Better Marketing Analysis Through Dynamic Filters

When you run a report within Eloqua, you will often want to understand a bit more about the data that you have within the report. Whereas you can easily export the data for secondary analysis in a tool like Excel, often the easiest thing to do is to dynamically filter the results of your report to get the view you want.

This is easy to do from most list reports (ie, a list of visitors, or a list of contacts).

In the top menu, under Filter, select "Filter these contacts" and you will be presented with a window that lets you define a filter. That filter is applied dynamically to the report you are looking at, letting you quickly see a subset of your data.

For example, if you had a list of contacts who had submitted a web form for a download, and wanted to understand how effective that marketing campaign had been at targeting CEOs, you might add a filter for "Title = CEO". Note, however, that the need for a contact washing machine becomes very clear in doing this. If we have not managed the data quality of our incoming title data, it will be hard to define a good filter. However, if the data has been standardized and normalized, we can work with a normalized Title field that can be easily filtered.

With the "CEO" filter layered on to our results, we can quickly see whether the campaign has been effective at generating responses from top execs. The filters can be quickly and easily removed or changed, which lets you work with any list report to get a better sense for the data it contains.

Dynamic filters on reports are a quick but powerful tool for getting better insights out of your marketing data.