Hello everybody,
A while ago me and the team made this discussion, in this discussion External activities and lead scoring. we were having trouble with correctly uploading contacts to campaigns in the way of adding external activities to these contacts. This lead to not accurately being able to score these contacts/leads.
In this document the whole process will be explained so one can just follow this step by step and get results.
Content:
- P1: Making a campaign,
- P2: Making external assets/activities and making a file to upload,
- P3: Making a response rule,
- P4: Uploading the contacts with external activities into the campaign,
- P5: Making a lead scoring model based on the external activity.
P1: Making a campaign
What's important here to remember that this campaign is used to add the contacts e-mail addresses and their external activity info. There's two ways to upload something to a campaign. Either directly by entering the campaign you want and clicking on settings (see image below). This way you do not have to add a 'campaign ID'. We'll get back to this in P4.
The second way to upload external activities into a campaign is by going to the 'campaigns' tab itself in the menu bar in Eloqua and clicking on the button: 'Upload External Activities'.How we will do this will be explained in P4.
Next to these two steps, it's important to remember that you do need to activate the campaign, give it a reporting range and decide for yourself if you want to keep using it for adding external activities or that you do this once for each campaign you do. It depends on how many external activities you have really !
At last there's the campaign ID, this is so important if you are not directly uploading the assets into the campaign but via the second way, that you grab the ID and use it for when you will upload the external activities. So how to grab it? Simple: Go to the URL of the campaign when the campaign
is opened and grab the ID in the url, it will look like this: (see image below). In my case: the id = 340.
P2: Making external assets/activities and making a file to upload
Alright, the next step involves making external assets and activities and making a file to upload to the campaign (in whatever way you prefer ).
For this you need acces to the tab in the main menu called 'Setup'. Once you're there, you need to click on the symbol which says 'External Activities'.
If you do not see it, you might not have sufficient rights. I would suggest that the one in your team that is responsible for the database or contacts should pick up this task. (see image below).
Once you've clicked on this, we can start making External Asset Types and External Activities. I by default, use the External Asset Type: Download and I use the External Activity: Whitepaper. It will look like this: (see image below).
Making a file to upload *:
Now that I validated that these external asset types and external activities exist, I am going to go ahead and use them in this example. You are free to fill this in, in any way that is suitable for your company her events and other activities.
Depending on how you are going to upload the contacts into the campaign, you need to make a list. If you are directly uploading, you don't need to add the CampaignID. If you aren't directly uploading, you must add the Campaign ID. So it's either picture A; directly uploading or picture B; not directly uploading. (Check P1 if you're lost). You can clearly see that in case of picture B: I added the Campaign ID described above (=340).
Don't upload yet, go to P3 after this step.
Picture A: directly uploading.
Picture B: Not directly uploading, (adding a CampaignID)
P3: Making a response rule
Now you haven't uploaded anything yet, and that's good, because in order for a contact to show up as a contact who 'responded' to a campaign, you need to make a response rule. Go to 'Setup'>'Response Rules' and select the external activity that you want to use to rate if people who are uploaded into a campaign, become contacts who have responded to the campaign you're adding them too. Why? So that they eventually can become lead scored. In my case I selected the configuration we started with in P1. As you can see it's a combination of the External Asset Type and External Activity. Click save in the right bottom of your screen (it's hiding there ).
P4: Uploading the contacts with external activities into the campaign.
Now that we have done all of the above, we can upload the contacts into the campaign, either directly or not directly! (Choice is yours). Simply click on the options I've described in P1. Give it an appropiate import name and click on the cloud. 
Click next, etc etc, map the assets field as image below:
You can select 'Custom' or 'Always update' at the 'All fields update type' to your own liking. I use 'Always update'. Make sure everything is matched correctly and start importing.
P5: Making a lead scoring model based on the external activity
Alright, you're almost done, now when you want to give these contacts point for being such good test subjects, you will want to make a lead scoring model! (Thanks Masoud Banbersta). Ours looks like this: (On the profile we just asked if they had a contact email address because we use Custom Data Objects). On the Engagement part of the lead scoring model we ask that it should respond to the particular campaign (the one campaign with ID=340 ). With the external activity: Download whitepaper (the one we selected as response rule ). at least one time within the last 9 years give it 100% of the score. Click save !
Now we made the setting as following, because we wanted to give these contacts 15 points for doing this.
That's it! You're done! Now wait and watch your contacts get scored in a couple of hours.
If you want to lead score contacts who have acted out and have gotten an external activity, and they weren't bound to a specific campaign, you can also grant them points similar to above by using the setting as displayed in the picture beneath.
I would recommend against this, as it is not that accurate and you don't have the option to segment within a lead scoring model, therefore I would always bind external assets to a campaign especially for this reason. Thanks for the comment though Lauren Kincke
* Info: the 'external asset name' you're filling in when making the list, is to your own choosing, it's a name for the external activity. In our instance this would be for a group of people who had downloaded a whitepaper from a company named like Z24. You can use this information to segment on external activities.
Hope you guys had fun and hope this helps all newbies to get their external activity game on the roll!
Kind regards,
Robert Nagelmaker
Central Marketing Automation