Creating Activities

This chapter covers the following topics:

Understanding Campaign Activities

A Campaign Activity is the delivery tool for a marketing campaign. After precampaign analysis and planning, marketers create campaign activities, each with a specific purpose and using a specific channel. The following figure shows a typical campaign activity flow.

The Campaign Activity Process

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A campaign ativity’s tasks flow logically as follows:

  1. Performing precampaign analysis and activity planning.

  2. Creating a campaign activity, that includes:

    1. Selecting a template for a specific marketing execution channel

    2. Selecting a purpose

    3. Selecting the parent campaign

    4. Associating products and/or offers to the activity

    5. Associating a target group

    6. Associating outbound collateral

    7. Associating collaboration content

    8. Updating tracking setup

    9. Adding notes, if desired

  3. Submitting the activity for approval.

In the process of creation and execution, a campaign activity can be in different transition states as depicted in the following figure.

A Campaign Activity’s Status Transitions

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When approval is needed, the transition states for a campaign activity include:

When approval is not needed, the transition states for an activity include:

When you create a campaign activity, you must specify the basic attributes, such as Activity Name, Activity Template, Parent Campaign, and Launch on Date.

Optionally, you may specify the Source Code, End on Date, Objective, and Marketing Medium when applicable. If you do not specify the Source Code, the system will generate one as it is a unique index into marketing channels.

Based on the channel of execution of a campaign activity, you must define additional attributes as needed. For example, for an e-mail or direct mail print activity, you must specify a target group, while for advertising or Web schedules, a target group is not necessary.

The following diagram shows the flow of statuses for an activity.

Activity Statuses

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Understanding Activity Purposes

For activity planning purposes, you can align channels (and associated activity purposes) with the overall marketing objectives. For example, if the goal is to increase marketing effectiveness, and cross sell is the primary way to achieve this, then the activity purpose would be "Cross Sell".

Marketers have the option of choosing from the following seeded purposes:

To help you create suitable target groups for your activities, administrators can create list templates and include segmentation rules to support these purposes. When you select a purpose for a campaign activity, the associated list template becomes available.

Administrators can also create custom purposes to meet your specific needs. For example, advertisements or Web activities may be set up to build brand awareness or surveys can be created to measure customer satisfaction. Because advertisement activities do not target specific target groups, no list template is required. However, to target customers for customer satisfaction surveys, the list template needs to extract a list of customers based on their service and support history. Refer Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide for details on creating custom purposes.

Understanding Activity Templates

Activity setup can be quickly and easily performed as each activity is based on an Activity Template. An Activity Template provides a prebuilt framework that includes predefined values and specification for commonly used activity attributes. These include:

Administrators can create custom activity templates based on Channel Category and channel to suit specific business needs. Refer to the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide for information on creating custom activity templates.

Using Marketing Collateral

When you create E-mail, Fax, Print, or Advertisement campaign activities, you may want to include electronic marketing collateral, such as product data sheets, white papers, promotional flyers, newsletters, cover letters, invitations, and so on. Such collateral are outbound and must reach the customer. For example, if you are organizing a press conference to launch a product, you may want to send out invitations. Alternatively, you may include the product datasheet to go out as an attachment in the e-mail.

Cover letters for the different direct marketing channels (e-mail, fax, and print) and other outbound collateral are stored and managed in Oracle Content Manager (OCM). To maintain security for content, you need to have access to the OCM folders to be able to create content items. Refer the Oracle Content Manager Implementation and Administration Guide for more information on folder security.

While many versions of a collateral may exist in the OCM repository, only one version can be live. When the content associated with an activity is fulfilled, the live version of the content is used.

For Direct Marketing Print campaign activities, cover letters can be either in Portable Document Format (PDF) or Rich Text Format (RTF) formats. Refer the Oracle Content Manager Implementation and Administration Guide for more information on collateral creation and maintenance.

For Web activities, the execution content is the content for Web Ads, Web Offers, or Product Recommendations.

Creating a Campaign Activity

To speed up campaign activity creation, your new activity is based either on an activity template or on an existing activity (which also uses a template).

Notes for Copying an Existing Activity

Notes for Creating a New Activity

When your copy or create completes, the Activity is created with a New status. The Details page appears and you can view and update all the details and associations.

