Reporting on sparkly clean data

(guest post from Mike MacFarlane @eloquamike)

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In the year and a half that I have been working in Eloqua’s Marketing Operations team, one of the things that I have realized is that Marketing Automation is more than just “deploying an email”. Actually, it is much more than that.

Using Eloqua to really drive the alignment between our sales and marketing teams, I've realized how valuable it is to have absolute accuracy on any reports. This means, sometimes, I want to run a little bit of a cleanup routine on data before I report on it, rather than just running the out-of-the-box reports.

For our own team, this approach had started off a while back with managing how data came into our database and what we did with it once it entered. Enter the “Contact Washing Machine” – a program that I built within our own instance of Eloqua that helps to standardize and normalize key data that we segment and report off of. Once we were able to align our data, it opened up a world of possibilities in terms of the depth of reporting I could do (as well as how easily I could pull reports).

We wanted this confidence in the data to carry over to all our reporting, and I want to show you how we achieved that when we were building what we call our Activity Dashboard (there is lots of information in Eloqua’s Customer Central on how to build out your dashboard). The primary purpose of this dashboard was the help visualize exactly what was happening in our database – everything from total inquiries, inquiries by segment, inquiries by normalized title… the list goes on and on!

To get the ball rolling on this process, I created a very simple program in Program Builder which would help me to bucket active prospects into one group. We have various definitions of what an inquiry is, but for simplicities sake, I am going to define my inquiry as a form submission.

Step 1: I built an Activity Based Filter that evaluates any and all form submissions within the last day. This lets me get started with the set of data I'm interested in having a sparkly clean report on:



Step 2: I took my filter and added it as a feeder to my program (*note that activity filters only evaluate once a day). This technique lets me work with the data before I see it in a report, rather than use the out-of-the-box forms reports:



Step 3: The same step where I have my feeder setup, I also have a step action to add these people to a contact group. I'm going to report on the contact group members, rather than directly on the form submissions, so it allows me to do a little bit of data cleanup first:



You will notice above that after I add these people to a contact group, I evaluate to see if they are a current customer or partner of Eloqua – if they are, I remove them from the contact group that placed them in originally. The purpose of this is because I strictly want to evaluate inquiries from prospects. Any other cleanup and massaging of the data that you want to do before you report on it can be done here in this program. I'll just show this one cleanup step of removing customers and partner, but you can extend and elaborate.

Step 4: Once you have your contact group setup, you can start to build out all kinds of reports to place on your dashboard. For example, if you wanted to have a report that showed your inquiries by title, you could use the report called “Contact Field Values By Contact Group”. Simply select the title field in your database (or in our case at Eloqua, we use our Normalized Title field which is part of our Contact Washing Machine) and the contact group that is referenced within your activity program and run the report. The output looks something like this:



Steps 5: Next, you will want to add this report to your dashboard:




Your end result will look something like this - a very similar report to what you would have had out of the box, but now sparkly clean:



There are many other reports that you can add to your dashboard by simply utilizing this one, dynamic contact group so feel free to check out the Report Console within Eloqua. I would love to hear your feedback about how you are utilizing dashboards within Eloqua to help provide visibility on your marketing efforts, so feel free to leave your comments below.

Happy Marketing!

Five in 5: Reporting Fundamentals

To help you get the most out of Eloqua, we're launching a series called Five in 5. These are five very quick tips on how to get the most out of Eloqua - small features or settings you may not have known about, quick tips, and ideas.

The first of this series is Reporting Fundamentals: Accessing Data for Insight, and highlights five reporting tips and tricks you can get started with today.

Each of the tips leads back to a more detailed overview of how to go about doing what is described. Either click on the links in the Brainshark presentation, or download the Five in 5 Reporting Fundamentals PowerPoint.

I hope you get a few good ideas out of this one:

(if this does not load, the original Five in 5 Reporting Fundamentals presentation is here)

The topics covered on Eloqua Artisan are both for you, as users, and from you. Please keep the ideas coming.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement

One of the panels at Eloqua Experience that was very much worth watching was the panel discussion between Paul Teshima, Eloqua's SVP of Customer Success, and three of the industry's top CMO's and marketing leaders - Chris Boorman of Informatica, Drew Clarke from Cognos/IBM, and Tom Miller from ADP.

