In January 2021 Oracle Eloqua’s legacy Salesforce Integration was retired, and is no longer supported.
This means if you are still using the legacy integration you are unable to make edits to your configuration, and if you pause or disable any actions, then you will be unable to reactivate them.
This poses a problem for businesses that may not have taken the time to migrate to the new integration or understand the differences between the old and new configurations to ensure a smooth transition of workflows and actions.
This guide serves as a simple introduction to the new Salesforce Integration App, to help you get started – but if you’re looking for specific configuration support please don’t hesitate to contact us for more information.
Also – before we get started, here is a handy link to the official Eloqua Salesforce Integration Configuration documentation:
Let’s get started.
Accessing the Eloqua Salesforce Integration App
The Salesforce Integration App for Oracle Eloqua can be downloaded from the Oracle Marketplace.
When setting up your configuration, the first thing you will notice is that everything is contained within the apps section of Eloqua – the dedicated ‘Integration’ section will be redundant once you’ve fully migrated across.
Open the app by heading to Apps > Salesforce Integration > Config – a window will open within the application where you will manage the entire configuration.
Within the app you have access to several easy to navigate sections:
- Status and Reporting – where you can check on the volume and status of imports and exports, by day, and by action.
- Actions – where you configure all of the data you wish to send from Eloqua to Salesforce
- Imports – where you configure all of the data you wish to send from Salesforce to Eloqua
- Marketing Activities – where you bundle and send all the marketing activities logged in Eloqua to a Salesforce object (Tasks or custom)
- Campaigns – Where you configure Campaign responses and manage the distribution of campaign responses for campaign members to Salesforce
- Connections – where you connect Eloqua to one, or many Salesforce instances
- Notifications – where you configure all of your alerts for successful and failed integrations.
Setting up actions and imports
The majority of your data transfer between Salesforce and Eloqua will be handled by Imports and Actions, which works in a similar way to the legacy integrations External Calls and Internal Calls.
Each action or import sets up a one way dialogue between one Salesforce Object, and one Eloqua Object – for example, you can send information from Eloqua Contacts, to Salesforce Leads, or Contacts, or, well, you get the picture.
For every object-to-object connection, you need a separate action or import – meaning over time you will have a portfolio of actions and imports to manage your daily synchronization of both Eloqua and Salesforce.
Helpful tip: Because Salesforce operates as an accept-none integration, any field that causes an error within the action will prevent the entire sync from completing. We recommend you create a ‘LITE’ version of all imports with the minimum data you wish to sync from Eloqua to Salesforce, followed by a ‘FULL’ action, to ensure any potential data errors don’t prevent mission-critical information from syncing between both platforms.
All actions are configured by setting field mapping line by line, or adding custom information to map to a destination field (for example a timestamp, or a descriptive message).
Setting up marketing activities
Marketing activities are different to the legacy integration wherein all activities are bundled into send packages.
We recommend when building your activities that you create an activity bundle for each type of activity – for example ‘Email Clicks’ – and within the activity, create multiple ‘actions’ for different types of ‘email click ‘activity you wish to send.
For example – we recommend you send descriptive data about the email clickthrough for contacts associated to Prospect Accounts, where your Sales team may want to follow-along with the user, and send less information for a tally of opens and clicks for other types of contacts. We also split data based on if the activity was for a specific Email Group (operational/transactional emails may send less data than marketing messages).
Setting up Campaign responses
Campaign responses work similar to the legacy campaign responses section of Eloqua, but are really only required for users who are actively using Campaign response rules in their currently implementation.
We recommend using the ‘UPSERT’ Action for campaign members if you are handling campaign responses based on specific criteria, rather than sending every response rule for every campaign – this way you cut down on the volume of calls to Salesforce and you can be more deliberate about which information you sync to Salesforce.
For a quick run through and video guide of the integration app please watch the below video – and keep an eye out for more posts covering specific integration topics!
Video Transcript:
Hello – This is a very quick introduction to the Salesforce.com integration available from the Oracle Eloqua app marketplace. The salesforce.com integration app serves as an alternative and eventually a replacement to the default integration available through the integration section of Oracle Eloqua.
The Salesforce the new app comes with all of the same functionality as the previous integration but the interface is much more intuitive so anyone who is unfamiliar with integrations, or feels a little bit overwhelmed at the idea of managing multiple data processing steps can very easily get up to speed and feel quite comfortable with the tool.
