October ‘23 Monthly Release Notes

We have enhanced our Review Submission Endpoint to support the creation of reviews without content: only a star rating is required. With this method, users can now submit reviews even if the content field has no written text. For clients using review generation, this update provides greater flexibility in the types of reviews that can be submitted to Yext.

As of October 18th, 2023, the TripAdvisor Reviews App was removed from the App Directory.

In the Spring ’23 Release, we introduced Computed Field Values (CFV) — our system for generating content at the field level. This October, we’ve released several exciting new features that will allow users to leverage CFV more widely and with more control throughout their CMS.

These include:

• Logs API for Computations – to view the logs for all triggered Computations, results, and errors
• Computation Support for Struct and List Field Types — includes support for new built-in computation methods to generate a list of keywords and FAQs
• Improved Localization Experience — to manage computation methods across multiple language profiles on a field

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Fall ‘23: Computed Field Values Improvements (early access).

This release we’ve rebranded the display names of our Twitter field to match their rebrand to X. Thus the Twitter Handle field is now X Handle. The API ID (twitterHandle) will remain the same to avoid interruptions with existing integrations.

Following Apple’s removal of select Action Links categories, we will be taking measures to remove these options within Content so users don’t select invalid options.

With this October’s release, we will rename the Display Names of the categories to indicate these are no longer eligible to sync on the publisher. Then, with General Availability for this release, we will remove these options entirely.

This affects the following action links:

• Appointment
• Fees Policies
• Front Desk
• Gift Card (Restaurant)
• Other Menu
• Portfolio
• Reserve
• Store Orders
• Store Shop
• Store Support
• Takeout
• Ticketing

We are introducing Matched Query Tokens, which is a type of Relevance sort criteria that counts the number of matching tokens from the query in the result. This new form of Relevance sorting will more often use secondary sort criteria as a tie-breaker between equally relevant results.

This is helpful because some Search administrators want to use Relevance in combination with another type of criteria to bias the results in a particular way.

For example:

• Primarily sort help articles by relevance, with a bias toward articles that were more recently published.
• Sort by relevance of products, but bias the results toward products that are in an active promotion.
• Return the most relevant healthcare professionals or financial advisors, but randomize the ones with equal relevance scores.

These new Matched Query Tokens will help Search administrators achieve their business goals more consistently and effectively through search. For example, a healthcare search administrator does not want to accidentally favor some cardiologists over others in the ranking of results. Or a support team does not want to promote an article from 4 years ago over an equally relevant article that was published yesterday.

We have made improvements to the Filter Search endpoint to ensure Search returns more accurate location-based results.

The purpose of the Filter Search endpoint is to retrieve a list of potential location-based filters that match the user’s input. When a user searches for a particular location, this improved endpoint will be able to more accurately return the appropriate geographical coordinates, which will improve the search quality of location-specific queries, such as “weather forecast in Brooklyn,” providing a better experience for the end-user.

With Dry Runs in Connectors, users can now review Connector run results and confirm the potential changes prior to applying the updates in Yext. Dry Runs significantly improves the user experience for customers testing their Connectors Configurations, providing more control and minimizing data quality risks while ingesting content.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Fall ‘23: Dry Runs in Connectors (early access).

This release we’ve introduced the ability to ingest multiple entity types in a single Connector. This allows users to map content from one source to multiple entity types all in a single Connector. With these enhancements, we’ve streamlined how users manage Connectors, improving the overall usability of the system.

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Fall ‘23: Map to Multiple Entity Types in a Single Connector (early access).

We’ve added a new built-in Transform that allows users to apply the field values on a Template configured in their account to incoming data from a Connector.

This will help users fill out content in new entities (or update existing entities) from Connector runs more efficiently — using Templates to automatically update fields that are often consistent across common entity types in an account.

For example, a Listings user adding new locations via the Connector would be able to automatically populate content in fields that are consistent across all of their locations (e.g. the business’ corporate branding).

To turn this feature on in your account, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Fall ‘23: Apply Template Transform in Connectors (early access).

Koomio Field Expansion

Yext’s integration with Koomio now includes 4 new fields: Instagram URL, iOS App URL, Android App URL, and temporarily closed (Hours > Temporarily Closed).

CitySquares Field Expansion

Yext’s integration with CitySquares now includes 3 new fields: Instagram URL, iOS App URL, and Android App URL.

Koomio Categories Mapping

Koomio has added an additional 144 descriptors to their business categories list, allowing users to have more options when deciding how they’d like to describe their business type in their Koomio listing.

Localeze Social Links

Users can now integrate social links at the bottom of their business listings, giving their consumers additional opportunities to interact with their brand.

Apple Business Description Length Increase

Apple Business now has extended their description length with an additional character count of 245– an increase from 255 to 500 characters.

LocalDatabase Deprecation

As of October 18th, 2023, LocalDatabase was removed from the Yext Publisher Network.

YaSabe Deprecation

As of October 12th, 2023, YaSabe was removed from the Yext Publisher Network.

Apple Action Links Deprecation

As of October 18th, 2023, the following Apple Action links will be deprecated. For more information see Apple Action Links Deprecation in the Content section.

• Appointment
• Fees Policies
• Front Desk
• Gift Card (Restaurant)
• Other Menu
• Portfolio
• Reserve
• Store Orders
• Store Shop
• Store Support
• Takeout
• Ticketing

We’ve created a simpler and more scalable way for our reseller customers to share custom dashboards across all accounts in an account tree.

A parent account can now automatically share a custom dashboard across all child accounts by setting the shareWithSubAccounts property to true in the dashboards Config-as-Code (CaC) file. You can access this from the Admin Console.

International customers should keep in mind that since this feature is for custom dashboards, we will not automatically handle translations.

Note: This tool is best suited for dashboards without filters, or with generic filters that are not specific to the resources in the parent account (such as Listings Action, App, or Referrer). This is because the dashboard will attempt to apply the same filters from the parent dashboard in the child accounts.

Following the introduction of new conversion metrics as part of our August ‘23 release, we plan to remove the legacy conversion tracking metrics and all conversion tracking screens from the platform on December 13, 2023.

Legacy metrics will be removed from the Analytics platform and cannot be queried via the Reports API. These are:

• Clicks (Conversion Tracking) → Click Count
• Conversions (Conversion Tracking) → Conversion Count
• Conv. Value (Conversion Tracking) → Total Conversion Value
• Value / Conv. (Conversion Tracking) → Average Conversion Value
• Conversion Searches (Conversion Tracking) → No replacement yet
• Conversion Sessions (Conversion Tracking) → No replacement yet

To access the new metrics, navigate to Account Settings > Account Features and select Fall ’23: New Conversion Tracking Metrics (early access). For more information, see this guide.

All conversion tracking screens will be removed from the platform, including the home screen, actions screen, and setup.

This means that conversion actions can no longer be viewed, created, or updated in the UI or via Config-as-Code (CaC) past December 13, 2023.

This does not impact the conversion actions themselves. Any existing conversion actions will continue to collect data in Yext and can be accessed via the new conversion metrics for the foreseeable future. Customers are not required to make code changes at this time. This particular deprecation only impacts the legacy metrics and the ability to view, edit, or create new conversion actions within the legacy system.

We will deprecate the legacy ‘Featured Message Clicks’ metric on December 13, 2023. On this date, the metric will no longer receive any new data. Historical data can still be queried. We plan on removing the metric from the Analytics platform and the Reports API in 1H 2024.