Adobe Connect and Eloqua Integration

Integration between Eloqua's marketing automation programs and webinar providers is an area we've covered quite a bit lately. Of course, for those who use systems other than WebEx or On24, the comments have been consistent - great structure, but can you support my chosen webinar provider. We're happy to add another popular provider to that community - Adobe Connect.

Adobe Connect, part of the Adobe family, provides an excellent platform for hosting large or small events for marketing, education, or sales. They also provide a robust way to tie the data on who attended webinar events into your digital body language on each prospect within Eloqua.

Like any other Eloqua Cloud Connectors, the connectors act as steps within Program Builder's marketing automation workflows, so the first step is to whiteboard what you would like to have happen. With Adobe Connect, to ensure that the individuals are uniquely tracked (by email address), you'll want to register them for the event via Eloqua.



This creates a guest user account in Adobe Connect that allows you to see who is attending. After the event has taken place, you'll likely want to pull information on who attended into Eloqua. To do this, there is a Cloud Connector step to Query Attendance.



With the plan set out on the whiteboard, let's look at how to get these Cloud Connectors set up in your Eloqua instance. We looked at how to install a Cloud Connector into Eloqua recently, and you'll need to do that for the steps you are going to use. Find these connectors at cloudconnectors.eloqua.com:

Register Contact with Adobe Connect: to create a user account and register them for the webinar.

Unregister Contact from Adobe Connect: if you want to remove people from the event automatically.

Query Adobe Connect Attendance: to get information on who attended after the event has taken place.

and also

Feeder of Adobe Connect Attendees: to feed in all Adobe Connect attendees directly into Eloqua for nurture and follow-up (without using a program step to query from)

Install any of these connector types you wish to use and then you are ready to add them into your marketing automation program. To add a step, put the step in the program as you would normally, then select “Cloud Connector” as a step action. You’ll then see a drop-down of installed Cloud Connectors below (if you have installed the Cloud Connectors into your Eloqua instance). For this post, we’ll look at just one of the connectors, but the flow is similar for all of them. Select the Adobe Connect Query Attendance connector for the step that looks to see if people actually attended the event.



Click the Configure button to begin setting it up. You will be asked for your credentials, and it will confirm the Program Builder step you’re connecting to, and from there it will go straight into configuration. The Configuration tab asks you for some options on configuring the Adobe Connect side of the connector. Important: you’ll need an account that is part of the Administrator group for this integration as user accounts (just guests) are being created.

If the account you are using is your own, you should see your meetings with the “My Meetings” option selected, but if you are using a system administrator account, you’ll want to select “All Meetings” and save to see your meetings. Also configure where you want to store the information retrieved by Adobe Connect; you can either use fields on the contact record or, better, store the information in a custom data object.



Move to the field mappings tab and select the fields on the contact record and/or in custom data objects that you are interested in using.



That’s all that is needed in order to configure the connector. You can run it manually a few times under the “Run Step” tab or go to the Configuration tab to enable it to run automatically. Follow the same flow for the “Register with Adobe Connect” step, and you now have your Eloqua marketing automation fully integrated with your Adobe Connect web conferencing.



Enjoy, and please keep the feedback coming, we’d love to hear from you what about this integration is working for you, and what you’d like to see us add, change, or improve.

WebEx and Eloqua Integration - Webinars as source of Digital Body Language

Webinars are as much of a core element of most B2B marketer's day to day tactics as anything. They form a great vehicle for educating prospects on a deeper topic than might otherwise be possible, they allow a richer interaction with presenters, and they provide a great interim point to guide prospects towards that is less of a commitment than a purchase.

However, webinars generally show a wide range of attendance stats among those who register. Large percentages of people who register do not attend at all - often between 40 and 60% of registrants. Among those who do, some may drop off after 5 minutes while others may stay for the full hour. Knowing about this attendance difference is crucial in understanding how to follow up and how to score leads.

A prospect who registered but did not attend should be sent a “sorry we missed you” rather than a “thanks for attending” email, while a prospect who dropped off after only 5 minutes might respond well to a follow-up proposing a different set of topics that might be more appealing. Similarly, attendance for the majority of the webinar is indicative of very high engagement, and may be a good factor in lead scoring.