Some great insights came out of this panel as they each showed how they are measured, how they measure their teams, how they build their marketing dashboards, and what they are doing about measuring new media and the effects of social media.

The conversation is divided into parts so you can skip to the section of most interest to you. I hope you enjoy the insights from these leaders as much as I did:

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 1: Paul Teshima introduces the panelists and the topic of the marketing metrics that matter and building the CMO dashboard.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 2: The four key elements of marketing analysis are introduced - Campaign ROI, Funnel Health, Strategic Segment Analysis, and Benchmarking - and a discussion on "How are you measured today?" starts.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 3: The question of "How do you measure your marketing effectiveness?" is discussed by the panel, and the three marketing leaders show their own dashboards (Chris Boorman and Drew Clarke)

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 4: (continuation) The question of "How do you measure your marketing effectiveness?" is discussed by the panel, and the three marketing leaders show their own dashboards (Drew Clarke)

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 5: (continuation) The question of "How do you measure your marketing effectiveness?" is discussed by the panel, and the three marketing leaders show their own dashboards (Tom Miller)

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 6: Open questions regarding percentage of pipeline that marketing is expected to contribute, and how data is maintained across the entire lifecycle of a lead in the marketing process.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 7: Open questions on measuring buzz from social media and its effect on search and SEO, as well as measuring brand equity vs revenue.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 8: Open questions on measuring influences of marketing in deals rather than just sourcing.

Eloqua Experience: Highlights from 2008 - Fred Waugh, Convio

Eloqua Experience 2009 is just around the corner. Coming to San Francisco on Nov 2nd - 4th, 2009, this is the event of the year for any marketer focused on marketing automation and demand generation. We’ll have 3 tracks this year; a “Rising Star” track for those just getting up to speed with campaigning, lead scoring, lead nurturing, and sales alignment, a “Rock Star” track for those who are looking for cutting edge ideas on understanding, communicating with, and facilitating buying processes, and an “Executive Insights” track for those leading marketing organizations and looking to transform their businesses.

Topping it all of is the Markies Gala on Tuesday night, where the industry’s best marketers will be celebrated in 12 categories. If you have not yet written up your Markies submission, the deadline is fast approaching on Friday, October 2nd so you’ll want to submit soon.

In preparation for this year’s event, I wanted to highlight a few of the presentations from last year that I thought were particularly interesting. Not only are the ideas shared in these presentations still highly relevant today, but most of the marketers you hear in these presentations will be back at Eloqua Experience this year as veterans, and you will have a great opportunity to talk with them and get their advice and insights into not just how they re-engineered their businesses as discussed in these presentations, but how they have grown from there in the past year.

Today’s highlight is Fred Waugh, VP Marketing and Alliances at Convio. Convio is a leader in software for non-profits, and as such they serve a very broad base of customers, ranging in size from local food banks to the American Red Cross, and in their focus, ranging from libraries to cancer foundations.

In this presentation, Fred walks through their transition in Sales and Marketing alignment, from a “Field Marketing 1.0” perspective, to their current state. The presentation is rich in metrics, and ways of analyzing the Marketing pipeline.

Some highlights from Fred's Sales and Marketing Alignment Presentation (use the “Chapters” tab to quickly jump through the presentation):

5:03 Marketing 1.0
Fred discusses their previous state, what they were measure on, and how they tied closed/won business back to marketing’s influence.

14:00 Model Sensitivity
Fred looks at the sensitivity that their models had to changes in assumptions on close rate and what that did to drive the need for more leads in Marketing.

20:12 Report Card
A comparison of Convio data to benchmarks from Sirius Decisions

22:21 Pipeline Contribution
A full report of funnel data all the way from marketing through to sales, based on the quarter in which an opportunity was created


I look forward to seeing you all at Eloqua Experience 2009 in San Francisco, and I hope you will all submit your Markie award submissions before next Friday.

