Oracle Eloqua 19C Release Overview

It's a time of transition for the Eloqua platform. Last year's new asset editors have been followed up by the deprecation of the previous classic asset editors. This release sees the final sunset of the legacy email and landing page editors. These drag and drop style WYSIWYG editors have been totally unusable for years due to crippling limitations and their inability to support responsive design. They will not be missed. Fortunately, assets created using these editors can still be viewed in Eloqua, even if they can't be edited.

The classic form layout editor has been given a stay of execution until February 2020. This too was initially supposed to be retiring in the current quarter, but the deadline to migrate forms to the new editor has been extended by six months. Migrating forms to the new editor requires CSS changes to landing page templates, so more time has been given for customers to make the necessary changes. Three months' notice was never going to be enough time for template designers and enterprise web teams to support any changes on their side.

Also transitioning this month is the LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration with Profiler. This is being broken out into an Oracle developed first-party app, and the existing native Sales Navigator integration will be going away on 27th September. Nothing in Profiler will change as a result of this development. It is only a back-end update. Admins have a little over a month to make the switch though, with the new app being released on 16th August.

Speaking of apps, there have quite a few enhancements to the new Salesforce Integration app. It is now possible to create contact and account fields from the app, a feature also possible in the native integration, albeit deeply buried. The missing option to create activities in Salesforce for Web Visits and Page View has finally been added several releases after all the other activity types possible in the native integration. Error notifications have been enhanced with the ability to select how frequently integration admins should be notified. It is also easier to find error notifications within the app. Finally, the default integration configuration has been updated to include several options such as activities and converted leads that were standard in the native integration.

The headline feature of the release is definitely the integration with Oracle's Infinity web analytics product. Customers of both products can now pull Eloqua campaign data into Infinity to enable cross-device reporting and analysis. Infinity also includes re-marketing capabilities with Infinity Streams, allowing Infinity customers to push contacts who complete a particular action on a web page (such as viewing a video) into an Eloqua campaign canvas or program. Eloqua has always had web tracking capabilities of its own, but these are exceptionally limited by modern standards, covering little more than page views. The integration with Infinity allows visitors who engage with other types of interactions to be tracked and ultimately pushed to Eloqua. Customers interested in trialling these capabilities can now do so, but should be aware that they have only been released under Controlled Availability.

The rest of the Eloqua customer base will be much more interested in some small but highly useful tweaks to the email design editor. The Hyperlink Manager feature from the old email editor is now available in the new editor, allowing marketers to review all the links in an email from one screen and check whether they're correct. It is possible to edit the links from this screen as well, but it is not recommended to do so. A canvas alignment option has been added to the email design editor too, so that emails can be left or right aligned when the design calls for it. This is most useful for text emails, which are typically left aligned like an Outlook email. There is improved support for CSS in the design editor. Class names are clearer, making it easier to apply styles in a template to individual sections or paragraphs. CSS will also be applied when editing a section of an email, as well as when previewing it. This makes it easier to make text changes, and to see whether any changes have broken styling. Finally, the view dependencies link has been made more prominent on both forms and landing pages.

There have been major enhancements to asset search on the Email Overview page. It is now possible to search using the subject line as well as on the asset name. Results returned by the search can then be further filtered by create user and date, modified date, status and editor type, making it significantly easier to find emails after they've been created. The existing Recently Modified and Recently Accessed by Me views on the Email Overview page have been removed to make room for this change, but that's no great loss because the new capability totally replaces this functionality and more. Search has long been the most common way of finding assets in Eloqua, so making it better and more prominent is overdue. Expect the new capabilities to be rolled out to other areas of the application over time.

Also worth noting are some changes to the default campaign duration and segment re-evaluation frequencies for new campaign canvases. These only affect new campaigns and not existing ones, but should be remembered when creating long-running campaigns. The default end date of campaigns is now 3 months in the future rather than 1 year, which is plenty long enough for a batch email blast but maybe too short for event campaigns. Make sure to check the end date when activating campaigns. Segments configured to add members on a recurring basis, will now do so daily by default rather than hourly. This is actually fine for most campaigns, but not necessarily for programs so make to check and amend this setting when adding segments to a campaign.

Finally, it is now possible to report on click-throughs by dynamic content rule in Insight. Previously, the only way to compare the results of different rules in a dynamic content section was to use a different link in each rule. This made identifying the most successful dynamic content version difficult, particularly if the CTA was the same across all variations. For emails sent after the 19C release, it will be possible to drill down by dynamic content version when viewing Email Click-through reports in Insight. This makes reporting much easier.

The Oracle Eloqua 19C Update is scheduled over two weekends starting August 16th, 2019. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as faster segments and context sensitive editor help, can be found in the official release notes.