Campaign reporting in Eloqua for people who don’t live in Eloqua

Three places the numbers live

Eloqua tracks everything. The difficulty was never the data. It is that the data is arranged for the people who run the platform, in three layers that each answer a different question for a different audience.

Operational reports

Every email, campaign, form and landing page carries operational reports. Open an email under Assets and click the reports icon and you get Email Link Click-Through for every tracked link, Recent Email Opens, Recent Email Sends, Recent Email Click-Through by date, contact and link and Recent Email Unsubscribes. A campaign has entry and exit reports that show who came in and who was excluded and why which is the first place to look when a segment count doesn’t match the send count. A simple email campaign shows its real-time performance the same way.

They are quick and they are close to live. They are also limited by design. Oracle says “email operational reports only report on the last 3 months of email activity,” they include test sends which Insight doesn’t and you need the View Operational Reports action permission to see the tab at all. Oracle describes that permission as a way to “provide more control over data accessible to marketers to meet data privacy policies,” which is a fair description of what it is for.

Dashboards

Dashboards sit a level up. The Campaign Analysis dashboard calculates its metrics “at the campaign level for all campaign assets,” with responses defined by your organization’s response rules. The Email Performance dashboard shows an email’s engagement by metric, segment performance, timeline and click map. They are built for a marketing manager reviewing a quarter rather than a marketer checking yesterday and they don’t let you drill to the contact.

Insight

Insight is the full reporting layer, powered by Oracle Analytics Server. It holds data for all time, lets you drill from a metric to the contacts behind it and comes with a library of out-of-the-box reports, the Email Analysis report among them. Anything the other two layers can’t answer, Insight can, given someone who knows how to ask.

Access comes in two kinds. A reporter runs what exists. Oracle says that “to access Insight, users must be a member of one of these security groups,” Basic or Advanced Users – Marketing, Executive Users or Administrator and that “there is no limit on the number of reporters.” An analyzer “can do everything a reporter can do and can also create analyses and dashboards,” needs an Analyzer license and companies “are able to have as many Analyzer licenses enabled as the number of Eloqua Marketing users they are licensed for.”

Two further controls shape what a given user sees. Insight Folder Security lets administrators restrict folders within the Company Shared folder to named users, with permissions inherited by sub-folders. And if the instance uses contact security, “any contact related report in Insight is limited to the contacts that a user can access,” while dashboards show everyone the same totals.

Why the marketer still files a ticket

Put those together and it is clear why “how did my campaign do” is one of the most common requests in an Ops queue.

The numbers need a login

Every layer is inside Eloqua. Most marketers in an enterprise that runs on tickets don’t work in Eloqua. They have no login, or one they used once during onboarding. Giving them one means a license, a security group with the right interface access and the View Operational Reports permission and a conversation about what else that group lets them do.

The numbers are arranged by asset

Operational reports belong to an email or a campaign. The marketer thinks in terms of the thing they asked for which might be one email, or a campaign with three, or a landing page and a form besides. Finding all the pieces and knowing which report on which asset answers the question is a skill and it is Ops’s skill.

The interesting questions need an analyzer

Which template performs best. Whether one sender gets better open rates than another. How this quarter’s regional sends compared with last quarter’s. These are the questions a marketing lead actually asks and none of them is answered by a report attached to a single asset. They need an analysis built in Insight by someone with an Analyzer license and most teams have a handful of those people and a long list of things they could be doing.

Three months, then Insight

A marketer who learns to use the operational reports will one day want to look at a campaign from the spring and find nothing there. Operational reports and simple campaign reporting stop at three months. After that it is Insight, with its own navigation and its own permissions.

Several instances, several logins

A company that runs more than one Eloqua instance, or Eloqua and Marketo, has the whole problem per instance. Nobody can see results across them without exporting and stitching. Marketo’s reports, Email Performance and Program Performance among them, sit behind a Marketo login in just the same way.

So the ticket gets filed, an Ops person pulls the numbers, pastes them into an email or a slide and the marketer gets their answer a day or two after they wanted it. Multiply by every campaign.

What marketers need from reporting

It is less than Ops tends to assume. The marketer who sent a campaign wants to know how many people it reached, how many opened it, how many clicked and, if there was a form or a page, how many did the thing. They want it the morning after, without asking, in a form they can read and forward. Occasionally they want to compare it with their last one.

The marketing lead wants one more layer: which templates, senders and teams are doing well across everything so that the next campaign is built on what worked.

Neither of those needs is served by giving marketers Insight. It is served by putting the right numbers where the marketer already is.

Reporting in Campaign Launchpad

Campaign Launchpad reports every campaign it launches inside Launchpad. The marketer who ran the wizard opens the campaign and sees its opens, clicks, visits and form submissions, pulled from Eloqua or Marketo, without a platform login and without a ticket. The campaign is the unit rather than the asset so the results of an email, its landing page and its form are one view.

For Ops and marketing leads, Launchpad breaks performance out by campaign, template and sender across every campaign in the account. That is the comparison that needed an Analyzer license and an afternoon in Insight, available to the people who make template and sender decisions. Because one Launchpad account can connect to any number of Eloqua and Marketo instances, the view spans all of them which no single platform report can.

Results in Launchpad don’t replace Insight for the analysts, who still have the full data and the tools to interrogate it. They replace the ticket. The marketer gets their numbers the morning after, Ops stops pasting figures into emails and the queue loses one of its most repetitive request types.