Setting Up Activities

Campaign activities are the main execution vehicles for marketing. Activity setup includes setting up products to promote, offers, a target group to contact, and the collateral content to deliver. Setting up event activities includes an agenda, registration requirements, and roster management. Web content needs to be set up for identified web placements for web activities.

Notes

Please refer to the procedure for the type of activity you want to create. The procedure includes the common creation steps in the correct sequence.

Associating a Product or Offer

Use the Offering subtab to associate a product or offer with a campaign activity.

Notes

Understanding and Using Offering

The Offering functionality enables you to associate Products, Product Categories, or Offers that you want to promote with a campaign activity. Product categories available to campaign activities are those defined in the Single Product Catalog. You can either associate the products that are associated at the campaign level or any other product in the single product catalog. You can also associate offers that have been associated to the parent campaign. The offers associated at the activity level should either be associated with the product categories, with the products associated at the activity level, or should be independent of any product (for example, 10% off invoice). Additionally, you can associate offers of type Request Offers to a campaign activity. Request Offers are those that are requested by a customer. For example, customers may request a telesales executive for discounts based on coupons they hold.

The selected product or offer may also play a role in defining the segmentation parameters. For example, if a campaign activity is being planned for marketing electronic toys, the segmentation condition may be high-income parents with kids.

For sales activities, products, and product categories associated with them are recorded as Lead Lines.

Using Collaboration with Campaign Activities

Collaboration content is material associated to a campaign activity. Collaboration content is not outbound - that is, not sent out to customers. It includes content, scripts, or proposal templates, and is meant to be used by sales and external teams involved in the activity. For example, you may need to associate sales kits containing proposal templates, competition analysis, scripts, and so on. Additional collaboration content like competitive information, sales plans, and so on can also be included. Refer the Oracle Proposals User Guide for more information.

Collaboration content is governed by the same security considerations that are defined for the campaign activity. Once content is associated to a marketing object, all users who have access to the marketing object have access to the associated content.

Oracle Scripting integrates with Oracle Marketing to help you interact with customers and track such interactions. Topics in this section include:

Scripting Overview

The goal of the integration between Oracle Marketing and Oracle Scripting is to provide marketing managers with the ability to follow-up on the campaigns they design with a scripted flow of interactions (either through the Web or a call-center).

One of the resulting benefits is to enable marketers to automate and streamline some marketing-specific activities like event registration or lead creation.

As another benefit, the branching functionality of Oracle Scripting enables marketing organizations to react differently to the input of different customers based on their profile or on the answers they provide to questions, and thus to develop a personalized relationship with customers.

Scripting Integration Process Flow

The following figure illustrates the Oracle Marketing/Oracle Scripting integration flow.

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The high-level process flow is as follows:

  1. A script is created in Oracle Scripting.

  2. The Script is deployed in Oracle Scripting.

  3. The marketer links a campaign activity to the script (using click-through destinations for Web scripts).

  4. Customers responding to the activity are taken through the script, the customers' answers are collected, and the potential action (event registration, lead creation) is executed.

  5. Marketer can check the activity dashboard for a report on the results of the activity.

Sample Scripts

Oracle Marketing comes with sample scripts for the following marketing-specific activities:

These sample scripts are intended to be usable with minimum configuration and to be deployed as either call center scripts or Web scripts. Some components or building blocks are also seeded to allow customer identification and customer authentication. Refer to the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide for more information.

Associating Scripts to a Campaign Activity

Scripting is integrated in Marketing through the use of click-through destinations (CTDs) that can be enabled behind a banner on store, via an e-mail, or even associated in direct marketing collateral. You can invite a list of customers to participate in a survey campaign or direct them to specific Web sites by visiting a defined URL. The return data from surveys can be used to evaluate customer satisfaction, improve product lines, target new or improved services, or otherwise improve responsiveness.

Navigation: Campaign > Campaigns > Collaboration mid-tab > Add Script

To view the responses to the deployed scripts view ,the operational reports for activities that deploy scripts through Click Through Destinations.

Understanding Target, Control, and Contact Groups

A target group for a campaign activity specifies the list or lists associated with the campaign activity. You can generate a target group using any combination of the following:

A Control Group is a set of list entries who do not receive campaign information. While generating a Target Group, you can specify the number of records to be included in the Control Group. For example, based on your marketing criteria, you could have 5000 prospects being targeted for a direct marketing activity. You could then create a Control Group of 250 (5%) prospects who will not be contacted for this direct marketing activity. The responses from the Control Group can be compared with the responses from target records that receive the campaign information to determine the benefits of marketing to customers and prospects who meet the list criteria.