Quick Tip: Dashboard Pop-Outs

One of the most powerful ways to ensure the your marketing organization adopts a culture of analytics is to focus heavily on building great dashboards. One very quick tip that some users of Eloqua dashboards may not be aware of is the Pop-Out function.

For the sake of keeping your dashboards clean and clear, many tabular reports are automatically truncated to 10 or 15 rows. This is great for clean viewing of an overall dashboard, but can be problematic if you are looking to do a deeper dive into trends that are below your top 10.

If you want to dig in further than the top 10, you'll need to see a full list. Whereas you could easily see this in the report console, there is an easier way with dashboard pop-outs.

Under the "Actions" menu, select "Pop-out Report", and you will pop that report out into its own window, giving you a full screen to work with (useful for larger reports such as visitor lists), and allowing you to go beyond the top 10 or 15 rows.



A lot of thought can be put into what you include on your dashboards, and it's an area that I recommend reading up on. Tim Wilson has a great post on the art of dashboard design and development to get you started on his Gilligan on Data blog.

A well crafted dashboard can give your team great insights into your overall marketing efforts and their success, and when presented to your executive team, can alter their overall thinking about the investments you need to make in marketing.

Insights on Data Quality from Contact Group Dashboards

Understanding your data is one of the most critical things to do as a marketer. Data is a foundation for everything you do; lead scoring, segment definition, content personalization, lead routing, and marketing analysis. Without good data, each of those tasks will be challenging if not impossible.

One of the most powerful tools in understanding your data is the contact group. It lets you build almost any cut of data that you want. Most simply, this can be done with simple group overlap rules that show people who are in group A, but not group B for example.

A slightly more advanced technique is to combine groups and filters to perform robust group manipulation to create a combination of activity and data as a driver for a group definition. This process can be further automated using a marketing automation program to dynamically create a dashboard based on group membership.

With each of these techniques, you are provided with a one-click dashboard of the group. By selecting "Contact Group Dashboard" from the menu, you get a full suite of interesting reports showing you what is happening with that group and the contacts in it.

One of the most interesting reports in this dashboard is the Contact Field Completeness report. This report shows you, based on a view, how complete the fields are in contacts within that group. Each field is shown as being between 0 and 100% complete, giving you good insight into whether you have data to work with for the set of contacts in your group.

However, more interesting than this, is the results you get by clicking on a field of interest. For example, if we click on the "Title" field (98.2% complete), we can see that the data within that field is from a manual text field as it is obviously free form.

A quick look at this data gives you a good sense of whether it is of sufficient quality to build rules upon.

Using this dashboard to quickly understand your data gives you a very quick sense of where you are at and what areas you need to work on in terms of data quality.

Armed with this understanding, you can quickly tune your contact washing machine to best optmize the data that you have and the data that you need. With cleansed and normalized data, building segmentation rules, lead scoring rules, content personalization rules, and marketing analysis becomes significantly easier.

Marketing Analysis and the Lead Funnel

In thinking about B2B marketing analysis from the perspective of a top-down view of a balance sheet and income statement of lead metrics means that we need to look at the stages of the buying funnel a bit more objectively. A balance sheet view would give us a current (or past) point in time view of what leads are at what stage, and an income statement view would give us an indication of the transitions in stage that took place within the time period.

The first step is to define the stages of your buying process more explicitly. This can be as simple as the Sirius Decisions model of Inquiries and Marketing Qualified Leads, or it can be a unique mapping of the buying process stages of your business. The number of stages in your buying funnel will depend on your business and how your buyers buy.

With the stages defined, however, you can then begin to model them as part of your marketing analysis. Within Eloqua, this means defining the lead stages/ranks. In Campaigns, under "Inquiries & Leads", select "Lead Ranking Systems". You can define a lead ranking system to model your buyers buying process as you need.

Each leve you define has an order, a name, and a text value. The text value is what is written to the underlying contact or prospect when a lead is defined as being in this stage.

To indicate that a contact or a prospect is a lead at a certain stage of the buying process, you must build a lead ranking rule. Under Data Tools, build a lead ranking rule for each stage in your buying process.