Historically, this has been difficult as this data would have to be brought in manually. Eloqua now has a cloud connector to change that – making us the first marketing automation platform with a seamless integration into WebEx. The WebEx cloud connector allows four main usage scenarios (each can be used as individual steps within a marketing automation program as you design the promotion, reminder, and follow-up campaigns around your webinars):

- Register Attendee: Registers a contact who is in that step of a program with a specific event in WebEx meeting center, training center, event center, or sales center.

- Unregister Attendee: Unregisters a contact who is in that step of a program from a specific event in WebEx meeting center, training center, event center, or sales center.

- Query Attendance: Looks at each contact in that step of the program and queries WebEx to see if they attended and for how long

- All Attendees: Automatically pulls a list of all people who attended a particular WebEx webinar and feeds them in to Eloqua as contacts and places them into a group (where of course they can be fed automatically into a program for follow-up nurturing)

To get started, you’ll need the Cloud Connector installed in your Eloqua instance. This is very easy to do, see the recent post on Cloud Connector Installation instructions for how to add a new Cloud Connector to your install. The Cloud Connector we’ll be looking at here is available on Black Starfish, our repository of interesting connectors. Go to cloudconnectors.eloqua.com and create an account. Under Communication, you'll find WebEx: Register, WebEx: Unregister, and WebEx: Query Attendance, while under Feeder, you’ll find WebEx: All Viewers – those are the connectors we’ll be working with, and the ones to install.



Once you have them installed, you can begin using them within your webinar invitation and management program. The cloud connector steps for WebEx integration can be plugged into your marketing automation program at whatever points make sense, so be sure to whiteboard what you want to have happen and use the steps accordingly.

Likely, you’ll want to use a WebEx: Register step when the buyer has indicated that they are interested in attending, perhaps by clicking a link or submitting a form.


You’ll want to run the WebEx: Query step after the event has taken place to see who attended and for how long. That data can be used to guide prospects down unique follow-up paths depending on their behavior.



Now, for each step, you’ll need to configure the Cloud Connector to do what you need. Each connector is roughly the same, but with slightly different options, but once you have one figured out the rest will be simple. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll walk through the WebEx: Query step. Choose Cloud Connector as a step type, and pick WebEx Query from the drop-down below (if you have installed the connector in your Eloqua instance as we discussed earlier). Click the Configure button to launch the configuration UI.



The connector will need to be configured with your WebEx credentials, the type of WebEx event (ie Meeting Center, Event Center, etc), and the Session ID (from the event details page in WebEx). You can also configure the Session ID to be pulled dynamically from the contact record if you're running a large number of events and want to manage this dynamically.

A final setting is where you want to store the returned information, in the contact record or in a custom data object (data card). If you're running many events, you'll want to use custom data objects to keep a full history of attendance.



With that configured and saved, move to the field mappings tab, and choose the contact fields or custom data object fields that you want to read data from or write data to.


That's all that's needed to have full integration between your WebEx webinars and your Eloqua marketing automation. You can go over to the Run Step tab to run the integration manually a few times to make sure it's all working, or just go to the Credentials tab to click "Enable Step" to enable it to run automatically.



We'd love to hear your feedback on this connector, what can be improved, and what else you need it to do.

Social CRM meets Marketing Automation

Much of our conversation around marketing automation tends to focus on the new revenue side of the business. Understanding digital body language allows us to understand which prospects are ready to buy, and which need to be further nurtured. However, the same concepts apply to the understanding of existing customers.

Understanding which customers are engaged with your knowledge portal and online community in order to learn more, which are struggling, and which are advocates allows you to use similar principles in order to better guide all of your customers towards success and ultimately renewal. I wrote recently about the ideas behind renewal marketing and social CRM, and the opportunity that it provides us to focus on maximizing customer satisfaction.

Since that time, I’ve had a number of conversations with the folks at Helpstream (who power our Customer Central online community), and we have a strong collaboration in the works. Recently, the Helpstream team announced the ability to integrate marketing and social CRM by adding Eloqua tracking to any pages (or all pages) within a Helpstream-power portal that you would like.

By doing this, activities within the social CRM community can be used as part of your lead nurturing strategies to guide your communication based on what level of engagement an individual has, or as part of lead scoring algorithms for looking at renewal or upsell.

If you have both Eloqua and Helpstream, it is worth ensuring that you are receiving the insights into your customers’ engagement with your social CRM system by integrating Eloqua scripts into the portal.

