The word ‘data’ has become a buzzword in the modern marketing space. Everyone talks about the importance of data, reporting, and visualizing results, but many of us feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of options. Although we are extremely lucky to be marketers in a time rich with customer and lead data, the amount of data available can be mind-blowing. Where do we start? Do we have the resources to make use of it all? Is it really worth it?
The Importance of Reporting
Remember when you first implemented marketing automation? Remember all of the reasons you felt marketing automation would be so beneficial to your company? Perhaps you believed/still believe that marketing automation will:
- Automate marketing processes and workflows
- Augment targeting and profiling
- Improve the customer experience
- Increase customer retention
- Enhance lead management and lead nurturing
- Raise productivity
- Increase revenue and add to the bottom line
The true benefits of marketing automation are endless, but regardless of the ones on your list, you undoubtedly had clear goals from the start. Yet, without reporting and analytics, it’s impossible to know whether or not you are meeting your initial objectives.
Without good reporting, we don’t know what is working, what isn’t, and what is needed for success in the future. Without proper analysis, we can’t build effective nurturing campaigns, increase deliverability, grow qualified leads, cleanse our data, or increase revenue. At the end of the day, without reporting, we cannot prove marketing automation’s worth.
Although most of you will agree with these statements, not everyone knows how to best plan for reporting. It’s hard to know which tools are vital or which reports provide the richest information. Thanks to the sheer volume of available information, external to Oracle Eloqua and within, it can be difficult to start and maintain a reporting practice. The development of a reporting cadence requires in-depth conversations internally and with your consulting partners, but you can build a strong foundation by utilizing some of the pre-built reports within Insight in Oracle Eloqua.
Types of Reports
Oracle Eloqua provides two different types of reports: Operational Reports and Insight Reports.
Operational Reports can be accessed directly within a specific asset such as emails, campaigns, forms, and landing pages. Operational Reports provide real-time information on key metrics within a certain time frame – from 10 minutes to 3 months. They are mainly used for verification and QA, and can be extremely helpful when you need information within 24 hours of your asset’s launch or activation.
Insight Reports can also be accessed directly within a specific asset, but a link to Oracle Eloqua’s reporting tool, Insight, is included within the top navigation menu as well. By navigating to Insight via the top navigation, you have access to Insight’s full suite of reporting, including dashboards pertaining to emails, campaigns, database health, contacts, website visit, etc. Insight reports are best suited for detailed analysis of campaign and asset-level performance and provide the ability to schedule reports to be delivered automatically to yourself or other reporting end users. Just keep in mind that Insight reports do not reflect real-time data and that engagement data can take 24-48 hours to populate.
There are additional ways to analyze engagement, conversions, and performance, but they may require an external Business Intelligence tool such as Tableau (try this free trial) or an external data warehouse such as Relationship One’s Data Cloud. These types of solutions are recommended when you need to track waterfall metrics, conduct complex comparisons, analyze performance metrics based off of contact attributes or grouping, utilize multiple data sources, or dive deeper into your metrics with visualizations, among other use cases.
Insight Reporting
Insight contains a number of dashboards and reports that provide insightful information and actionable metrics that help you determine overall engagement, data cleanliness, and deliverability. Reports are “Excel-style” tabular reports with or without a single graphic. These are best used when analyzing large amounts of paginated data like a breakout of all campaigns over the last 6 months and how their related emails performed. Reports also serve as “datasets” that can be used in dashboards, either as tables or as graphics.
The term ‘Attributes’ is used in Insight to represent a quality or characteristic that provide context in reports including asset name, email subject line or the product a campaign is geared towards, for example. Metrics, in the world of Insights, are calculations that provide measurements of performance.
It’s important to note that customization of reports and dashboards in Insight is possible, but requires use of a special license called “Analyzer License.” If you are unsure if you have access to an analyzer license, you can confirm this with your Oracle Account Manager.
Oracle Eloqua has well over 50 reports, all of which have their own unique benefit. There are so many reports available that it can be difficult to pinpoint where to start your analysis journey. Below are my “go to” top 10, in no particular order. Please keep in mind that each report has its own intrinsic worth. I have purposely excluded Closed Loop Reporting since CLR requires a separate implementation that not all users of Oracle Eloqua utilizes.
Campaign Analysis Overview – View engagement metrics for one campaign or multiple campaigns within the timeframe selected. Track campaign performance easily.
Campaign Analysis Overview by Segment – See all active campaigns within a certain time period along with engagement metrics by segment within your campaign.
Email Analysis Overview – Evaluate engagement metrics at the individual email level. Analyze one or multiple emails at once by specific date ranges. Drill down to see exactly who has been engaging, or unsubscribing, from your emails.
Email Clickthrough Link with Query String Breakdown -Learn which links in your email are being clicked, down to the query string.
Email Bounceback Overview – Discover the number of bounces (hard and soft) your emails have received in a certain time period. Run it for all emails, a subset, or one in particular. Drill down to see specific user information.
Bounce Back History with Messaging – Receive rich information on the messages accompanying your bounce backs (the reason for the bounce). Determine which ISPs are delivering the most bounce backs and why.
Contact Field View – Get a better picture of a specific contact field’s completeness as well as the values within that field and the number of contacts with each particular value. Note: Not all fields can be analyzed with this report. To see field values for other fields, navigate to Setup > Fields and Views > Contact Fields. Once on the field you need to analyze, click “View” under Field Population Details.
Email Frequency – Review the number of times contacts have been emailed in the time span selected. Get a good sense on whether contacts are being emailed more or less than you thought.
Query String Parameter Overview – See how many times each query string parameter has been recorded. Drill down to view the number of times each value under each parameter has been noted.
Website Overview Report – See detailed statistics about your website, including page views, return visitor rate, and average page views per visitor.
Dashboards
Dashboards in Insight are just awesome. They provide an easy-to-use interface, combine multiple reports into a single view and allow you to customize attributes and/or metrics to suit your needs. Oracle Eloqua has also added new dashboards over time, and they are all useful in their own right. These are a few of my favorites.
Benchmark Dashboard – See your performance and metrics trending over time while also comparing them to industry benchmarks. Multiple industries can be chosen so you get the greatest insight into your line of business. Metrics are updated daily.
Campaign Activity Performance Dashboard – Review your campaign engagement over time based on specific attributes and time ranges. The default is to display 3 months worth or activity, but you can also click on the “re-prompt” icon to adjust the timeframe displayed on the dashboard.
Database Health Dashboard – Get insight into your contact database by seeing details on active, inactive, reachable, and unreachable contacts alongside trends over time. Dive deeper into your contact data and cleanliness with field-level detail.
Keep in mind that with most dashboards you have the ability to filter results by your three standard campaign settings – product, campaign type, and region. Set these fields to include values for whatever three attributes matter most to you. They do not need to be as labeled, even though the field names themselves cannot change.
Bringing It All Home
It’s great to be marketers in an age that prides itself on being data-driven. We have so many tools at our disposal that help us better understand our customers, our engagement levels, our successes and failures, and our opportunities to get that much better. Reporting and analysis can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Like everything else, start small. Begin to review a few standard dashboards and reports on a regular basis. Over time, you will see trends that you’ll want to explore in greater detail. From there, you can build your reporting platform and dive deeper into the data.
Happy analyzing! If you have Eloqua and you need support with email strategy or building emails, please contact us! We love helping companies transform their marketing automation.
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About the Author: Melissa Santos