With that in place, you can use a lead ranking rule whenever you want to define that a lead is at a particular stage. The text value for the lead rank/stage is written into the contact record, so existing processes that may be dependant on seeing data in the contact record are unimpacted.

The lead ranking rules can be run anywhere it might make sense; on groups that have been uploaded, such as lists from events or tradeshows, in form processing steps to indicate that anyone submitting a certain form is at a certain stage of the buying process, or within program builder.

Running a lead ranking rule from within program builder is done in a similar manner to how leads were ranked as being a certain stage using data update rules. Except that when done within a lead ranking system, the lead rank is stored historically, and forms a basis for all of your marketing funnel analysis.

With your lead funnel data flowing through as formal lead ranks, you will be able to easily represent it in funnel reports in the campaign analysis area. More importantly, when it is tracked in this way, a historical record of the lead rank for each person is kept. This allows you to view how each person's lead rank has changed over time, and begin to understand how your marketing campaigns have facilitated moving buyers through the lead funnel.

(*Please note that the capabilities described here are currently available only with Eloqua Team edition)

Marketing Dashboards and Time Ranges - A Quick Tip

I use custom dashboards a lot in Eloqua, usually in order to track ther performance of anything I'm interested in over an extended period of time. The performance of the Eloqua Artisan and Digital Body Language blogs are good examples of that - I check in on their performance using a custom dashboard at least a few times per week. We also track in great detail what the sources of traffic are for our online properties in another custom dashboard.



When building and using custom dashboards, one setting that is worth being aware of, and thinking about, is the time range settings. This is the definition of exactly what period of time is included in the dashboard. With Eloqua, you have a rich set of options that you can use to define exactly what timeframe you have in mind.



You can configure this for the standard dashboards in your system in one central place, under Setup->Management->Systems Management->Dashboard Settings, or you can configure the settings for each report in a custom dashboard by selecting Edit under the Actions menu on the report's upper right side.



Each of these will give you a set of time range options. For a dashboard, it's almost certain you will be using a relative range (the period of time up until now) rather than a fixed range (a specific set of days) as you generally want the dashboard to change over time and be up to the current moment.



However, that's where the nuances come in. If you are looking at a daily chart for the last 3 weeks, for example, exactly how you specify that will guide how your data appears for the periods around the start and end of the time period.



For example, if we looked at it literally, we could say that the last three weeks was equal to the last 3x7x24 hours. However, the data for the day at the start (three weeks ago) and the day at the end (today) would be skewed based on the time of day we looked at. If I looked at that data at 6pm, the starting day would only have 6 hours of data in it and the ending day (today) would only have 18 hours of data in it (up until 6pm). In many cases, this literal option is not the best result.



The "Last Full X days/weeks/months" options provide a way around this, by only including full days. There is also an option to "include today" with these if you do want to show the 18 hours of data up until the current moment in the day today, without skewing the data on the start day.



Similarly, a variety of options allow you to report on specific precisions at the week or month level (such as weekdays only, for example), if that is relevant to your marketing analysis.


What is important is that you think carefully about exactly what period of time is of interest to you and then select that option for your dashboards. The options will be available to you to do what you need.

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.

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.

Email Analysis By Region - Batch Overview by Group

If you are running a marketing operation that is larger than one region, you'll likely want to be able to split your analysis by region. Even very useful reports such as the email batch overview report become too busy to be useful with a large marketing group sending many batches per day.

Many of these high level reports can be broken down by region in one or more ways.

One of the easiest ways to break down the "email batch overview" report, for example is to use the "email batch overview by security group" report instead. This presents the same information, but is done based on the security group of the sending person.

If you have existing groups of marketers that suit your purposes, you can use them, or if not, you can create these groups.

Defining groups based on "marketers in France" vs "marketers in Germany" allows you to split your reporting along geographic lines, while defining groups based on "marketers targeting SMB" vs "marketers targeting Enterprise" allows you to split your reporting based on market focus.

Once you have selected your group, you can run the report and see the email batch overview based on that group of marketers. This report can be added to a custom dashboard or an email update as you require.

