dynamically resized for every device, ensuring a fast download. We use adaptive bitrate streaming for all videos so that your users on slow connections can Experience your content. Additionally, we provide tools and education related to Experience performance for designers and encourage you to read the following articles:
Q: Do you support A/B testing?
A: Since Ceros content lives on the web, it plays nicely with third-party A/B testing platforms. You can drop your integration pixel into the Custom HTML field under Settings and then set up your test as usual. If you have any further questions about custom use cases, your Account Manager can help!
Q: Can Ceros serve different content based on geographic region?
A: You’ve got two options for serving different Ceros content based on IP address:
- You can create a single-page Experience that asks the user to select their region or language and link to the appropriate content based on their selection.
- You can embed your Experiences in pages you host on an appropriate subdomain and use your domain’s HTTP or JS redirect logic to take viewers to the content you want to serve based on their IP location.
Q: Can you personalize content with Ceros based on user preferences, behaviors, or other stored CRM data?
A: We don’t yet offer direct integrations with CRM. However, using our SDK, you can personalize your content. If you need help, contact your account manager to speak with our professional services team.
Q: How does Ceros work with search engines?
A: Ceros Studio provides a number of optimization settings for search engines and Ceros content performs quite well from an SEO standpoint. For more details on how to best leverage Ceros for SEO, check out the following guides:
Publishing & Hosting
Q: Can we schedule content to be published at a later date?
A: Not right now, but this is a feature we’re considering for future development.
Q: Can I host Ceros content on my own domain?
A: Yes, you can set up your own vanity domain and have Ceros content published on it. You can learn more about setting up vanity domains in this article.
Q: Do custom domains support SSL/TLS?
A: Yes, TLS can be enabled on all vanity domains.
Q: Can I host the code for my Ceros Experiences on my company’s servers?
A: We offer the ability to export published Experience code from the Admin and host on your own servers for an additional cost.
Q: Can I unpublish an Experience if I don’t want it to be live any more?
A: You can effectively unpublish content in one of two ways.
- You can duplicate the Experience you would like to unpublish and then delete the original published Experience in the Admin. This will remove any analytics from your Dashboard. The duplicate Experience will be unpublished with a fresh set of analytics.
- You can also check the “Disable SEO for this Experience” box in Settings to prevent search engines from crawling your Experience, and add a lightbox with a message that blocks your Experience from being viewed.
Q: How does Ceros handle large spikes in traffic?
A: Published Ceros Experiences utilize caching through the Cloudflare CDN. This allows us to serve our Experiences without needing to hit our backend servers so that we can handle any size traffic spike without breaking a sweat.
Q: Where and how does Ceros host content?
A: Here’s a rundown of how our published content and products are hosted.
- All published Experience content, media, and other assets are served from S3 with CloudFront and Cloudflare in front as our CDN’s.
- Admin and Studio content is served from Ceros-managed AWS EC2 instances.
Security
Q: Is encryption used when transmitting data to/from Ceros?
A: Secure TLS connections are used for all logged in sessions. We support secure connections for published Experience content but do not force it.
Q: Do you follow industry best practices to support safe and secure facilities?
A: Yes.
Q: How do users accounts and roles work?
A: Users can have one of two roles. Either Account Owner or just Members. Account Owners have access to all projects and can make account level changes. Members only have access to the projects in which they are invited to and can not make any account level changes.
Q: Can we restrict individual user access to specific projects?
A: Yes. A user can be given access to only certain projects and not the entire account. Also, that user can not make account level changes.
Q: Do you support identity federation standards to authenticate users?
A: Yes, we support Single Sign-On. Ceros supports both password authentication and enterprise SSO using identity standards: LDAP, SAML, and OAuth. Contact us if you need to learn more about our information security policy.