Eloqua Administration Best-Practice: Standardized Platform Usage

Marketing automation platforms, such as Oracle Eloqua, are powerful tools that have become more and more of a necessity for marketing operations, not only in large enterprises but smaller businesses too.

Learning all the ins and outs of operating such extensive platforms, with so many functionalities, emerging new opportunities, and a growing number of administrative challenges can be the key to your success in all digital campaign endeavors.

Easy to learn but challenging to master.

Indeed, implementing, maintaining, and utilizing marketing automation platforms, like Oracle Eloqua, to their maximum potential is a challenging task. With a steep learning curve, the time and effort that is required should not be underestimated.

However, once mastered, Eloqua provides substantial rewards, such as achieving better security for assets, improving the user experience, decreasing churn rates, building better campaigns in only minutes with intuitive UI & a large variety of options in workflow setup and decision steps.

Furthermore, master the right tools, and directly manage an infinite amount of data, being able to translate these insights into actionable solutions and recommendations.

How can faulty platform governance affect you?

Marketing automation platform governance is one of the most important aspects to take into account when it comes to your digital marketing experience, but this doesn’t come without its share of challenges.

This can have a significant impact on your business results, either good or bad, depending on how it is managed. Good administration that applies the right standardized platform use approaches leads to results that make the adoption effort worthwhile.

Improper platform management practices, on the other hand, have an equally detrimental effect. Faulty governance often leads to increased configuration time, loss of data, and higher risk exposures.

Fortunately, these common threats can be avoided by incorporating standardized approaches for platform use within your Eloqua administrative setup. Throughout this article, we cover four such ways in which you can enhance your Eloqua platform administration.

1. Establishing & Complying with a Naming Convention

Asset naming conventions are a helpful technique that makes everything more comfortable when used. You might wonder why.

Imagine having a folder that contains 1200 images and 650 different files, for example, PDFs, Excel sheets, Word documents, and others, all under unclear, vague names. Now, you have to search in these folders for all the assets related to a specific campaign that you created a couple of years ago. Seems daunting. Here is where the asset naming convention steps in.

Creating an asset naming convention to match the needs of your company is an activity usually avoided, deemed “less important”. But, dedicating the necessary time to it is much worthwhile, saving you plenty of time and sparing you some severe frustration.

This is especially the case when companies are growing because a larger business means a more significant database and an increased volume of assets to organize.

2. Organizing Campaign Assets by Folder Structure

Similar to the point mentioned above, having a folder structure convention improves workflow efficiency.

Even despite having implemented a proper naming convention which you comply with, storage of files, folders, projects, multiple campaigns, and assets might still lack efficient, proper organization. Therefore, implementing a folder structure convention is yet another step forward in your platform management. Besides, this process also proves to be helpful when you start a clean-up of your assets.

Having these meticulously organized, for example, in the following structure Fiscal Year > Business Group > Region > Campaign Identification makes it easy for you to navigate the platform or identify the assets that have to be kept, deleted, or archived.

Additionally, given development skills and resources, you can leverage the REST API “Get” requests and query parameters to allow you to pull lists of the assets sorted by group and ultimately help you in automating your assets clean-up process.

3. Building Data Dictionaries

Building data dictionaries is another technique that helps you standardize usage across data systems while simultaneously leveraging the organizational power of your marketing automation platform.

First, let’s see what a data dictionary is.

A data dictionary is a tool that helps you keep your data organized and consistent, usually represented by a spreadsheet containing entire lists of contact fields configured, connected systems, and others, carefully broken down and explained in meaning.

When used as a reference, data dictionaries should contain all data tables used by the system to organize information, such as data from campaigns, accounts, custom data objects, and contacts. Leveraging the benefits of the data dictionaries, you can standardize data usage across your systems, thus providing a broader context of your data and usage for all departments.

Moreover, these are accommodating when adding or updating system integrations, helping to eliminate errors and to provide the necessary guidance on the correct usage of new fields. Also, as an added benefit, it can be used as a guide for data-related questions of agencies or new teammates, saving substantial time.

To find out other similar solutions surrounding data restructuring in the scope of improving lead generation processes at the global enterprise level, don’t hesitate to check out our Customer Success Story. See for yourself how data normalization plays a vital role in best-practice MarTech functionality and take a step further towards accessing Eloqua’s full marketing automation potential.

4. Creating Security Groups

Having an overview of the access people have to the data and assets in Eloqua is essential. This reason is precisely why Eloqua offers the opportunity for security groups’ creation.

Security groups enable administrators to control users’ level of access. There are a few standard groups offered by Eloqua; however, you can also customize your own depending on the specific needs of your company.

Imagine having multiple marketing teams that are each working on their separate campaign. Each team has different data needs that are paramount for the success of their respective campaign. Sending an email to the wrong contacts by accident can have unpleasant consequences.

Yet, keeping track of all data access can be extremely challenging at such a large volume.

By creating security groups, and ensuring permanent compliance with these, Eloqua platform administrators can provide specific teams with access precisely to the data they need.

Final thoughts

As seen here, faulty platform management can be a hindering element to the efficiency of your marketing automation workflows.

Bad administration practices increase time loss, influencing your team’s overall performance. Not finding data and assets needed or taking invariably too long to do so can be a very frustrating experience, costing substantial time which you can better spend elsewhere.

Yet, just by implementing these four standardized platform administration approaches, you can turn these inconveniences into helpful ways to improve functionality.

Increased security boosts the protection of your essential data, while marketing teams can be thankful for the beautiful management of files and data, allowing them to truly focus on content optimization, instead of spending time looking up assets. Applying these practices undoubtedly enables data users to make changes in bulk across all the systems that use Eloqua data.

Ultimately, we know that tackling a complex subject like platform administration can be difficult. Often, the biggest challenge is knowing the right places where we can improve.

To relieve you of this stress, we offer you the chance to benefit from a complimentary audit of your Eloqua install. Depending on your specific needs, you can sign up for a free trial of our trusted Eloqua services and test your compliance with best-practice platform administrative settings.

Check out the threefold Eloqua Platform Audit to determine if, where, and how, you can improve your Preference Centre management, audit your Security Groups compliance or check for Field Completeness.