Analyzing a Blog or a Subsidiary Website

As part of running this blog, I wanted to be able to separate my traffic on this area of the site from the main Eloqua.com web traffic. Separating it lets me dashboard it, build rules specific to the site and better understand what is happening.



The first step in working with a blog or a subsidiary website (either for a specific campaign, for a product, or for a subsidiary company) is to define a Sub Site. This is a domain name, or a few domain names, that define the Sub Site to be analyzed. It is still part of the main web analytics, but can also be analyzed as a stand alone entity.



In Eloqua, in the Web Integration tab under Web Profiling, create a new Sub Site, and add in the domain you want to track separately. I'm creating a Sub Site for the Digital Body Language blog, and another for the Eloqua Artisan blog, so I'll create a new Sub Site for each.



That is all you need to do to create a Sub Site. Now it can be analyzed, and added to a dashboard. In the Report Console, go to the Website Overview section and you'll see a list of reports that relate to analyzing your Sub Site.



For each report that you want to use, click the Add to a Dashboard menu item to add it to your dashboard. This will give you a configuration screen where you can configure the options for how this report is shown on your dashboard. I usually would use a relative time range of last 14 or 28 days to give a recent history of the performance of the Sub Site.





Select the dashboard you want to add the report to (I'm assuming you've created a personal dashboard earlier - if not you'll want to do that). The dashboard will be available from your Eloqua Today page, and can be shared with your colleagues if appropriate.



If you're using this technique to track traffic on a blog, you'll probably notice that I didn't cover adding the tracking scripts to the blog itself. Not hard to do on any of the standard blogging platforms, but I'll cover that in a separate post.

Targeting a Territory

Lots of marketing is still geographically targeted in B2B - face to face events, breakfast seminars, local references, or field events for a particular territory to fill up that field team's sales pipeline. Let's take a quick look at how to target a territory with a Contact Filter.

The first step is creating your Contact Filter - under the "Contacts" tab, choose "New Contact Filter" from the top menu. You've probably done this before, but the piece that some know about, and some don't is the "in" condition. This evaluates whether a particular field value is "in" a list of values. I think that this was one of the most common requests I heard at a number of Eloqua user groups, as prior to this, the only way to do it was with many individual criteria... not a great solution, we readily admitted.

So choose "Country" is "in" as a filter criteria, for example, and let's pull together a group of Contacts in South-East Asia. Click on the List, and it will pop up a list editing interface where you can add your list of countries.

It's easy to see why data quality is absolutely critical in managing your marketing database, as you can see I've built this filter assuming the data on country is not normalized, and a list of 10 countries quickly becomes a lot longer with over 30 different ways of writing their names (and this is by no means exhaustive).

(See my post on data normalization here http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/whats-in-name-job-titles-and.html or the need for a Contact Washing Machine here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/contact-washing-machine.html for more on that... it's a common topic for me)

Once you've created this filter, save it, and you can start seeing results. Pop open the Contact Filter Dashboard, and you can see that it is capturing the right group of Contacts. Contact Filters can be used in targeting email lists, routing leads, scoring leads, or analyzing your database, so having a quick way to define a territory up your sleeve is always handy.

Comments welcome as always, I look forward to hearing about how you're using territories in your marketing efforts.

Quick win - what's going on in my database

Okay, I'm cheating already. Our own Chad Horenfeldt (http://www.twitter.com/chadhorenfeldt ) created some great videos that show you how to put together an Eloqua dashboard with key metrics on your database. Contact growth, email frequency, most popular lead sources, titles of leads that have been ranked as A leads, etc.



I'm all for unique and original content, but when I happen across a 20 minute video that hits on a topic I was about to blog about, I'll just borrow it.


This video shows you a few things; how to use standard system dashboards, or dashboards on each individual asset (emails, groups, filters, forms, etc) to quickly get a view into marketing performance. It also shows you how to put together your own custom view of what you care about into your own custom dashboard.


See the video here: http://www.eloquasm.com/eloqua/wallboard/Dashboards_contacts_custom/Dashboards_contacts_custom.htm


If you've built an interesting dashboard showing your marketing operations results, I'd love to hear about it.