What is Playbook Versioning? 

Playbook Versioning is the ability to see and access the entire history of published edits to a Bot playbook. The history is chunked into "versions", which specify who made what changes. You will also be able to restore the playbook to its last version and preserve all version history when you do so. TL;DR you can view

1. who edited and created new versions
2. when those versions were made
3. Bot Analytics for each version
4. the visual builder of those old versions

A new version is created and logged in version history every time that you "Publish" edits from the visual builder. 

Billing Plan: Playbook Version History is available on the Premium, Advanced, and Enterprise plans.

Intended Audience:

• Admin
• Marketer

In this doc we'll cover:

• Why Version History?
• Using Playbook Versioning
• To Find Playbook History
• Viewing Version History
• Restoring Versions
• Creating New Versions

 

Why Version History? 

At Drift, we preach a bias for action and being constant learning machines. This means that we are constantly changing our bots and learning better strategy, and we know our customers do too. Especially as a marketer, you need to be able to compare how changes to your Bot playbook affected site visitor conversation so that you can make informed decisions for future playbook changes. Read on to see versioning in action!

 

Using Playbook Versioning

The Version History dropdown lives in the editor view, where you'll be able to compare how previous versions of playbook performed as compared with the current version. Now, when you change copy or add new questions, you won't completely lose the previous metrics that you were able to see, especially if you navigate to the Bot Analytics page:

To Find Playbook Version History

Go to one of your Bots in your Playbooks tab. From there, look to the top right of the editor view. You should see a dropdown that either says "Playbooks is on" or "Playbook is off" depending on whether your playbook is on or off. Click that dropdown and you will see a button titled "View version history".

 

Now, if you click on that time stamp, you will see a table list of all the previous versions of the Playbook. 

Viewing Version History

The main benefit is that to this feature is that you can now access and View every single version and see each version's performance. Note the you will be able to tell when you are not viewing the current version by looking at 1) the blue bar at the top of the page, and 2) the "Viewing" tag on the version which you are seeing analytics for within the Version History dropdown. 

Whilst in Preview mode of old versions (other than one you have restored to), any changes being made to the builder will not be saved.

 

Restoring Versions

Often you'll edit an already published playbook to optimize your conversational strategy. We know you might not be ready to hit publish, but also don't want to lose changes, so Drift auto-saves any changes you make to a playbook and makes them into a Draft version. This will be reflected by the blue tag in the top as soon as your playbook enters a drafted state. 

Above is the draft tag. If you see this tag, that means your Playbook is in a draft state and any changes that have been made in the Playbook are not currently live in the bot. Below you can see how drafted states are triggered and playbooks start auto-saving automatically. If you leave the playbook editor and navigate to some other page within the app, the draft would still be here in its auto-saved state when you returned to the Visual Builder. 

Hopefully you'll decide you like the changes you've made to your new Draft. But we all have moments where wish we could just go back to what we had before. To restore a playbook to its last published version (reverting it from its Draft state), click the "Restore" button from the dropdown, and you will be prompted to confirm that you really want to restore the playbook. You might want to do this if you accidentally deleted something or you just didn't want one of your teammates to be editing the playbook, etc. 

Creating New Versions

Make sure that you hit the blue Publish Playbook button if you want your changes to be saved as a version!

You may see a version published "by Bot-1". This means that a Drift Customer Advocate or Customer Success Manager probably logged in and provided support by logging in as a bot instead of one of your teammates so that the work didn't get attributed incorrectly.