Showing Area of Web Activity in your CRM System

Recently we talked about pulling web profile information into your Contact record within Eloqua, and how that can be a very powerful technique that is useful for many things. One way that can be used is to bring deep insight into the area on your website that prospects are interested in, and present it - in a summarized form - to your sales team in Salesforce.com, Oracle on Demand, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM.


In this example, we'll look at presenting to the sales team the number of views, percentage of views, and favourite offer viewed out of a set of 5 offers. The offers are presented on the web, and we will associate the 3 or 4 pages that reflect each offer so that each contact is updated with the pages viewed across all relevant pages.

To do this, first create Contact fields within Eloqua and in your CRM system, and ensure that they are mapped in the integration area. For each offer, we'll create an "Offer A Pages Viewed", and a "Offer A Percentage of Views" field, and then one field for "Primary Area of Interest".

In the content tagging area, create a Content Tag for Offers, and a Tag Value for each Offer. In the Profile setup area, create a Profile Field for "Number of Times" and "Frequency of Selection" for each of your offers. Also create a "Most Frequently Selected Choice" to reflect the favourite offer.

As we'll be updating directly from the Contact record in Eloqua to the Contact record in your CRM system, use the technique we talked about last week to pass data directly from the Visitor Profile to the Contact. With that as a feeder to your Program, simply pass those Contacts into your CRM update program and the data will appear in their record in your CRM system.

Your sales team is able to quickly see what their favourite offer is with one glance. This technique can be used equally well to show sales a product of interest, buyer role, or likely industry.

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.