Monday, March 1, 2010

Curing Curiosity with Visitor Reports


Guest post from Adrian Chang, Customer Success Manager, and avid tennis fan. Adrian has a long history of helping Eloqua clients succeed, and in this post, he looks at exploring patterns in website visitor behavior through a pair of his favorite reports.



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Like most marketers, I am a curious creature. I want to know what additional information can I help my customers acquire for contacts who reside in the same region, attended the same event or performed the same download. What info can I learn about them? Where did they come from, how frequently have they been on your site, what was their search term and engine? Also, can I get their contact details into the same view for further analysis? The answer is yes - I have two new favourite reports that have helped me develop a newfound love for Eloqua’s ability to capture digital body language for specific contacts – Visitors in Contact Group and Visitors by Contact Filter.

Start with a View

Before we begin, I recommend that you spend some time getting acquainted with our Web Profiling area. You should setup a view that contains the attributes that are important to you. Search tends to be popular with my clients in addition to Most Recent Form Submitted, Most Recent Referrer, Total Pages viewed, as well as Most Recent Search Query. You may also care about First Page In Visit. My point is, if you’re curious like me, you’ll start off with a wide net and narrow it down as you start to figure out what online attributes are you trying to figure out.



If there are contact fields that you would like to add to this view, you may do that by creating a profile Field off a contact field. Bringing in your combined lead rating field from your lead scoring program would be neat to see against recent activity.

Visitor in Contact Group

Many customers are using contact groups to store recently uploaded contacts, event attendees and registrants or blind form submits for recent asset downloads. Since it’s quite probable that these contacts are responding to other campaigns in real time, you should run this report relatively close to the date that their action has occurred. Whether you have just rescored a lead, sent your followup communication to contacts from a tradeshow or have recently launched a new product, I hope this report is of value to you.



Visitors by Contact Filter

If you are looking to find out the online patterns of your contacts who share the same implicit or explicit attributes (visited x pages in x days, are part of this region, or have this job role), then you can derive the same value via this report. (Advanced - try Visitors by Contact Filter and Segment - you can remove your own employees from the report by domain if this is already setup in this area for you).

One of my customers happens to be one of the NBA Teams who came across a previous blog post that suggested that search would be valuable attribute to add to their lead scoring program. They use a contact filter to identify season ticket holders and this report was able to help them determine if there were patterns with search queries and ticket buyers.



Would love to hear how else you are using these reports.

3 comments:

Jack Volkov said...

Thanks Adrian, these two reports are helpful in better understanding certain segments' digital body language.

One additional report I would like to see is "Visitors by Program". Currently there is a report for "Email Visitors by Program" but the contact has to click-through from a program email. Would be interesting to see if program members are visiting the targeted website, but not by way of an email click-through.

Adrian Chang said...

Jack, thanks for your response. Glad to hear that these reports were of value to you.

Sounds like a worthwhile feature request – the ability to attribute automation against web traffic; definitely get this one into Customer Central if you have not done so already.

Here’s a quick example of what can be done today which may be of value to you:

For your next event powered by Eloqua, let’s assume that you are trying to determine what source is responsible for driving the highest number of registrants. Your assets will include your invitation email(s), a landing page and an Eloqua form for capturing registrations. Potential attendees can access this form either from your email, a banner, a specific search term or directly through your website. Using query strings, you can differentiate the links that point to that registration form (banner, email, search query). If you create profile fields for the query string values, you can easily add this intelligence to your Eloqua form – simply by adding a hidden field called “Registration Source”. You can add profile fields to forms to help you acquire additional digital body language at the time the registration happens. Post event, you can review the form submission data reports for all registrants and sort “Registration Source” to determine where most of your traffic came from. The trick is those who were able to find the registration form organically will come up as blank entries via this report. Hope this helps.

-Adrian

Jack Volkov said...

Thanks Adrian, I will try implementing these ideas for our next campaign.