A Contact Group is a group of list entries who are actually contacted through a marketing activity. The Contact Group is obtained by taking the count of the associated lists (or segments) for the Target Group, subtracting the Control Group records, and adjusting for any suppression and duplicate records. For example, based on your marketing criteria, you could have 5000 prospects being targeted for a direct marketing activity. You could then create a Control Group of 250 (5%) prospects who will not be contacted for this direct marketing activity. You will then have 4750 prospects who will automatically become part of the Contact Group (assuming no suppression and duplicate records). The responses from the Contact Group can be compared with the Control Group responses to measure the effectiveness of the marketing campaign.

Understanding and Using Fatigue Rules

Fatigue rules prevent marketing teams from over contacting their customer/prospect base. These rules enable them to carefully target customers so that they have a receptive group of customers even as they work towards meeting their marketing goals. For example, a fatigue rule could be created so that a customer is contacted four times (or less) per month. Fatigue rules are specified for a time period - weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly and are applied during campaign activity execution.

Use the following sections to understand the various concepts associated with fatigue rules and to perform related procedures.

Overview of Fatigue Rules

Fatigue rules prevent marketers from over contacting their customer or prospects base. These rules enable you to carefully target customers so that they are more receptive to the marketing promotions and messages.

The business benefits derived from using fatigue rules include:

Promote Brand Awareness - If promotions are strategically timed, customers are not overexposed to noise. Therefore, when they are contacted they are likely to be more receptive.

Support marketing strategy decisions - Helps enforce marketing rules dictating customer contact limits.

Maximize Marketing Dollar Effectiveness - By strategically contacting customers, every marketing dollar spent receives (in theory) a better response rate, therefore improving effectivity.

Improve collaboration for the enterprise - Enables you to setup enterprise wide rules. For example, telesales, direct mail, and e-mail (all communication channels having the potential to fatigue the consumer) - by centralizing the rules, you can prevent all channels from over-contacting the consumer.

Understanding Fatigue Rules and Time Periods

A fatigue rule defines maximum permissible contacts within a specified time period. For example, "Do not contact customers more than two times per month by any channel." The defined time period adheres to a rolling period.

Rolling Period Example

An e-mail activity is set to execute on February 13th -- Amy is on the target list of customers to be contacted. The fatigue rule specifies, "Do not contact customers more than two times per month by any channel."

On 13th February (when the activity executes) it determines how many times Amy has been contacted in the last one month.

However, if the activity executed on Feb 14th, the total number of contacts within the last 30 days would have been 1. The contact on Jan 15th would have been rolled out from the past 30-day period starting Feb 14th.

Fatigue rule time periods are defined as follows:

Week = 7 days

Month = 30 days

Quarter = 90 days

Year = 365 days

Fatigue rules can be global or channel specific.

Global Fatigue Rules

Using this type of rule (threshold) you can set an absolute limit on the number of contacts by any channel for a given time period. For example, do not contact any customer more than 4 times per month by any channel. If exclusively setting channel-specific limits, global rules can be null.

Marketing Channel-Specific Fatigue Rules

Within the limits set globally, you can also establish specific rules (thresholds) for each outbound channel - direct mail (print), email, fax, and telemarketing (phone) For example, of the 4 total contacts allowed per month, do not contact customer by phone more than 2 times per month.

Depending on how the rules are setup, both global and channel rules can be applicable. For example, a global rule may be 'Do not contact customer more than once a week' and an e-mail channel rule may be 'Do not contact customers more than 2 times a month by e-mail'.

Activity Level Previews

You can use preview fatigue to determine whether an optimum number of customers are available for targeting. In a given target group, preview provides information about the total number of customers available to market and the total number of fatigued customer for a date range.

Customers can belong to the target groups of multiple activities and may be contacted too often. Therefore, they could be fatigued on a particular date. You can use the projected counts to adjust your activity start date to optimize your targeting need.

Activity level previews contain the following information:

The Preview functionality uses the historical fatigue counts tracked to date for each member of the target group against each date in a given date range. The set of currently queued activities are looked up, assuming that all approved, available, or active activities planned between the time of Preview and the previewed date will be executed.

The fatigue projection is done for 28days.