Prospect Profiler - As an AutoHotKey Shortcut

In the second post in a two-part series on Prospect Profiler, one of our keys to sales enablement, Ben McPhee continues exploring the topic he introduced in his first post; Prospect Profiler as a stand-alone. This time, Profiler is accessed as a AutoHotKey shortcut from within your email client.

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Option 2: Take a shortcut from your email client!


This is REALLY cool. We don’t officially support or have any direct integration with this software, but if you run AutoHotkey®, you can easily jump from your email client (e.g., Outlook) straight to a contact’s Prospect Profiler record with just the press of a few buttons.

Click the following link to download the custom AutoHotkey script that we wrote: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=58ec0aca75258a2ac79b87b207592a1ce04e75f6e8ebb871

When you are prompted, Save the file to your desktop. Once it is saved to your desktop, select it and drag it into your Start Menu > All Programs > Startup. Drop the file there so that the file runs every time you start up your computer. Having this script run on startup allows you to always use a hotkey combination to view a Prospect Profiler record for a contact.


Once the script has been ‘installed’ successfully, the next time you start up Windows, you should see an AutoHotkey icon appear in your toolbar:


Now all you have to do is the following:

1. Select an email address from your email client (make sure you select the entire email address, rather than the address book display name):


2. Copy the address: CTRL + C
3. CTRL + SHIFT + Z: This runs the AutoHotkey script
4. Select “Yes” to the prompt confirming that you want to look up the activity for the contact with the email address you copied


Your internet browser will now automatically load up with a view of the Prospect Profiler for the contact you identified! Going forward, all you need to do is copy an email address and then hit the hotkey combination above and you can load up an activity overview of your lead or contact in seconds.


Again, if you have not already logged into the Eloqua application or stored your user credentials with the Profiler, you will be prompted to enter your company name (no spaces), your Eloqua user name and your Eloqua user password. Make sure you select the “Remember Me” option, then log in.





Note: If your user account does not have access to Prospect Profiler (it is an add-on product offering), you will get a message to this effect. Contact your CSM if you are interested in Prospect Profiler.

Prospect Profiler - without a CRM System

Today's post on Artisan is another guest post, this time from Ben McPhee, on our Product Management team. Ben is most well known for his recent work on Prospect Profiler, one of our keys to sales enablement, but he is also responsible for our work with the sports marketing vertical where we work with a number of professional sports teams, arenas, and racing facilities.

In this post, Ben revisits Prospect Profiler, and looks at ways in which it can be used in stand-alone manner, without relying on being embedded in a CRM system as it normally is.

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No CRM system? No problem. While Eloqua’s Prospect Profiler is most effective in the context of a Lead or Contact record, we recognize that context may not always be ideal or available. There will be instances in which sales reps would like to simply see a contact’s activity without having to navigate through a CRM system and other instances where reps have not been provided a CRM tool at all.

Focused on making both marketing and sales as successful as possible in as many scenarios as possible, we want to let you know about some alternate routes/shortcuts your reps can take to get to Prospect Profiler and acquire a more in depth understanding of their prospect’s interests and behaviors.


Option 1: Just get on the internet and go to it!

Go to http://prospectprofiler.eloqua.com/
If you have not already logged into the Eloqua application or stored your user credentials with the Profiler, you will be prompted to enter your company name (no spaces), your Eloqua user name and your Eloqua user password. Make sure you select the “Remember Me” option, then log in.

You will then be presented with a search bar – going forward, when you go to the URL above, you will be automatically taken to this search interface. Type in the email address of the contact whose profile you wish to view (notice that once you type in the ‘@’ symbol you’ll get a list of possible contacts from which to choose), then hit Search.


The page will then load that contact’s profile with all the standard features of the Prospect Profiler – hover-overs, drilldowns, previews, etc.

Option 1B. If you’re a Mac user, set up a dashboard

In case you’re a Mac user, we thought we’d point out a quick and easy trick so that you can have quicker access to the great information available in Prospect Profiler.

Open Safari and navigate to http://prospectprofiler.eloqua.com/

Login to the profiler using your Eloqua login info (make sure you select the “Remember Me” option)

Choose "File" and "Open in Dashboard..."



A purple bar will drop down from the top of your browser window - click on the "Add" button at the right end of that purple bar.

