Tips and Tricks After an Intensive Year in Eloqua

1. Moving members around on the Campaign Canvas:
   • Once you have a campaign activated, and the audience members are located in various steps of the campaign canvas, you can manually move the members around to other steps. To do so, double click on the bubble in the top right-hand corner of the canvas element > the "View Campaign Step Members" window should pop up > now select some or all of the members > look at the bottom of the pop-up window. The "move" button should now be click-able. If not, you may need to save your campaign then return to this point > Click the "move" button > you will now see the campaign canvas with all the elements available for your move highlighted. Choose the appropriate one > Hit "move members" at the bottom of the window > done!
2. If you have dirty data and you don't have a contact washing machine built yet, build it. Do not export your data to Excel for cleaning. Using Excel to clean data certainly works and it's comfortable, but if you force yourself to spend the extra couple of hours to setup a simple program to clean up a small data problem you can then add to that program as you encounter new data issues. And when you discover other data with the same old problems you do not have to duplicate your work.
3. You can run validation rules against shared lists. If you are building and testing a contact washing machine or if you are doing some simple, non-repetitive data cleaning it's handy to know that you can open any shared list, hit the gear icon on the top right-hand side, select "validation rule" and then select from any existing validation rule to run against a set of contacts on the fly.
4. If you are uploading large files (possibly for a migration) you may run into a timed-out issue when uploading from the desktop. To get around that, upload via SFTP instead of directly from your desktop. The SFTP upload option does not have a timed-out limitation.
5. You can see the upload history of files by going to the Integration screen. To get there, go to the Eloqua setup screen, select "Integration", select the "Inbound" tab, hit the "Reporting" drop-down and select "Upload history"
6. In addition to #5, keeping the file upload notifications that Eloqua sends provides a very simple way to keep track of data uploads. Every time data is uploaded into Eloqua a notification email goes out (or can go out) to the user. These notifications can serve to help you quickly figure out what file was uploaded for that rush segment you built 10 months ago. I recommend building a filter in your email client that stores all of your Eloqua notifications in one folder. Then when you need to find out the details of upload id #12345, just go to your email client, search for that number, and you will find the notification email that contains the upload file name and number of users successfully uploaded.
7. If you're working with a colleague on a campaign, segment, email or landing page you can reference the ID of the item instead of the name. If they are logged in, you can even just send them the link:
   • https://secure.p03.eloqua.com/Main.aspx#campaigns&id=12345
   • It's also worth noting that when you are on the phone it is much easier to tell someone to check out campaign ID 12345 than to spell out a complex name
8. Naming conventions are important. Wildcards are cool. When you are searching for a segment that begins with BLUE and ends with RED, try searching for this: "BLUE*RED" - this will return everything beginning with BLUE and ending with RED. The magic here is that this approach works across E10, including in the configuration menus in the Campaign Canvas elements

I hope this is helpful to a few of you. Please do feel free to add your own in the comments below.