A Simple ABM Report Every Eloqua Marketer Should Build Today

Account-Based Marketing (called "ABM") is a series of strategies and tactics aimed at building a relationship with an entire company instead of at the individual level. Because there are so many different B2B situations, Motiv has built a series of tools and best practices that can be combined like Legos to tailor an effective system for ABM Marketing Automation. The ABM report below is a simple tool that has wide appeal and usefulness for monitoring ABM effectiveness. I hope you make good use of it.

Which Accounts are Paying Attention?

Answering this question is vital to ABM program evaluation. The ABM report below is designed to give you a Top 10 analysis of companies that are on your web site and paying attention to your content. By having a top 10 for the week, month, quarter and year you have a really great way of monitoring account momentum.

The Top 10 ABM Report

This report is build using Eloqua Insights. The names of the accounts are modified for privacy, but the gist is that seeing which companies are visiting your web properties can be delivered in a glance. The report below does not require any special fields or set up, though you can modify it to have all kinds of additional filters and slice and dice properties.

Note: This is a real report.

Image has been altered for privacy

 Why is This ABM Report Useful?

Let’s say you’ve been working on ABM based marketing campaigns for 3 months. You’re doing all that you can to drive traffic to key pages on your site and you want to know if any of your target accounts are actually starting to pay attention. Beyond click-through reports, visits to the web site can often be a powerful indicator of just how much buzz you’ve created. You’ll also pick up traffic that came from other sources from these companies (i.e. word of mouth and water cooler traffic) This is also a great report to show to the sales team. In the spirit of great sales/marketing alignment, a report like this can show the sales team which accounts have momentum and can inspire some prioritized sales activity. Being able to track visitors without anonymity is one of Eloqua's biggest features. Also be sure to check out Google Analytics and Oracle Eloqua: What You Need to Know for more details on how to use Eloqua versus Google Analytics.

More Advanced Ideas

For this article, I kept the ABM report simple (the build steps are below) however, if you are comfortable with insights you can do a few more advanced things to this report that will make it even better such as:

• Build this report with a metric selector and switch between day, week, month, quarter and year
• Adjust the filters for the year and replace the table with a pivot table by month, which can show you trends over the current year
• Build a series of these reports and add them to a dashboard page that gives you all your ABM traffic in a glance
• Add more attributes such as page tags which allow you to see more detail about account interests

Hopefully, this simple report triggers a whole series of ideas for you - go nuts and message me to tell me about the awesome stuff you build!

Building the ABM Report

Eloqua does not a have report configuration export button (unlike Oracle Engagement Cloud! Ahem, Eloqua product managers, please pay attention) so you’ll have to build the report yourself, but this is a beginner report, so with basic training, you can do it. If you are new to the Eloqua insights report engine, you might want to start here: Eloqua Help Center - Insight

Here is a step-by-step guide.

Set-Up

1. Login to Eloqua and navigate to Insights
2. Create a new analysis with the subject ‘Web Visit Analysis’

Criteria

Add the following three columns to the criteria:

• Top 10 - Open the ‘Metrics’ folder and choose ‘Total Visits’. Then click on the gear icon and choose ‘Edit Formula’. Check the box for ‘Custom Headings’ and then change the column heading to ‘Top 10’ Finally, paste this formula in place of what is shown in the column formula field RANK("Metrics"."Total Visits")
• Account Name - Open the ‘Attributes’ folder and choose ‘Account’ and ‘Account Name’ (note, you can also choose ‘Contact’ and ‘Company’ if you wish)
• Total Visits - Open the ‘Metrics’ folder and choose ‘Total Visits’ (yes, you are doing this a second time), then sort this column to order descending but number

Add the following filters:

• Top 10 – Click the gear icon next to Top 10 and filter to less than or equal to 10
• Current Year – Click the gear icon next to Top ten and choose filter. Then click ‘Convert this filter to SQL’ and then copy and paste the following: YEAR("Visit Date Attribute"."Visit Date") = YEAR(NOW())
• Current Month – Repeat the process above and paste the following filter: MONTH("Visit Date Attribute"."Visit Date") = MONTH(NOW())
• Clear away UNKNOWN account – Create a filter for Account Name Does Not Contain UNKNOWN

When you are done, your criteria should look like this:

Results

Get ready for the easy part. To build this simple report, the out of the box table is all you need.

Troubleshooting

You might get the “No Results” view and that might be due to a few possible reasons:

1. No one has visited your web site this month. Remember that only visitors that have identified themselves will be available in this report. To identify themselves, a visitor must do one of two things: 1) Fill out an Eloqua form 2) Click a link from an Eloqua email

You can test the report by removing the MONTH filter on the criteria and try again. If the report renders properly, you’ve found your problem – now go out there and get marketing!

2. One of the filters is incorrect. Be sure to check the two filters converted to SQL – they are easy to mess up. Try removing them and try the report again.

If you get stuck, give us a shout and we’ll be happy to help.

David Ewing is the CEO of Motiv. Companies around the world turn to Motiv for ideas, and implementations of Oracle CX solutions such as Eloqua, Engagement Cloud, Sales Performance Management and more. Learn more about Motiv at www.motivcx.com