Starting with Eloqua's Salesforce integration app?

June 29, 2020 David Huml

I remember like it was yesterday - 7 years ago my former colleague Adrian showed me for the first time "advanced" settings in Eloqua platform. I have never seen anything as advanced as this that time. I discovered, for me that time a brand new vocabulary like auto synchs, API external calls and internal events.

Many years later - I consider myself to be pretty competent with Eloqua's integration studio. Application's module that embarrassingly looks like from the early 90s. You need dozen of clicks and many new dialogue windows to be opened to perform almost any basic operation.

With acquisition of Eloqua initiated Oracle long journey to revisit the platform. They double downed on modularity with external apps and started revisiting the core functionality including assets editor or CRM integration.

Eloqua

Integration studio was long due and in 2019 finally the  Salesforce integration app left beta testing mode and is now the new standard.

As Eloqua consultant I still see these days companies are using the old studio - if ain't broke don't fix it, right? Let me tell you there can be several reasons why to upgrade your current integration with the new one.

  1. Oracle will officially end technical support of the old integration studio in Q1 2021.
  2. You might be missing on leads - program builder that is triggering integration API calls has limited bandwidth and you have to choose between speed of the program or it's capacity.
  3. You can ditch program builder all together! You can use program canvas exclusively for your integration actions. It's faster and easier to build anything here.

So if you are Eloqua admin still connecting to Salesforce with integration studio, please, do your homework, future-proof your platform and update your workflows. It's not complicated to start small and with current application you will be able to rebuild whatever you have in place right now. Here is small app map for your first steps.

Status and Reporting. Here you have your quick overview. Charts are summarising how many objects in Salesforce were touched, how many were created or updated and new tasks created for your sales team. Probably most important section you should pay attention here are potential errors, you can retrieve error codes/messages and address thier root cause.

Actions. Actions are your external outbound calls which are triggered from either campaign or program canvas. In actions you define what object/entity should be updated or created, you set mapping of your integration and some additional setting. You can send static/dynamic value, not just contact record.

Eloqua

Imports. This is what you know as autosynch from previous integration's incarnation. In 15 minute intervals Eloqua sends GET requests to your Salesforce database and retrieves data of your preferences. Define entities, map fields. You can add filters if you need to (you can use SOQL language). Done, bang, forget about having imports as they will work smoothly ever since.

Marketing Activities. Automatically triggered events (previously known as internal activities events). Events in Eloqua like bounce, unsubscribe, email click or open will trigger this integration event. Most usually you will be creating new tasks in Salesforce.

Campaigns. Anything campaign related is in this section. You can sync in each direction - Eloqua->Salesforce and Salesforce->Eloqua, moreover you can synchronise campaign responses in order to attribute campaign membership and statuses.

Eloqua

Connections. Any general settings of the app is here. You define connection with your Salesforce instance, plus some additional options you will probably never need to touch more than once.

Notification. This is location for notification - the app sends you an email if any API error occurs.

You see? First steps are not complicated and you can start right now because the integration app is free. Start is easy, but excellin can be challenging - reach to Eloqua experts from LeadFabric.

About the Author

David Huml

Rocking in Eloqua & Marketo instances since 2012.

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