You'll now see prospect profiler living on your OS X dashboard making it instantly accessible at the click of a button (or swipe of your mouse if you're using expose)


Styling Tip: You can change the style of the dashboard frame by clicking on the small "info" button located in the bottom right corner of the Profiler dashboard.

With these techniques, you can make Prospect Profiler, and the insights it provides into prospect buying behaviour, available anywhere, without needing the context of a CRM system.

Note: If your user account does not have access to Prospect Profiler, you will get a message to this effect. Contact your CSM if you are interested in Prospect Profiler.

Setting Up Your Social Media GPS

Today's Eloqua Artisan post is a guest post from Mike MacFarlane, our own marketing operations manager. Mike is responsible for our own internal use of Eloqua, and is one of the best when it comes to innovative uses of the Eloqua platform.

I often get asked "how does Eloqua use Eloqua?" and Mike is the best person to answer that question.

Steve

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As a Marketing Operations Manager with Eloqua, my goal is to use the app to its full potential. There is just so much functionality available today, I always feel the need to find new and cool ways to use all the tools that I have been given as a marketer.

The most recent challenge I have given myself is to help integrate all of our Social Media efforts into Eloqua that allow us to report on and react to activity that happens on the web. Steve wrote a great post a while back about how to setup Social Media Referral reporting so you can see how much traffic you are driving to your website. This information has been extremely valuable for us and has helped to validate that all the work we have done in terms of spreading our marketing message through Social Media is well worth the time and effort. Still, I thought that we could do more.

Keeping up with the Sales Enablement theme that we have been promoting through the use of our new tool, Prospect Profiler, I thought to myself “Hey Mike, wouldn’t it be valuable to our sales reps if they could see their prospect’s social media activity”? Agreeing with myself, I started to build out an integration between Eloqua and our CRM system that I like to call “The Social Media GPS” - know where your prospect started and where they ended.

The ingredients for the devilishly good recipe are:
- A dash of Program Builder
- A handful of Saved Visitor Reports
- A pinch of ability to create activities within the CRM system
- A sprinkle of data tools for use within Program Builder

The image to the right is what the program flow looks like.

To start, I created a single track marketing automation program with the feeder into this program being a saved visitor report of those that came from Twitter to our website within a hour of the visit. In this case, I am feeding these web visitors into our marketing automation program as Prospects (as this allows me to create unique entries that I can report on later). The key information that I want to map from the visitor to the prospect is:

- Most Recent Referrer
- Last Page In Visit
- Last Visit Date and Time

When the prospect is created within the marketing automation program, I can then see this visitor information stored on its record (seen in the image to the right)

My record then flows down to a step which I run a Match Rule that looks for an existing Contact in our database based on a matching Email Address. The purpose for this match rule is to append the CRM ID that is stored on the contact record and write it over to my prospect. This ID is what is used to uniquely identify the record within Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM on Demand, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM and write information over to it.

After I append the CRM ID to my record, I then flow down to an integration event that will write this activity over to the CRM system. You will notice that I have set this action up as a conditional action.


The condition in this case is that if there is no CRM ID in the associated contact record, I do not want to run the activity call over to the CRM system. If there is a ID, then I want to execute the call to the CRM system.

Once the call is made to the CRM system to create the activity within the associated Lead/Contact record, the sales rep can then see how the website activity was generated. Here is what the rep would see:


(you may need to click the image for a full size view of the record in your CRM system)

So in one snapshot, your sales rep can see:

a) What webpage/blog/online asset the prospect visited
b) Where the visit originated from
c) When the visit happened

The other benefit to this information is that the sales rep can view both the referring and visited page URLs (as shown in the comments). In this case, if I were a prospect, the sales rep could click on the referring URL and actually view my Twitter profile. They could also read over the blog post that I went to (which could be helpful in a call when determining what my interests are).

Just another way that Eloqua can help you read your prospect’s Digital Body Language.

Please feel free to connect with me on Twitter @eloquamike or on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemacfarlane01)

Providing Sales Insights into Digital Body Language

There has been so much buzz about Prospect Profiler that I'd be remiss in not talking about it quickly.



Laura Ramos, from Forrester, highlights the fact that Marketing's Number 1 job is sales enablement on B2B Marketing Posts

David Raab from Customer Experience Matrix talks about Prospect Profiler and why Marketing Holds the Key to Effective Selling. He also has a great whitepaper on the subject available.