You can drill down on Projected Fatigued Count to view the list of activities that are fatiguing people and how many people each activity can potentially fatigue. Access to activities are controlled by team security settings at the schedule level. Confidential activities will be displayed only if you have access to them.

Example to Demonstrate How Preview Works

Activity A is set up and previewed on June 1, and is to be activated on June 5. The activity contains Irvin as a member. On June 1, by Irvin's rolling period, Irvin has a running count of three contacts. But by June 5, by Irvin's rolling period, Irvin will have a running count of two contacts. So, two contacts is the number Preview will leverage for the June 5 schedule activation preview.

Two additional activities are already approved and planned for execution on June 3, both of which include Irvin as a member. Therefore Irvin's fatigue count on June 5 is projected at four contacts. Since the global limit per week is three contacts by any channel, Irvin will be considered fatigued and removed from the Preview function for Schedule A.

The preview displayed in Figure A, Sample Fatigue Preview, shows that the Projected Fatigue figures for the dates between March 24 and March 26 are high. Using this information, as a marketer, you can decide to wait until Mar 27 to launch your schedule, when you will have more customers to target.

A Sample Fatigue Preview

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The Fatigue Rule Override Option

When launching a campaign activity, you can choose to override fatigue rules based on two key requirements:

Note: For all sales activities, that is, for all campaign activities where the channel is Direct Sales, fatigue rules are automatically overridden.

Notes to Override Fatigue Rules

Tracking Fatigue for a Campaign Activity

When the system executes a campaign activity, customers who have already been contacted the number of times specified by the fatigue rules are considered fatigued. These members are removed, and not contacted via the activity channel for that particular initiative.

To track the number of times each customer is contacted via the different channels in a given time period, the system will track each contact for a given customer.

Customers who have not exceeded their fatigue thresholds will be contacted as part of the activity’s target group. Upon activity execution, the customer's contact count should be incremented, for the date of the activity, for the channel of the activity.

The following figure demonstrates how fatigue rules work when a campaign activity is executed. The system looks up the fatigue counts for all the target group entries, which are eligible to be contacted, for a given activation date, then applies the fatigue rules that have been set up, and removes the fatigued customers from the contact list. The campaign activity is executed for the non-fatigued customers, and the contact count is incremented and recorded.

Fatigue Rules Execution

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Previewing Activity-Level Fatigue

Use the following procedure to preview fatigue.

Prerequisites

Using Target Groups

You can define target groups (audience) for your campaign activities and preview the list entries generated in the Target Group midtab.

You can create target groups in the following ways:

Target groups are generated in the Full Refresh mode - that is, using the selection criteria, deduplication rules, and suppression options, the list is recreated as if for the first time.

Indirect marketing activities, such as of type Advertising, are not targeted at a specific audience and therefore target group creation functionality is not applicable to them.

Use the following topics to create a target group for a campaign activity.

Creating a Target Group

A Target Group for a campaign schedule specifies the list or lists associated with the campaign schedule. Certain activity types require a generated list in order to make the campaign active. For example, any direct marketing activity type (direct mail, e-mail, fax, or telemarketing) requires a generated list. You can generate a target group using any combination of the following:

A segment is a dynamic criteria that will be executed when the target group is generated. For example, a segment could be defined as a condition to obtain residents living in the state of California. Now, if this segment is associated with a target group, then the number of records satisfying the segment criteria at the time of generating the target group will be considered as part of the target list entries.

However, for a List the number of entries is static. This implies that if a list or employee list is associated with a target group, then the static number of entries in these lists when the lists were generated will become part of the target group list entries.

Prerequisites

Navigation: Campaign Dashboard > Activities > Select an activity > Target Group tab

Notes

Target Group Options

Use the following information to create a target group using a list template. When you use list templates to create a target group, you are using the natural language query method for specifying the target group selection criteria.

Notes

Target Group Locking

Creating a Target Group Using the Advanced Option

Use the Target Group subtab to create target groups based on other lists, segments, Discoverer workbooks, list imports, or SQL. You can also create your own SQL conditions.

Prerequisite: Fatigue rules and deduplication rules should have been specified by the System Administrator

When you select the list sources for the target group, the Action in the first row must be Include. The % Requested must be null for the Intersect and Exclude actions.

Defining Control Groups

A Control Group is defined so that a certain set (sample) of target group members are not contacted via a marketing activity. The behavioral difference (response, orders, and so on) between the contact group and the control group are studied to establish the effectiveness and usefulness of the marketing activity.

