Dark Pool does a lot of heavy lifting for you: automatically analyzing millions of contact engagements and bounceback messages to determine behavioral patterns and categorize your audience into 6 quality groups that can be routed on a campaign canvas. That's a lot for a machine to do without some human oversight, which is why we developed the Dark Pool Contact Checker. This simple tool provides an in-depth explanation of why a contact is in a certain Dark Pool quality category. All you need is a contact's Eloqua ID.

You'll find the Dark Pool Contact Validator by clicking "Dark Pool" in the main navigation menu of the Motiva app. Scroll down to the "Contact Breakdown" section of the dashboard page. On the right side, you see a button labeled "Check Contact" next to the "Export All Contacts" button.

Click "Check Contact" and the following window will pop-up on your screen.

You can grab a contact's Eloqua ID either by exporting the contacts in a certain category from the Dark Pool dashboard or by running a report in Eloqua Insight for a relevant audience. If you're using Eloqua Insights, make sure the contact is included in the Dark Pool evaluation period.

Click "Done" in the bottom right corner once you input the ID and a report will appear detailing the reasons for the contact's classification.

The reasons listed relate to the activity we see for this contact. If a contact has opens, clicks or external web activity like page views and form completions, we will mention that activity in the list. Engagement improves a contact's overall quality score and puts them in a healthier contact category.

Problematic signals will also be mentioned in the list, like hard and soft bouncebacks. These signals will lower a contact's overall quality score and put them in an unhealthier contact category.

For the example contact above, the only datapoints we had to reference within the evaluation period were problematic bouncebacks. No engagement for a year plus bouncebacks means this contact is polluting your segments and dragging down engagements rates. As a result, Dark Pool categorized this contact as "Remove."

The Contact Checker checks one contact at a time. We recommend grabbing a small batch of contacts at random and checking the rationale of this smaller pool of contacts to make this analysis more manageable.

You can also narrow down the contacts you want to analyze. Remember that when you export the contacts in a quality category from the "Contact Breakdown" section, you will get a spreadsheet stating if the contact is a catch all domain and if there is external activity present (webviews and form completions). Use these fields to narrow down the group of contacts you want to analyze. For example, contacts without email engagement and without external activity that are also a catch all domain, should definitely be removed.