Latest update 13:13 EST, March 23rd
Oracle has released the following statement: “Please be advised that we are re-aligning our timing for the changes to Form Field lengths within Eloqua. No changes will take place with form field lengths (new or existing) as part of our upcoming 487 Release (April 4-23, 2017), and no action is required at this time. Stay tuned as we will provide additional information shortly.”
Original article follows…
The upcoming Eloqua release impacts form behavior in another big way. As you may have heard, forms will only be able to collect a maximum of 35 characters per field, regardless of the form type or use case.
This field length validation is being enforced at the server level. The implication is that if a user enters more than 35 characters in a single form field, Eloqua will discard the entire submission and the form submitter will not be redirected to the intended destination (gated asset, thank you or confirmation page, etc.) but to an error page.
Besides negatively affecting the user experience, this will have an impact on metrics and reporting downstream, as the discarded data is not captured within the form data or preserved elsewhere. As a result, it will not even be possible to see how many users have encountered this failure.
The latest update following community feedback
Oracle has now re-assessed the situation and is altering the way in which this 35 character limit will be rolled out – this is good news!
Previously, all existing form fields would have this validation step enabled if 90% of form submissions contained less than 35 characters in that field. The new criteria for the imposition of the 35 character limit is as follows:
1. Changes limited to the following field types: Single Text Fields, Hidden Fields and Campaign ID Hidden Fields
2. 100% of Form Submission data less than 35 characters and have over 1000 Form Submissions for that field. This includes scenarios where the submitted value is blank
3. If a max character length was already configured by the customer on some fields, they won’t be altered
4. Max length should not be less than minimum length
5. Skip 35 characters validation when the field HTML Name is set to elqCustomerGUID
6. Email address fields will be omitted from any changes
At the time of writing, the primary article on Eloqua Insiders describing this change has not been updated.
Overall, this change will mean that not all forms are immediately affected, and what’s more, not all fields are affected. However, there will still be edge cases where a field has collected less than 35 characters consistently to date, but may collect more than 35 characters tomorrow.
What you need to do right now
Oracle will shortly be sending each account a report identifying the forms and specific fields impacted by this change. A careful scrutinizing of form structure, data collection use cases and fields will need to be performed by your marketing operations team. New guidance will need to be issued when creating new forms and modifying existing ones on how to manage this, especially in the scenario where a form’s primary use case is modified.
If you require any further information or assistance, please do not hesitate to contact your account team or technical contact at MarketOne.