The control group size is generally a trade-off between the accuracy required for a test sample and the required confidence in the results. If more accuracy and confidence level are required, then a bigger control group size is needed. The target group size considered for control group calculation is based on the final contact-able target group size after all other conditions have been applied.

Control Group Business Scenario

ABC Company wants to promote a new Z-series laptop to young, high-income consumers. The target group members are identified and will be sent a special offer to purchase the Z-series laptop. ABC Corporation wants to hold back a subset of the target group and later study the effectiveness of the campaign by comparing orders from the contacted members and the control group members.

A subset of the target group is held back as control group members. This special offer is not sent to the control group members. After executing the campaign, the order rates of the Z-series laptop between the contact group and the control group members are measured to determine the effectiveness of the marketing activity.

The available methods of determining the control group size are:

To create a control group for an existing target group

  1. View the target group for the activity in the Target Group tab. The target group must be Draft, Available, or Failed status.

  2. In the Options section, click Define and set the control group details.

    The Define Control Group page displays the size and status of the target group for reference.

  3. Click Save.

  4. Generate the control group by clicking Regenerate or by generating again from the Target Group page. The actual target group enabled entries are utilized for the control group calculation.

  5. Click Update Entries in the Target tab and view all entries. You can sort the Control Group column to view all entries flagged as control group members.

To define the control group while defining the target group

The marketer can define a new control group while defining a target group. For a new control group, the marketer defines the size of the control group and the system selects the control group members randomly from the target group. This ensures that the control group members are a representative sample of the target group.

  1. Define the target group in the Target Group tab and save the target group definition.

  2. In the Options section, click Define and set the control group details.

  3. Save the control group definition.

  4. Generate the target group.

    The control group is applied automatically. Control group members are selected after successful completion of target group generation. If the target group generation fails, then the control group members are not selected and the control group status remains in Draft status. If the target group generation is successful, then the control group status is Available.

  5. Click Update Entries and view all entries. You can sort the Control Group column to view all entries flagged as control group members.

Notes for Statistically Significant Sample Size

You are a marketer for ABC Company and are responsible for planning and executing a campaign to cross-sell an accessory to the Z-Series laptop. You target the customers who already bought the Z-Series laptop and you want to send them a special offer for taking 10% off an accessory. You decide to hold back a certain set of random target people as a Control Group and not send the offer to these.

Your assumption is that sending the special offer to a certain set of people has an affect on them and that they will buy the accessory more than the control group people. What should be the size of your control group? The size of the control group should be significant enough that assuming you had not sent the offer to the entire target group, the results of the control group study would be representative of the entire target group. Your target group size = 1000. Your control group size as n.

The following formula is a standard statistics formula for calculating the Sample Size for an infinite population when the population size is not known.

Sample Size (SS) = (Z2 x R x (100-R)) / E2

Where Z = Confidence Level (a constant)

R = Response Rate needed from the Target Group

E = Required Limit of Error

The statistical formula with a correction for finite population is:

Control Group Size = SS / (1 + ((SS-1)/ target population))

If the Target Group size is 1000, then:

Z= confidence level required 90% = 1.645

R = Response Rate = 10%

E = Error Limit = 2%

SS = 1.645 * 1.645 * 2 * (100-2) / .3 * .3 = 530.38 5893.1211

Control Group Size = 530.38 / (1 + (530.38 –1)/1000) = 346

This means that in order to be 90% confident that you will get a response rate of 10%, you need to have a control group of 346 entries.

Notes on Regeneration

You can regenerate the control group itself or both the target group and control group.

Notes on Repeating Activities and Control Groups

Assuming the base activity has a control group defined, the subsequent copies of the activity for repeating purposes copy the target group definition and the control group definition of the original activity. There are two options you can set for how repeating activities use the target and control groups:

Control Group Analysis Report

Use the Control Group Analysis Report to compare metrics between the control group and the contact group for an activity in a graphical and tabular format. Your administrator defines the metrics available for comparison in this report.

Notes

Related Topics

See the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide for information about setting up the metrics for this report.

Costs, Revenues, and Metrics for Activities

To analyze the effectiveness of marketing activities, marketing managers need metrics tracked at individual campaign activity levels and across campaigns. Costs and revenue details are captured and tracked for return on investment (ROI) calculations. Other seeded metrics are also tracked and reported for the different campaign activities. For specific business needs, the marketing administrator can define additional metrics.

