Overview
Contacts perform a variety of activities that are external to Eloqua that make up a valuable part of their digital body language. From attendance at a tradeshow to viewing a webinar, ensuring you have a holistic perspective on all elements of a contacts engagement can help you target them more appropriately. With the Summer '13 release we've added new criteria that allow you to filter and segment contacts based on their external activity.
Introduction to External Activities
By their definition, since external activities happen outside of the Eloqua application, they must be imported into Eloqua and associated with the corresponding contacts who have performed them. Before we dive into the details of the new filtering capabilities available with the release, here are a few terms and their definition that will help you understand how the data model is configured.
- External Asset Type: This is a type of asset that a contact performs an activity on. As an example, this may be "Tradeshow" or "Webinar", etc. This is the equivalent of defining a channel such as "Email" or "Landing Page". These can be defined under Setup --> External Activities (screenshot below)
- External Activity: This is an action that a contact can take on a specific external asset. e.g. a contact can "register" or "attend" Eloqua Experience 2013. These can be defined under Setup --> External Activities (screenshot below)
- External Asset Name: This is a specific occurrence of an External Asset Type. As an example, for Tradeshow's, this may be "Road to Revenue Tour 2013 - Chicago" or "Eloqua Experience 2013", etc.
- External Asset Date: This is the date on which the External Activity occurred. Note: the required format for this field is mm/dd/yyyy.
- Email Address: This is the primary key used to identify the contact that performed the external activity.
Click here for a more detailed guide to using external assets in an Eloqua campaign for closed loop reporting.
Filter on External Activities
Now that you've successfully uploaded external activities and associated them with corresponding contacts, you can take advantage of the new features available with the Summer '13 release for segmentation.
Segments have been updated to include a new drop down that lists all external asset type's in addition to categories for other standard activities. (see screenshots below). Each of the External Asset Types defined in the setup area will be show in the drop down.
Selecting a specific External Asset Type will narrow down the filter criteria to the corresponding external activities. As an example for "Tradeshow" one of the criteria available is "Attended - Tradeshow". You now have the ability to select which specific External Asset Name (or instance of the External Asset Type) and the date of the activity. This will return all contacts who have performed an external activity satisfying your criteria.
