We all understand the importance of analysis and data-driven decisions, but let’s be honest – sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. You might not feel like you have the time to become a data genius. Or, you could be wondering if you even have the right tools in place. Excel is great, but it’s not always the easiest thing to use for advanced data projects.
Fear not! The road to data mastery is not as daunting as it first appears. Below are five of my favorite ways to get better insight into your Oracle Eloqua instance without giving you a headache.
1. Leverage Campaign Settings
“Oh, Campaign Settings, how do I love you? Let me count the ways.” All cheese aside, using your campaign settings isn’t just the first tip, it’s the best tip, and it’s the fastest and easiest way to get immediate insight into campaign performance. Campaign Settings allow you to assign meaningful classifications to all of your campaigns. Think region, product/business line, industry, tactic/type, etc., that align to the campaign goals and focus. Ask yourself what your reporting needs are and go from there. For example, if you need to understand if webcasts have a higher unique click-through rate than in-person events or how much revenue each are influencing, assign the tactic type within Campaign Settings.
Under “Fields and Views” in the Setup area you can create a large number of custom campaign fields and classify to your hearts content. But, without an Analyzer license, you can’t pull those custom fields into your Insight reports. No Analyzer license, you say? Not a problem! Decide on your top three classifications and leverage the three out-of-the-box campaign settings “Product,” “Region” and “Campaign Type.” These three campaign fields are incorporated into nearly every campaign and closed-loop reporting report and dashboard Oracle Eloqua offers in Insight. If you don’t see it in the grid (Excel-style) reports, take a look to your left and you’ll typically see them available in black in the “Report Objects” area. You can drag and drop them into the grid report for viewing. Remove the campaign name column and play around with different ordering for cool new views into your data.
“But I go to market by Industry, and ‘Campaign Type’ will confuse my internal audiences”, you say? Again, not a problem. For the three built-in campaign settings, you define the picklist used and its values to choose from. Once you’re in the grid report, simply right click on the column heading and rename “Campaign Type” to “Industry.”
Another trick? Put those Campaign Setting classifications to use on your web lead-generation forms. By creating an Eloqua campaign canvas that only has 1-2 web or externally-hosted lead generation forms on it, you can capture and associate that activity for closed-loop reporting (“CLR”) purposes (see more on CLR below) and include this activity in your larger reporting efforts — i.e. “Campaign Type” is “Web Lead Gen” and “Industry” is “X, Y or Z”.
2. Simplify Reporting
Remove all the extra metrics. Sure, it might be cool to know what the percentage of New Visitors to Existing Visitors was, but is a non-Oracle Eloqua user going to be able to take action based on that information? Probably not. Stick to the basics: total sent, total delivered, unique click-throughs and rate, unique form submissions, and total unsubscribes. Also, always show unsubscribes as a whole number versus a percent. When trying to convince internal team members that the 4th event invitation that was sent out to all non-responders wasn’t necessary, 30 global unsubscribes has more impact than saying the send generated a 0.02% unsubscribe rate. Consider incorporating visual thresholds, benchmarks, and report keys that explain what various metrics mean to reporting end-users.
Yes, I know I left out opens and open rates. I promise this was intentional. As many people are aware, opens are only counted when images are downloaded. Even if you set up the email to be image-free, Oracle Eloqua adds a tiny invisible image to all emails to capture opens. The trouble is that your recipient may have images blocked from downloading, or they may have their preview panes turned on. In the first case, someone could open the email and we wouldn’t know it. In the second case, it could flash open in their preview pane before they promptly hit “delete.” Opens can be helpful for testing or diagnosing deliverability issues, but the best true metrics for measuring engagement with your offer is unique click-through rate and unique form submissions.
3. Consider (reconsider) Closed-loop Reporting (“CLR”)
A common complaint I’ve heard from clients is they are hesitant to implement closed-loop reporting with their CRM because they are stuck in an internal debate about what the “trust cost” of a campaign is – does each email equate to $0.01? How do we assign a cost to assets that are used across multiple campaigns? It’s easy to get bogged down in the details, but there are many advantages to CLR you might be overlooking.
The first, and most important, is campaign membership handling and defining your response rules. If you’re still using the “old E9” way of manually sending campaign membership to your CRM, CLR can automate this process for you. You also get to tell Oracle Eloqua what a campaign “response” is by defining actions in the Response Rules. If you’re on E10, a key consideration is whether your organization has historically sent “Email Sent” over to CRM as a campaign membership. Including “Email Send” in the response rules, as the means to send this membership to CRM, is essentially telling Oracle Eloqua every send is a response, which you don’t want. You can also include responses that happen outside of Eloqua (“External Activities”) using CLR. These are just a few of the great reasons why you might want to reconsider implementing CLR for your organization.
Once CLR is implemented, all of these campaign responses get factored into your revenue calculations. Based on your exact configurations, linking campaign responses to opportunities in your CRM, Oracle Eloqua performs attribution and influenced revenue calculations. I usually refer to it as “CLR Lite”. Even if detailed cost is not available for ROI calculations, it can be very insightful to see how much revenue Industry A, webinars, or even campaign X are influencing. For even more accurate CLR reporting, work with your CRM team to require at least one contact be attached to an opportunity in CRM. Some clients even hide the ability to create a new opportunity at the account level and only offer it at the contact level.
4. Plan Your “Shared” Assets
Be thoughtful (and methodical) about when you add landing pages and forms to your campaign canvas. A good rule of thumb is: if it’s an asset that is shared across multiple campaigns, you probably want to leave it off the canvas. If it’s campaign specific, include strategically as appropriate. For example, if you have a contact us form for a nurture campaign series with 50 form submissions, and you add the form asset to all your canvases (early, mid and last stage), your Insight reporting will show 50 form submissions on all three campaigns, skewing your numbers. Consider only including the form and landing page on one of the campaign canvases.
5. Get Creative
There are lots of other ways to gain insight into how Oracle Eloqua is performing. For example, consider creating an Email Group for “Auto-responder” types of emails (such as registration confirmations). These types of emails will typically have much higher click-through rates when providing additional related offers (a best practice) compared to your original invite. Doing this will let you run email group reporting that shows how other types of offers are performing without being inflated by auto-responders.
Don’t have an Analyzer license and need to get more detail out of your reporting than the three “out-of-the-box” campaign settings provided? A strong naming convention can go a long way to supporting additional slicing and dicing of data in Excel. Eloqua offers some helpful naming convention generators, but another tip is to use dashes to separate the various positions versus spaces. It will make it a whole lot easier to use the dash as the delimiter to separate the positions out to different columns in Excel. If you just use spaces, the open-text description portion can tend to get messy.
What else are you doing with Insight reporting? What other tips and tricks do you have to share? I’d love to hear more!
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