Metrics Overview

Metrics are measurements for tracking the effectiveness of marketing activities. Metrics can be associated with each of the following marketing objects:

Metrics include both forecast and actual values. These values are either manually input or automatically calculated by the Oracle Marketing application.

Metrics can also be used to initiate Campaign Monitors. For example, a Responses Count metric that attains a desired value could be used to start a follow-up campaign activity to a larger audience.

Three categories of metrics are available for the Campaign Workbench: general metrics, costs, and revenues. General metrics include the number of responses to a campaign and the number of registrants for an event. Cost metrics are used to track expenses and revenue metrics are used to track the income associated with marketing activities.

A number of commonly used marketing metrics are included with the deployment of the Oracle Marketing application. If new metrics need to be defined for your organization, the Marketing Administrator must create and set up these additional metrics. For more information on creating and setting up metrics, see the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide.

Metric Categories

Metrics can be grouped into logical categories. For example, all metrics used to track expenses for marketing activities are grouped into the Cost category. Several metric categories, including Cost, Revenue, Response, and Other are included with the deployment of the Oracle Marketing application. Your Marketing Administrator can create additional metric categories as you increase number of metrics you are tracking. Refer to the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide for more information about metric categories.

Metric Hierarchies

Metrics are organized into two hierarchies:

Metric Calculation Types

The metric calculation type determines the way in which forecast and actual values for a metric are entered into the system. For different business requirements, marketers need different calculation types:

Metric Templates

Metric templates help marketing administrators to standardize the metrics to be associated with a campaign activity. For example, an administrator may define a metric template that automatically associates costs that are specific to the telemarketing activities of a call center. Each type of campaign activity and marketing object has an associated metric template.

When a campaign activity is created, for ease of use, all the metrics associated with the activity type are enabled via the associated template. You only need to enter the metric values. If necessary, you can also create and associate additional cost, revenue, or other metrics with a activity.

Metric templates can be associated with a marketing object (campaign, campaign activity, event, and so on) or a custom set up. When you create a marketing object with a particular custom set up, the metrics available for that particular object will include the metrics included in the metric templates associated with that custom set up and those included in the metric templates associated with that particular marketing object type.

For example, let us assume that you are creating a campaign ’live it up’ with the custom setup ’ABC’. Prior to creating this campaign, you created a metric template ’AA’ with metrics A1, A2, and A3, and associated it with the custom setup ’ABC’. You had also created another template ’BB’ with metrics B1, B2, and B3, and associated it with the marketing object of type ’Campaign’. The campaign ’live it up’ will include the metrics A1, A2, and A3 from metrics template ’AA’, which is associated with the custom setup ’ABC’, and B1, B2, and B3 from the metrics template ’BB’, which is associated with the marketing object of type ’Campaign’.

Metrics Refresh Process

The metrics refresh process runs on a periodic basis defined by the Marketing Administrator. For example, the process could be set up to run each night at midnight.

During the metrics refresh process, the following actions occur:

To set up or change the frequency of the metrics refresh process, refer to the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide.

Seeded Metrics

A number of commonly used marketing metrics, such as Total Cost, Total Revenue, Responses Count, and Event Registrants are included with the deployment of the Oracle Marketing application. Refer to the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide for a complete list of seeded metrics.

User-Defined Metrics

In addition to the seeded metrics, user-defined metrics can be used for measuring marketing objects. Refer to the Oracle Marketing Implementation Guide for details on defining user-defined Metrics.

Metrics Example

The following scenario demonstrates the various metrics concepts in Oracle Marketing.

Your organization, ’Just For You’, plans to introduce a new line in clothing for the coming fall season. Its marketing team wants to run a campaign (Fall In Place) and send an information brochure by a direct mail campaign activity (Fall Lines Print Campaign activity) to all the customers who bought clothing from ’Just For You’ last fall.

As the marketing manager, you want the overall costs and individual cost components for the campaign tracked. To do so, you need to track costs at the Campaign level and the campaign activity level.

