Oracle Eloqua 19A Release Overview

2018 was a big year for Eloqua. The once dominant marketing automation platform has been losing customers to their competitors, whilst their status as thought leader was usurped by Marketo years ago. Instead, the product appeared to be neglected as Oracle Marketing Cloud chased high profile opportunities in the B2C space with Responsys and BlueKai. Change was clearly needed, and over the course of last year a succession of new features and major updates delivered it. As a result, many of the biggest usability issues that have dogged the platform since its inception have finally been resolved. For the first time, the platform has responsive email and landing page templates that are simple enough for a standard marketing user to manipulate. Steps are being taken to modernise admin screens and native integrations beset by a UI that hasn't been updated since the days of Eloqua 9 over a decade ago. The first release of 2019 drops this weekend with further improvements in these areas.

The headline feature is the new form design editor, that follows hot on the heels of the recent landing page design editor, introducing improved validation and greater flexibility in form layouts. Oracle have spent a lot of effort on extending Eloqua's native form builder over the last few years to remove many of the annoying and often baffling limitations within it. Now the entire form builder has been redesigned so that forms built for the new landing pages can have totally responsive multi-column layouts and better styling capabilities. This also fixes the last of the legacy validation restrictions, finally allowing checkboxes and radios to be marked as required fields. The downside is that this is a totally new editor, rather than an upgrade to the existing one. There is no support for progressive profiling, but that will be introduced later this year.  Much of the new functionality included was already possible if you had a good developer at hand, but eliminating the need for coding hacks and workarounds makes everyone's lives easier. If your website or landing pages were created using the old editor with custom styles, then template tweaks may be required to enable the new forms to work on your existing pages. It is likely the current form editor will be deprecated at some point once existing forms can be migrated to work with it, so start planning for the upgrade.

Eloqua customers should also start planning for the new Salesforce Integration App. This is still a beta release in controlled availability, but it reaches 'major' feature parity this quarter, indicating a general release is likely to be close. Major parity means that marketing activity creation and closed loop reporting features have been added to the app's feature set, but that a number of smaller features such as certain activity types are still missing. The app is intended to be used on Program and Campaign Canvas, whereas the current native integration only works in Program Builder. Users can bi-directionally sync any Salesforce object with Eloqua at the desired schedule, as the option to adjust the frequency of import feeders has been added in this release. Contacts can be synced to Salesforce using action steps on either canvas, and imported contacts can be fed into programs or campaigns for further processing – this only applies to contacts and custom objects, account records cannot be fed into programs which is a notable limitation compared to the existing integration. Nevertheless, the flexibility and attempt to reach parity is welcome.

The impending migration of the Salesforce integration from native feature to optional app is a reflection of Oracle's product strategy. The Oracle Sales Cloud integration is also an app, so this change should not be seen as a downgrade. In the modern Eloqua platform, apps are first class citizens. Eloqua administrators are expected to be aware of the App Cloud portfolio and making full use of them. Integrations are just one use case for apps. There are also a wide variety of apps dedicated to data enhancement, sales enablement and multi-channel marketing in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. As a result, Oracle's portfolio of Eloqua apps is about to get a lot more prominent, with the addition of Recommended Apps to the cloud button displayed widely across the entire Eloqua platform. Some admins will consider this to be free advertising for Oracle, but it does give much better visibility to the full scale of Eloqua's capabilities. A lot of the tool's most powerful features are locked away as free apps in the Cloud Marketplace, and Eloqua customers are encouraged to make full use of them.

One area where apps and extensions have seen a big push in the past few quarters is with the Sales Tools. External apps can now be embedded into Profiler, and this is extended to include the Contact Details area in this release. There are some settings changes to Profiler in this release too, the ability to restrict visibility of a profiler extension to a limited group of users has been added, whilst the legacy profiler settings screen in the main Eloqua admin area has been removed. All relevant configuration settings are now in the App configuration area of Eloqua. Many of the best profiler apps, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, are sold on a per license basis, so the ability to restrict visibility to only sales reps with a license is welcome.

Secure Microsites are also seeing an upgrade in the admin experience. Rolling out later this year is a self-service capability for the SSL Certificates required to make Secure Microsites work. Given that SSL Certificates need to be renewed every year or two, this is long overdue.  If only, Secure Microsites weren't a paid add-on. In this release, the new UI is a beta in controlled availability, but if customers need this functionality they are advised to apply for it. Also, security related is the ability to prevent specified fields from being included in field merges or web data lookups. This is defined on a field by field basis and can be used to block fields from being used in data lookups or to ensure they can only be used if the visitor is known and trusted.

Security conscious admins should also be aware that it is going to be much easier to export data after this release. The baffling inability to export data from Program Canvas has been fixed. Users will be able to export lists and step members from programs in exactly the same way they've been able to from Campaign Canvas since day one. Another bizarre data export ability has been removed – it is no longer possible to schedule Insight export agents to be run every minute. This is another feature that has been around since day one, but I would be surprised if anyone has ever used it deliberately. Users mourning the loss of the 'all the time' export frequency will be pleased to hear that it is now possible to export 200,000 rows in an Insight Agent export, significantly increased from the previous limit of 5,000 rows. This is a limit that has caused problems for data analysts looking into contact activity over the years, and as such the increase is welcome. Also in Insight, there are now Campaign Activity by Asset reports, as well as additional dynamic date capabilities for landing page, email and campaign reports.

The Eloqua reporting dashboards get a useful UI refresh, with Insight click-through and export capabilities becoming much more prominent where available. These options have also been added to more campaign reports. The individual email dashboards are now much easier to get to, with direct links to them from the email editor. As part of this, the email click-through visualizer option in the email editor menus has been removed, because this report is also found on the aforementioned email performance dashboards.

Finally, there are quite a few API changes in this release, some of which were introduced last month. The most useful is the LinkedToContactDate activity field in the Bulk API, which indicates when a visitor record was linked to a contact. This enables the export of historical activity data for contacts that have just become known, facilitating more comprehensive reporting through BI tools and data warehouses. Another change is the creation of an Audit Log API, which can interrogate the system log of user actions through the API. The actual export link is sent by email, but the change will be welcome by security and compliance teams.