In this introduction I’ll take you through the main sections of the new app, starting with ‘Status and Reporting’ where you can look at total summary of all data exchanges by import and export type – including any failed updates that may occur. You can access some simple reports that will show you what types of data was imported a breakdown of the days that the import happened, and how many records succeeded or failed. In ‘Imports’ and ‘Exports’ you can look at the multiple different integrations that you may have, and configure new field mappings or additional integration actions if required. If you are running multiple connections, all actions will be visible in one section it’s a really simple place to go and check on the status of your integration, action by action. Within the edit mode of each action you can specify the fields that you would like to map to the new record that you create in Salesforce, and the priority – so if I scroll down to the bottom here you can see that you have different import rules that allow you to control data prioritization much in the same way as the legacy integration. It’s just a little bit easier to find.
The import section of the new Salesforce integration app allows you to pull data from Salesforce into a Eloqua. Personally, with the old integration, I always found it quite difficult to navigate to my imports and control my field mappings and just manage what was active what wasn’t active all at any one point in time. With the name in with the new application you can see all your imports you can see their status you can see whether or not they’re active when they last run. You can also add the import into programs immediately upon completion which is great, and you can also have data mapping from a Salesforce Contact or Lead, or any other object within Salesforce directly to the Eloqua contact or the Eloqua Account or Custom Object. For me, this is really really powerful because it allows you to pull in all manner of salesforce data and in businesses that I work for we typically have most of our data centralized in salesforce but it needs to be made more usable within our marketing automation systems so being able to have a mirror or at least a destination within our Eloqua platform to query that data immediately is really useful.
You can set all of your data priorities to run every 15 minutes quickest and you can run it every 24 hours the slowest you can choose the days that you would like to schedule your calls and you can use Salesforce SQL (SSQL) to be able to write the conditions as to when each of those imports fire. You can also manually run them if you wish to test every call that you have maybe they’ll have marketing activities so in the native integration you are able to run activities or an individual basis with the new application. You can consolidate the number of calls that you send to Salesforce meaning that you have fewer ongoing actions happening within the integration arriving for usually a much more stable integration and you can bulk all of your activities to sync or send over time so you may choose to send all email sends every few minutes or every few hours or email clicks every few minutes or a few hours or you may choose to send all activities as one big batch all together.
The campaign’s section of the Salesforce integration app allows you to do three different actions. You can either create and update campaigns whether that’s in Eloqua or in Salesforce depending on where you want the data to move from, you can import campaign data from Salesforce into Eloqua to be used immediately you can set up new response actions so that’s your response rules in Eloqua triggers some kind of action within Salesforce without having to go and set that up in a separate location.
We then have connections – so one of the useful things with the new integration up is you can have multiple integrations or connections set up at once so if you have different users or different teams that are processing different types of data you want to keep the users and the roles separate very easy to create multiple users that have different roles and permissions within Salesforce and that only allows the users to manipulate and edit and process data relative to their role. This is also very important if you work for a particularly complex organization where partitions and privacy is difficult to maintain. If you wanted to partition or separate out the actions your Salesforce users can do based on where they are in the world it’s also very very helpful, and finally, you can configure notifications on the completes of actions on the error of actions and you can do that either the individuals or for every single action that happens within the system. You can do that for imports as well so all in all the app is very good at centralizing all the data processing actions within Salesforce.
In my opinion, the best thing about the app which I really appreciate is it’s now very easy to add direct actions within your program campuses. So previously I always found working with program builder is a slightly disjointed experience – you have to go into your campaign you would have to set up your action you have to send the data to the program within the program builder and then you would have to go in there to check to see if all your actions were validated and successful with the new integration you can open up a program and if I open up one of my programs here as an example all of the actions to send data so Salesforce whether it’s a create lead, update contact, update campaign membership, or trigger lead assignment, everything can be comnfigured, with error rules from the Campaign Canvas. There’s no need to send data to another section of Eloqua – so for me this was a game changer in terms of how we use our Eloqua system and how all of our users who are unfamiliar with the integration settings can start to familiarize themselves with the process and ultimately become much more knowledgeable and confidentt with how our data from Eloqua passes the Salesforce so that we can generate better leads you can send the sales teams better information.
So that’s the summary of the Salesforce integration up thank you for listening.
