Uploading external activities

Most likely, you will have exported data from another source, perhaps trade show activities. You can upload this information to Oracle Eloqua using an upload file.

Before you begin:

  • Create your upload file (.txt, .csv, .xls, .xlsx). The .csv file that you upload must contain the following columns:
    • External Asset Type
    • External Activity
    • External Asset Name
    • Contact Email Address
    • Campaign ID (always include if known)

      • The Campaign ID can be found in each campaign's URL. For example, https://secure.p01.eloqua.com/Main.aspx#campaigns&id=XXX, where XXX is the campaign ID.

    • Date (MM/DD/YYYY format)

      Note: To ensure the external activity generates a campaign response, the date must be between the reporting start date of the campaign and the current day's date. Uploading an external activity with a date before the campaign's reporting start date or after the current date will result in the activity successfully being added to the contact record, however will not create a campaign response for that activity.

    • Additional contact fields can be included as well like first and last name, and so on.

      Note: With Salesforce integration, the Salesforce Campaign ID must be mapped to the Last SFDC Campaign ID contact field in Oracle Eloqua, unless a list upload is preformed directly to a campaign to create external activities.

  • Separate the fields in the upload file using a comma (,), pipe (|), or semi-colon (;).
  • The first row of the file must be column headings. Oracle Eloqua will attempt to map the headings to existing Oracle Eloqua fields.
  • If you are adding or updating contacts, make sure that you can map the data in your upload file to contact fields in Oracle Eloqua. Use similar naming conventions in your upload file to make this mapping easier.

Note: If a contact does not exist in your database, Oracle Eloqua will automatically create the contact.

To upload an external activity:

  1. Navigate to Orchestration An image of the Orchestration icon., then click Campaigns.
  2. Click Upload External Activities.

    An image of the External Asset Upload Wizard, Pick Data Source tab.

    Tip: To upload activities directly to a campaign, first open the campaign, then click Actions > Upload External Activities.

  3. Complete the information about the upload. Then click An image of the upload icon. and browse to the upload file.

    The upload wizard continues to step 2.

    An image of the Review tab.

  4. Verify the contents of the file on the Review tab and click Next Step.

    An image of the Map Asset Fields tab.

  5. Complete the Map Asset Fields window and click Next Step.
    • Make sure you map all the data in your upload file to the applicable Oracle Eloqua field.
    • Also, make sure that you select when you want the fields to update using the All Fields Update Type drop-down list. For example, update the field if it is blank or not blank. Using Set to default will use the default configuration for each field. If a specific field should be updated differently than the rest, you can double-click the field and configure the update type for that specific field.

    An image of the Map Contact Fields tab with source fields mapped to target fields.

  6. Complete the Map Contact Fields window and click Next Step.
    • Make sure you map all the data in your upload file to the applicable Oracle Eloqua field.
    • Also, make sure that you select when you want the fields to update using the All Fields Update Type drop-down list. For example, update the field if it is blank or not blank. Using Set to default will use the default configuration for each field. If a specific field should be updated differently than the rest, you can double-click the field and configure the update type for that specific field.

    An image of the Finish tab.

  7. Complete the final step of the wizard.
    • To place all the contacts into a shared list, click the Place Contacts into a Shared Contact List check box and choose the shared list.
  8. Click Finish.

The activities are uploaded. If a contact does not already exist in your Oracle Eloqua database, Oracle Eloqua will create a contact. Uploading an external activity will also trigger Oracle Eloqua to check when the activity was imported and re-score contacts associated with the imported data based on any active lead scoring models.

Resolving issues with an import

If you configured the import to send a confirmation email, the email details results of your import, and it provides links to any failed operations for troubleshooting purposes.

An image of an email showing a successful external activity upload.

If there were any failures, you must resolve them before the import can complete. To resolve a failed import, you must update the original source file with the applicable fixes, and upload the file again.

In the following example, there were five invalid entries for Campaign Data that must be resolved to complete the import. As a result of this failure, no data was imported. To view more details about the failure, you click the link provided.

An image of a section showing failures and issues from the external activity upload.

In this example, the import failed because the campaign specified was invalid.
An image of a table showing invalid Campaign Data.

Learn more

External assets and activities