Your Administrator will create:

You need to perform the following activities:

  1. Create the Fall In Place Campaign

  2. Create the Fall Lines Print Campaign activity

  3. Associate Fall In Place Campaign Total Cost as a summary metric with the campaign

  4. Associate the manual metric, Fall Lines Print activity Postage Costs to the Fall Lines Print Campaign activity

  5. Associate the manual metric, Fall Lines Print activity Envelope Costs to the Fall Lines Print Campaign activity

The costs are then captured as follows:

Associating Costs, Revenues, and Metrics for Tracking

Use the Tracking tab to view, enter, and associate costs, revenues, and metrics. The Views available to you for associating tracking metrics to a campaign activity include Costs, Revenues, Metrics, or All. For each of these, you have the Details view that shows a table or the Hierarchy view. You can see the history for any metric and post actual costs to the budgets.

Prerequisite: The costs, revenues, and metrics that you want to add were set up by your administrator

Navigation: View an Activity in the Campaign Dashboard and select the Tracking tab.

Notes for Adding Metrics

Notes for Posting Costs

Associating Partners with Campaign Activities

Marketers may assign partners, such as Value Added Distributors (VADs), Value Added Resellers (VARs), agents, and so on, to campaign activities. When the leads generated are converted to opportunities, they may be distributed to the associated partners. Vendors can do this assignment either manually or by invoking the partner-matching engine. Refer Oracle Partner Relationship Management (PRM) documentation for information on how partners may work with the opportunities assigned to them.

Navigation: View details for either an activity or a campaign > Partners mid-tab

Notes

Understanding and Using Activity Operational Reports

The Operational Reports available in the Campaign Workbench help you track marketing activities, analyze their effectiveness, and plan future campaigns.

Tracking Across Campaigns

For tracking across campaigns, the Campaign Dashboard contains reports that help you assess campaign performance and perform precampaign analysis when planning new marketing initiatives.

Tracking Individual Campaign Activities

Campaign activity specific reports help you analyze the effectiveness of each campaign activity. The sections displayed in a report depend on the activity's channel of execution. For example, for an e-mail activity, Click Through Destination Analysis information is displayed. The reports contain the following information:

Note: For Web ads and Web offers that are deployed on third party Web sites, pretty URL usage is not tracked or reported.

Channel Specific Tracking and Reporting

For reviewing channel effectiveness, you can view channel specific reports that display the following:

Tracking Repeating Activities

For repeating activities, details of target groups and fatigue rules applications are tracked and reported for each iteration of the activity. You can drill down to view channel-based information.

Target History Reports

You can use the Activity Targeting History and Channel Targeting History reports to view fatigue history. These reports will help you examine targeting performance by direct marketing channels.

Activity Targeting History

This report displays fatigue details by campaign activities executed for all direct marketing channels. For the activities in a date range or for a campaign, you can compare the target group sizes with the number of members contacted, fatigued, and suppressed. You can sort the report to view the activities with the largest contact rates and largest removal rates. You can restrict the search criteria to view activities for one particular channel only. You can drill down to view fatigue details for each activity. For repeating activities, the Repeating icon is enabled and you can drill down by date, week, or month to view fatigue details for each activity iteration.

The Fatigue Rate displayed is calculated as follows:

(Total Contacted/Total Fatigued + Total Contacted)*100

When you drill down using the Total Fatigued link for an activity, details of the activities that took away contacts from this activity are displayed

The total displayed for each column in the report is the grand total for all activities or all channels. The totals provide a global view of all fatigue data for the specified criteria.

Access to activities is controlled by team security. The report will display schedules that you have read access to. Confidential activities will not be displayed unless you have access to them.

Channel Targeting History

This report displays fatigue history by channels. For a specified date range or campaign, activity fatigue details are summarized and displayed by channels. You can drill down to view fatigue details for each channel by date, week, or month.

Using the View History icon, you can view fatigue details for a specific channel, for a specified date range as displayed in the following figure.

A Sample Channel Execution History Report

the picture is described in the document text

Use the following procedures to view the different operational reports.

Viewing an Activity or Channel Specific Fatigue Report

Viewing Campaign Activity Specific Reports

Viewing an Activity or Channel Specific Fatigue Report

You can choose to view the fatigue history for a specific period and/or for a specific campaign. You can also choose to view fatigue information across activities or for a specific channel. You must enter at least one search criteria to view the report.

Navigation: Campaign Workbench > Reports Dashboard > Target History

Viewing Campaign Activity Specific Reports

You can view campaign activity specific reports using different navigation:

Prerequisite: Campaign activity must exist and tracking metrics should have been defined

Notes