Our own David Rudolph talks about the symptoms of sales blindness on Funnelvision, his new blog.

Put simply, Prospect Profiler is the most eagerly anticipated release we’ve had in quite some time. It was highlighted when it came out in beta last quarter, and it has been seen fairly widely since then, with many of you using it during the beta process. I did talk about it briefly last release, but a few of the capabilities have been refined, so I want to go a bit deeper in talking about it as it approaches general release.

(*Note after the fact: Prospect Profiler is now, of course, in full general release)

At a high level, Prospect Profiler is an interactive, visual display of each prospect’s digital body language. Embedded in Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM on Demand, or Microsoft CRM, Prospect Profiler allows your sales team to get instant insight into what you as a marketing team are doing to communicate with prospects, and more importantly, what their response has been.

The main screen of Prospect Profiler provides a time chart of outbound communication and inbound prospect interest, and can be broken down by area (email, form, web visit, etc). The top section provides key insights into each area, as well as showing the prospect’s most recent search (on Google, Yahoo, or MSN), to provide crucial insight into their area of interest.

Not to be missed, however, are the secondary capabilities. The Website, Forms, and Emails tabs provide deeper insight into each of those areas. Each form can be presented exactly as the prospect filled it out, and each email can be previewed to gain insight into exactly what caught the prospect’s interest.

For example, when the chart shows a spike in activity for the prospect, a hover-over capability will give you a quick view of what that activity looked like. The spike shown here, for example is 66 page views on a specific day.

When calling a prospect, however, based on that activity, your sales team can benefit from knowing exactly what the prospect was interested in. Guiding the conversation to that interest area is key in engaging them. One click gives your sales team instand access to the details of the web visit and shows exactly what pages caught their interest. This detail of a visit can be very valuable in understanding exactly what each individual is interested in prior to a critical meeting or call.

Similarly, email activity can be viewed in great detail. By clicking on the email activity, your sales team can see the details of which emails have been sent, opened, read, and clicked on. Thumbnail previews give them highlights of the email, and a preview button will show them the exact email that was received, providing unparalleled insights into prospect interest.

Even more interactively, the button at the bottom of the screen, labeled “Setup Web Visit Alerts” allows your sales team to easily set up alerts so that they are notified immediately when a prospect, or even anyone from that company (based on email domain) shows up on your web site. This level of insight into visitor activity has typically been managed centrally by marketing through visitor alerts, but can now be managed by your sales team directly through prospect profiler.

If you are deepening your marketing team’s engagement with your sales team and working to have them better understand marketing’s effect on prospect engagement, and the insights that can be gained from understanding prospects’ digital body language, there’s no better way than through a tool like prospect profiler.

Understanding Buyers Through Internal Search Queries

I’ve talked quite a bit about things you can do with understanding the digital body language of your buyers based on Google search queries. However, there are often internal searches, within your web experience, that can be equally or more valuable. If your website uses an internal search for documents, case studies, or solutions, be sure you are adding the insights that can be gained from that into the view of your visitor’s digital body language.

To do this, there are two possible techniques. Either the search form can be integrated as a normal Eloqua form to capture the data before passing it back to the original search engine, or the search query itself can be captured directly from the query string seen in the URL.

The second technique is more commonly used if there is a hesitation to add an intermediary step between the user and the search results, of if there is a hesitation on the part of the team that owns the search area to make any alterations.

In this case, you can use query strings to track the searches. If the search results are presented in a URL that looks something like:


http://www.yoursite.com/search.php?searchquery=finance+case+studies


you can define a query string to look for the value of “Searchquery”.

With this query string defined, you will automatically capture the search query of each web visitor who performs a search within your site. This can be used individually for lead scoring purposes, or can be looked at in aggregate with reporting to see the aggregate trends in your visitors.

When thinking about understanding your buyers’ digital body language, it’s important not to overlook any potential areas of insight. An internal search engine can be a great source of this insight and it’s easy to track in Eloqua using either form integration or query strings.

This can be used either in overall understanding of buyer trends of the understanding of an individual's digital body language for the purpose of lead scoring or defining of nurturing routines.

