Oracle Eloqua 18D Release Overview

This week marks the final release in what has been a busy year for Eloqua releases. After a few years of lean updates, Oracle have been rolling out the big guns in 2018. Q4 is no exception with the headline feature undoubtedly being the general release of the new landing page design editor.

This was only released as a beta back in August but has proven to be far more stable and usable than expected, so has been fast tracked for GA this quarter. It fills an important feature gap for Oracle, allowing the easy creation of well designed form landing pages. This is something that Marketo have with their guided landing pages, but Eloqua lacked. The Eloqua version is less flexible but has the advantage that there is no need for a developer to code the initial template. A simple registration page can be built from scratch with no coding skills. There are a few limitations with the editor if you want control over spacing or dimensions, the adjustment of which can vary between fiddly and impossible to set. However, for the average marketing user, the new templates are really user friendly so long as you keep it simple. A designer would be frustrated with the limitations caused by the strict wireframe and restrictions in HTML usage, but a basic one or two column template with a banner is definitely possible. Unlike competitive products, these templates are genuinely modular out of the box, so can be extended with additional content if needed, which is also a strong positive.

The landing page editor beta has been so successful that Oracle have now announced the depreciation of the old WYSIWYG email and landing page design editors. As of May 2019, the option to create assets using these old drag and drop PowerPoint style editors will be removed, with the ability to edit existing assets disabled in August. Usage of these editors is low, with most Eloqua customers switching in recent years to the HTML editors due to the lack of support for responsive design in the legacy design editors. However, the HTML editor has always been fragile, as it is far too easy to accidentally break assets when editing them using the preview pane. If you're running into these issues, then the new editors are definitely be worth considering, so long as you're comfortable with having more basic layouts and much less sophisticated designs. Either way, the HTML editors are going nowhere.

Salesforce Integration App

Over the longer term, the most significant feature in this release will be the closed beta of the new Salesforce integration app. This has been coming for a long time. When Oracle brought Eloqua, they threw out the existing native Oracle Sales Cloud integration and developed a new one using the app cloud framework. This Oracle CRM app went GA last year, and now a few lucky customers get the Salesforce version. The key benefit is not so much the app itself, but instead the ability to use it on program canvas and campaign canvas. The existing native integration requires program builder, which limits how fast it can run - adding delays of minutes or hours to lead creation in CRM. Program canvas runs much faster.

The key question is whether it will retain the flexibility of the existing integration, whilst being easier to use and configure. Other systems have deeper integrations with Salesforce, but Eloqua's is the most flexible. With the current setup Oracle support much more complex multi-CRM scenarios compared to their competitors as well as vastly more custom configurations. This is one of the major selling points of the product. Although, if the feature set of the Sales Cloud integration app is any indicator, then this shouldn't be a problem.

Forms

There are yet more updates to form configuration options in this release. Last time, some UI enhancements were made to processing step conditions. This time they're adding starts with, ends with, contains and not operators. None of this is new functionality as the same conditions were already possible using wildcards, but the updated UI is welcome and makes the capability more obvious.

One of the big pushes in recent years has been around form security. Continuing this theme is a new option on form fields to reject form submissions that contain HTML. This option will be enabled by default, so be aware of this if you use forms to post email or landing page content into Eloqua for any reason. The primary users of HTML in form submissions are spammers though, so this has the nice side effect of restricting spambots.

The ability to restrict forms to internal usage will help too. These forms will only be visible in Eloqua, so can't be used by people who aren't logged into the app. There are several use cases for this one related to project management and program workflows with the form post app, so the option is more useful than it might initially seem.

Dashboards

The ever increasing number of built-in dashboards get a new landing page with a tabbed view to group them together by type. Users also get a closed loop reporting dashboard, so that attribution information can be viewed in Eloqua without delving into Insight. Not all Eloqua customers use this functionality, so its benefit is limited. The addition of the email click-through visualiser to the email dashboard has broader utility. This report already exists as a standalone option in the email editor, but it is good to have it in the same page as the other email reporting.

Insight gets extra customisation options to go alongside the ability to assign an analyser license to any Eloqua user. This is now a self-service capability that admins can grant to users through user management without requiring support cases. Also in Insight, more reports get the time span option on the prompt screen, including the widely used Email Analysis Overview report. There are additional customisation options to the website and closed loop reports in Insight as well. Some reports had been locked to prevent editing, but Oracle are gradually going through the affected ones and adding customisation options or tweaking their content so this restriction can be removed.

Cloud Apps

There is a new capability on campaign canvas - the ability to set scheduling restrictions on action steps that call a cloud app, allowing users to set time windows during which they want apps to run. This functionality already exists for email steps, and is most often used for nurture tracks to ensure that emails are only sent during working hours. That capability is now extended to third party communication channels that are run from Eloqua campaigns such as SMS apps or WeChat. It can also be used for data updates and integrations being run from program canvas, if needed.

There is a new cloud integration as well - with the image library on Oracle Content and Experience Cloud  - allowing images stored in this platform to be accessed directly from Eloqua when selecting images in the email and landing page editors. Customers need to be subscribed to both products to get the benefit.

Alongside these features are the usual array of minor changes and API updates. This time they affect options such as campaign canvas activation (which now defaults to the current server time, just in case the clock on the user's PC is wrong), campaign end dates (which can no longer be edited on upload) and picklists (no longer display quicklists in the UI, but does show how many options in each list).  There is also enhanced error visibility on forms and campaign canvas steps, as well as new APIs for landing pages and forms.

Overall, the release is a positive one. Eloqua administrators should definitely be looking at the new landing page capabilities. Particularly, if they're still using the legacy design editors as these will be going away in six months time. Oracle do have a history of announcing aggressive depreciation deadlines for old features and then pushing them out in response to customer feedback, but there is no guarantee that will happen in this case. Also, admins should take a note to review Analyser permissions in Insight, if they haven't already, as there may be users who would benefit from this capability if they have sufficient skill with BI tools. The new Insight is a substantial improvement over the old one, even for standard users.