Looking at Interest - Activity-Based Filters

In many areas, interest is equally or more important than explicit data such as title, role, or industry. Whether you are targeting an outbound campaign or scoring leads, an ability to build rules on interest is critical.

That is easy to do in Eloqua with Activity-Based Filters. If you haven't tried them, they are worth getting familiar with as they are useful in so many scenarios. Activity-Based Filters work like the Contact Filters you are familiar with, but look at data on email, web, and form activity.

Again, similar to regular Contact Filters, you can use Activity-Based Filters in many areas, Distribution Lists, Program Decision Rules, Group manipulation, and reporting.

To create one, select "Activity-Based Filter" when you are presented with options in the first screen you see in creating a new Contact Filter. Select the type of filtering you want to do - Clicked through an Email, Opened an Email, Was Sent an Email, Submitted a Form, Visited Hypersite, or Visited Website. Each selection presents you with a further set of options where you can refine the amount of activity and the time over which you want to look.

In combination with tools such as Content Tags, which identify specific areas of a website, this becomes a very powerful tool. By tagging the pages on the Eloqua Artisan blog with a Content Tag, I can now define a Filter to identify people who have seen at least 3 pages on the Eloqua Artisan blog in the last 4 weeks in order to identify people showing interest in the blog.

The ways in which this can be used are numerous, so it is worth exploring to gain familiarity with it. Comments on how you've used it are greatly appreciated.