All posts tagged Visitor Profiling

The Cost of Bad Data

by JFung on June 3, 2011 in B2B Best Practices, Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation, Other with No comments

Our very own Mike MacFarlane, Senior Marketing Consultant of Couch & Associates had the pleasure of speaking at Eloqua’s “It’s All About Revenue” Success Tour in Toronto yesterday on the topic of data.  While data might not be the “coolest” topic to talk about, it is something that is near and dear to many marketers’ hearts.  Having bad data to work with makes our life harder as a marketer; everything from reporting, segmentation, lead scoring and lead nurturing.

For those of you that were not able to attend, here are the three key takeaways from his presentation:

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Identifying Active and Inactive Contacts

by Sandeep Singh on May 11, 2010 in Lead Scoring, Nurturing Campaigns, Other with No comments

Have you been sending out emails to find new leads which you can pass on to your sales team?  Have you been using your Eloqua or marketing database for a while now? Would you like to identify who is responding to your campaigns?

If you continue to send communication to contacts who do not respond to your marketing efforts they might mark your emails as spam rather than unsubscribing.  Identifying these contacts in your database will allow you to suppress them from frequent communication.

How we define active and inactive contacts in your database:
An active Contact is defined as a contact that has opened an email, visited your website or completed a form in the last 4 months.

An inactive Contact are defined as a contact who has been sent at least 3 emails over the past 4 months and not had ANY tracked response activity.

Using the new Eloqua contact filter interface you can now combine the ability to filter on contact field values, activity and inactivity data.  Having all your filtering criteria in one filter you might have to apply advanced logic to make your filter accurate and execute correctly.

Once these contacts have been categorized you can now see the potential of how you can target your marketing efforts to these segments of contacts.  We would suggest that you create a re-engaging nurturing campaign for the inactive contacts as they are not ready to buy but when they are you will be on top of their minds.

COntact Filter

Google Analytics

by Barry Taylor on April 15, 2010 in Other with No comments


One of the most essential things necessary to create successful websites, landing pages, or marketing campaigns is to be able to measure your own success. There are many different ways to extract this information from your projects, but one of the most simple, reliable, and powerful solutions to do this is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics has come a long way since its initial release in 2005. Many marketers, webmasters, and companies now rely on this free platform for all their analytical needs. The reason all these people continue to use Google Analytics is its vast amount of reporting and integration features that Google constantly keeps innovating and releasing.

Google Analytics also allows integration with Google Adwords, which is currently one of the largest and most successful online advertising platforms available to date.  Syncing Google Analytics with Google Adwords allows for you to get accurate information of traffic and income generated from your Google Ads. This allows you to collect trend information on which ads are doing better during which time/days of the weeks, empowering you to fine tune your ad budgets to maximize your Google Adwords profits. 

Another reason why Google Analytics has been able to thrive is its simplicity of implementing it on website. General set ups require a simple step by step setup which entails posting a block of code that has your account id generally in your pages footer above the </body> tag. The block of code necessary to track your code won’t interfere with any other tracking your site has, and won’t bog your site down.

Example of a code required for simple tracking purposes.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : http://www.);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXXX-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

Google Analytics then automatically creates daily/weekly/monthly reports based on your traffic that can provide you with the insight you need to better manage your sites. Some of the useful features include reports showing what percent of your visitors use a certain browser, or how many of your visitors are from a specific state or province, and even what resolution they’re using to view your site. Information like this can be used to better cater your sites to your target audience allowing you to make the correct decisions in your marketing campaign design process. 

One of Google Analytic’s newer features that is still in beta and began in October 2009 is Google Analytics Intelligence. Intelligence monitors your sites traffic and automatically alerts you to any significant changes in your traffic. The created alerts also indicate when and where the change happened. Alerts are setup to monitor your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, and are all automatically compiled into Google Analytics Dashboard styled reports. Intelligence also allows you to make your own custom triggers that creates alerts, and can also automatically email you allowing you to see any significant changes on your mobile devices.

Google Analytics can also be integrated into your ecommerce sites to help track which products are selling, where the traffic that is buying is coming from, and how it’s getting there. This is very useful to help you design your ads to increase revenue of products that aren’t selling as well as you would like. This also helps you identify which sales processes are more effective I.E. does the 2 pages stream sell more then the 4 page stream? Identifying which sites are referring the most traffic to you is also important to determine which sites you need to invest more advertising in to maximize your ad income.

There are still a large amount of features and abilities of Google Analytics that I have not covered, but the best way to figure out which features are most valuable to you is by trying Google Analytics yourself.

Eloqua Contact Ownership & Profiles 101

by Mike Couch on January 18, 2010 in Other with No comments

Salesforce.com has it on all objects.  In fact, most CRM systems follow this general concept: each object in the system is owned by a user of that system.  Further, most platforms make this a mandatory relationship.

For instance, here is an example of a test Contact from our SFDC instance (owned by me):

To some of you, you may see this and think of the million ways your organization is leveraging this particular relationship in CRM.  Perhaps you use this during employee transitions, allocating all the accounts from an old employee to a new one.  Maybe, you keep a close eye on the number of opportunities owned by a given salesperson and ensure your pipeline is allocated to those people who can adequately manage the potential deal.  Maybe, you don’t use this relationship at all strategically, the owner is simply the creator of the given object and that’s that.

That said, this article isn’t about CRM Object ownership.  I could expand the examples above to an almost endless list, including Lead Assignment, but where I’d like to go with this is from a Marketing perspective; within your Eloqua system. Continue reading →