Account Selling using an Activity Summary Report in Salesforce.com

In B2B marketing and selling, we are managing a delicate balance between selling to individuals and selling to the organizations they serve. At the end of the day, we are doing both, and being able to aggregate individual activities into an overall "radar" that helps us sell into an account is extremely valuable.

This is very easy with Eloqua, and you can present the account selling summary reports directly in your sales team's CRM system. With activity logging set up, you will be able to configure it quickly using your CRM system's reporting engine (in this example Salesforce.com).

What we'll be doing is creating a custom report that shows the response that people at each account have had to your marketing, rolled up by account, but showing the individuals and their activity.

First, create a New Custom Report in Salesforce.com under the Reports tab. You will be asked what you would like to report on, and select "Activities", followed by "Activities with Contacts" as we'll be looking to see, and aggregate, the activities performed by contacts in each account.

When you are asked what type of report you would like to create, select a Summary report as this will allow us to aggregate our data by account. To do this, when asked, choose to summarize the information by Account Name.

In the next step, we'll be asked to select which columns are of interest. There are a number that are critical for this exercise, and a number that are optional. Select "Subject" under Activity Info, as we'll use this field to determine whether the activity is an outbound marketing activity or a response.

Select Account Owner and Account Name, as these are the fields that will allow us to show this account radar based on an individual sales rep's accounts, and of course the Account Name field is what we are using to roll up the activities.

Similarly, we can select Contact Owner, First Name, and Last Name, under primary contact info, as this will allow us to see who the individual is who showed activity. We will also usually select Email, and perhaps Phone from the contact's connection information as this will make the final report more actionable.


The next step is the criteria. You will want to define a timeframe, such as "All Activities" that have been "Open & Completed" in the "Last 7 Days" to keep things recent and relevant.

In order to ensure that you only see inbound/response activities, rather than all marketing activities, you will want to add a filter on the Subject field. Add a "Contains" criteria, and type "visit,brochure,viewed" in the Value field to limit this report to only the activities of interest.

You can also add criteria to limit this report only to a specific sales rep, or a specific territory if you are interested at this point.

With this completed, you are ready to save and run the report. Click the image to the left to see what a final account radar report looks like.

This is a very useful report to construct for each of your field sales team members as it gives them an instantaneous view into their accounts, and they can see which of those accounts are showing buying activity.

Tracking Lead Sources through Query Strings

Where traffic comes from is always a topic of significant interest in marketing. We've talked about how to easily track this with Eloqua if you only know the website the traffic is referred from using Online Referrer campaigns, but there are many times that you have an ability to add a more detailed lead source code into the link that sends traffic your way.

If you do, in situations like PPC ads on search engines like Google, banner ads, or partner promotions, you can go one step further and track the exact source that brought the visitor.

The first step is to begin tracking the value of the code that will be passed through in a query string. This is the extension of the URL that looks like ?source=PPC&ad=Promo12.

To track this, go to the Query Strings tab under Web Profiling, and create a new Query String Parameter to be tracked. All you need to provide in most cases is the name that you are looking for in the query string, and Eloqua will take care of the rest. If you are working with a site that does not use the standard way of separating values with "&" and "=", you can also configure the rules for that setup in this area.

Once this is in place, you are automatically tracking the query string values that appear in each of the URLs your visitors visit, whether the first page in their visit or within a many page visit.

In the same manner as we did with online referral campaigns, we can set these query string value up in their profile to present as interesting data on the individual visitor. We can also pass this data into a web form quickly and automatically. Similarly, once it is available in the web visitor's profile field, we can display it to our sales teams in their CRM system so the can better understand the mind of each buyer.

With query string tracking set up well, it is easy to build a much clearer view of what is happening to drive traffic to your website and what each visitor does when they are on your site.

Lead source codes - capturing with Javascript

In a recent post, we talked about using form profile fields to capture the most recent lead source code, as seen in the URL's query string, into a form. If, however, you want to manipulate the lead source prior to placing it in the form, or in any way work with the data, you may wish to use javascript directly.

This is a slightly more technical route, but once you are comfortable working with the javascript behind the form, many options become possible in your marketing efforts.

The javascript file here has the code that you see to the left. Essentially, the script looks for query strings in the URL of your page. In this case, we are looking for a query string called "c", so it will appear as "&c=****" where **** is the lead source code we are looking to track.

