New Ways To Think About Reporting - Group Manipulation

One of the most common reports we all want as Eloqua users is a list of Contacts where X and Y are true. It may be as simple as the list of people registered for the next event, or as complex as the list of East coast execs in manufacturing companies who have shown interest in the last month.

The good thing is that whether it is simple or complex, you can usually create the list quickly and easily. For the more complex requests though, the best place to start is with the manipulation of a Contact Group. Rather than trying to create one report that will provide exactly the set of Contacts you want to include or exclude in your report, start with a Contact Group.

For example, if we want to create a report that lists executive level contacts (VP, Director, or C-level) in any field who have show web activity in the last month, it would be a difficult report to put together. However, it is simple to put this report together with some group manipulation.

The reason this is an easier path is that you can break a complex report into steps, and deal with each step on its own. For this example, we'll start by creating a Group of we'll call "Interested - All". Using the "Add Contacts" option allows us to add Contacts to that Group, and we'll use a Filter to add them.

As the second step in our process, we'll create an Activity-Based Filter that identifies all Contacts who have had web activity (let's say greater than 3 visits) in the last month. Selecting this Filter in the Add Contacts step now gives us a Group with all Contacts who have shown web activity.

For the next step, we'll create a Filter that is called "Is An Executive" that uses wild cards to look for "*Vice Pres*" or "*Director*" or "C*O".

In a third, and final step, we'll create a second Group, "Interested Executives" and choose the "Add Contacts" option again. This time we'll use the "Contact Filter and Contact Group" option, and choose our "Is An Exec" Filter and our "Interested - All" Group.

Running this now adds all the Contacts who are executives and have also shown web interest.

From here, the reporting is simple, as you can use the regular reporting available on Contact Groups to provide you with lists, data profiles, or geographic views of the interested execs.

This example is a simple one, but it gives you a new technique that you can use in creating the right slice of your marketing database. By breaking it up into separate steps, and using the filtering, overlap, and activity-based tools available to you, you will find that a lot of new analysis options become possible.

In the next post on this general topic, we'll look at making this whole concept dynamic and continually updating: http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2009/02/dynamic-dashboards-with-groups-and.html

Defining Segments using Group Overlap

As B2B marketers, we're often asked to target a market segment that is defined in a way that seems to make sense verbally, but hard to define as an exact market segment given the data. Something like:

"Take the list of attendees from that last webinar, but remove anyone who
is already a customer, and anyone who is VP level or higher. Send them the
invitation, but make sure you don't send it to anyone who got the invitation for
the other event last month."

If you look at this, you've got a few ways of defining who is meant to receive the communication; Groups that already exist (webinar attendees, customers), Filters (VP title), activity (email history). What sounds like a simple segment to define becomes complicated quickly.

One simple trick to help with this is using Group Overlap to find people who are in two Groups, and remove them from one. You can use this technique in any situation where it gets too complicated to define your final segment criteria in one Filter. Build a group that is a broader audience than intended, and then remove a sub-group of that based on an overlap with another Group.

Go to the Group Members menu in the Contact Group interface and select "Remove Contacts". You are then given a menu of ways for how you want to remove the Contacts from this group. In this case, we have started with a Group of all webinar attendees, and we are going to remove the existing clients.

Select Group Overlap as a way to remove Contacts, and then select the Group you want to use to look for overlap. In this example, we are selecting the Current Clients group, and we will see what overlap there is between "Webinar Attendees" and "Current Clients".

When you click Continue, you will be shown how many Contacts are in both Groups. You may then select which Group you want to remove them from. In our example, we're looking for a final list of Webinar Attendees who are NOT Current Clients, so we'll remove the overlap from the Webinar Attendee Group.

Click Remove, and you're done. It's a useful technique for building segments that you might otherwise have found a bit tricky. I look forward to your comments.