The script then puts that value in the "Campaign_ID" field (likely a hidden field) within your web form. The web form in this example is called "WhitepaperForm_data". To configure this for your web form, just add the javascript into the page with your web form, and configure the form name, form field, and query string, and you will have the query string value automatically populate your form field.

This technique is a very useful one to know, as it can be extended to do all sorts of interesting things with your web forms, and the content on your pages, based on the values passed in in a query string.

Email Reporting - Visual Clickthroughs

Understanding the performance of each of your emails is a key goal in marketing. In many of our emails today, where there are many articles, and numerous offers, analyzing email performance needs to go to the level of the individual link.

That can be daunting to wrap your head around if you are presented with a table of links and the number of clicks, as you'll have to refer back to the email at each step to understand which link was which.

A better technique is to do it visually. With the visual click-through overview, you can see and understand email performance at the level of the individual link quickly and easily.

Start with the standard email dashboard for the email you're interested in. From the top right menu in the dashboard, choose the "Visual Click-through Overview".

The report will show you a view of your original email with the data on number of clicks and percentage of clicks layered on it.

Using this report is a great way to get a better understanding of exactly what offers are driving interest. In combination with A/B testing, you can also understand how offer placement affects clickthrough rates very quickly and easily.

As always, comments are welcome and appreciated.

Using Search Queries to Understand Buyers

One of the things that I talk about quite frequently is thinking about the prospects' buying process rather than our own selling process. Thinking in this way is key to making sure that we deliver the right message to each buyer based on where he or she is in his or her own thinking.


I wrote about the topic over on the digital body language blog here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2009/02/scoring-stages-of-buying-process.html


This discussion though quickly leads to the question of what to look for to give an indication that a prospect is at a certain phase of their buying process. One place to look is in search queries - the full search term used, not just individual key words.


I pulled some examples from the raw data in Eloqua's own marketing to give you a sense of this. In the first list, you can see general, pain-related and category-related terms, "lead management", "demand generation", terms that are only related to the general space in which Eloqua operates such as "marketing service provider", and terms that are clearly education-oriented, such as "digital body language".


Individuals with these search queries are, more likely than not, in an early education phase of their buying process. They are trying to learn about possible opportunities, or looking into solutions for pains that are somewhat related to what we solve.

At this phase in the buying process, high level thought leadership, ideas, and market research are often most of interest.

The next set of terms seems to be one step further down the buying funnel. By looking for more specific details such as "lead generation software", or detailed use cases like "marketing automation case study", we can see the buyer is progressing to the phase where he or she is looking to discover specific solutions to a more well formed view of a problem or an opportunity.

Being clearly visible (SEM and SEO) to searchers on terms at this phase in the buying process is key, as they are often looking to put together a list of possible vendors.

As buyers move further through the process, and begin to validate their chosen solution, or finalize their decision among two or three short list vendors, their search terms begin to get much more specific.

Often at this phase, you will see your own company name, and a very tactical query. Pricing, objections, issues, and specifications will often show up. From a marketing perspective, ensuring that information on key decision points and objections is readily available is key.

Also, as you work with your sales organizations, ensuring that they have insight into this aspect of their buyer's digital body language is critical as they can understand how the decision is progressing, and what top-of-mind issues are happening. Presenting that digital body language in their CRM system, or through Prospect Profiler can be a great way to keep sales armed with developments at the buyer's organization

Most Recent Campaigns as Source of Insight

I wrote recently about setting up Online Media referrer campaigns to track where your visitors are coming from. It's a simple but powerful technique in Eloqua to give you better insight into what sites are driving traffic your way.


This is equally valuable though, when looked at from the other direction. For each visitor on your website, you can see what the most recent referral campaign was that drove them to your site. With the tracking already set up, all we have to do is add that as a field to their visitor profile view.


Under the web profiling area, edit the profile view you want to show the most recent referrer campaign. Under profile fields, you should see an option for "most recent marketing campaign". Add that field to the appropriate spot in your profile view. You will also see similar fields for most recent search query, most recent channel, etc. All of these can be used in a similar manner, and can provide some very interesting insight into online media sources, blogs, and even Twitter.


With that in place, now when you use that Profile View for your reports, you will have columns that show the most recent online referral campaigns that drove each visitor to your site. Presenting this information in your visitor reports, especially those going out to your sales team can provide very important information as part of the prospect's digital body language.