Fatigue Analysis in Oracle Eloqua

What Fatigue Analysis measures

Fatigue Analysis is one of Eloqua’s Advanced Intelligence features alongside Send Time Optimization and account engagement scoring. Since June 12, 2025 Oracle has made Advanced Intelligence available to all Eloqua customers. It isn’t on by default: you turn it on by opening a service request with Oracle Support.

Once it’s on, the model looks at two things for each contact over the last 180 days: how many emails they were sent and how they opened them, weighing both recency and frequency. It runs every week and writes the result to a system contact field, Fatigue Level. According to Oracle’s description of the model it scores only valid contacts, meaning those who are globally subscribed and haven’t hard bounced. Eloqua stores opens and clicks from email scanning tools and Apple Mail Privacy Protection separately from a person’s own engagement.

The model starts from the send and open history already in your instance. Oracle recommends 180 days of consistent, high enough send volume for the best results so an instance that sends rarely or only to small segments will have many contacts the model can’t classify.

The nine fatigue levels

Oracle defines five states and splits two of them into low, medium and high:

• Inactive. No email in the last 45 days or a new contact with no engagement history yet. Globally unsubscribed and hard-bounced contacts are Inactive too and it is the default for any contact the model can’t classify.
• Undersaturated. The contact has been sent email but there isn’t enough activity to call them Just Right or Saturated. Oracle’s own examples treat them as contacts with room for more.
• Just Right. The contact engages well and the number of emails they get suits their engagement.
• Saturated (low, medium or high). Engagement is declining and the contact is possibly getting too much email.
• Oversaturated (low, medium or high). Engagement is poor and there is a strong possibility the contact disengages.

Oracle doesn’t publish the thresholds behind low, medium and high so treat them as an order rather than as numbers. In Profiler, sales users see the same levels as three engagement levels: Just Right shows as High, Saturated as Medium, Oversaturated as Low, and Inactive and Undersaturated as Uncategorized.

Where to see fatigue levels

• On the contact. Fatigue Level is a contact field so it appears in any contact view that includes it and in the All Contact Fields view.
• On the dashboard. Under Analytics > Dashboards the Fatigue Analysis dashboard shows how your contacts are spread across the five levels, which way each level is trending and how many emails each level was sent over six months against its open rate. A banner at the top raises a “Burnout Alert!” when more than half of your contacts are Saturated or Oversaturated.
• In Insight. Fatigue Level is available anywhere the Contact attribute is so you can report unsubscribes, clicks or conversions by fatigue level.

The Insight report is the one to build first. If Oversaturated contacts unsubscribe at several times the rate of Just Right contacts that is your case for sending them less.

Acting on a Fatigue Level in Eloqua

Oracle’s examples cover the places the field can be used. Three of them can change how much email a contact gets.

Exclude fatigued contacts from a send

Exclude the Oversaturated levels in the segment for a newsletter or a promotional send. It is the quickest change to make and it suits the batch sends that matter least.

Route them in a campaign

A Compare Contact Fields decision step in front of the email sends Oversaturated contacts down a different path: a wait step, a shorter version of the campaign or out of the campaign altogether.

Rest them in a program

A Contact Field Change listener in a program can catch contacts when their Fatigue Level changes. A program can then put newly Oversaturated contacts on a shared list that your campaigns exclude and take them off again once the model scores them Just Right.

Dynamic content and lead scoring can read the field too but neither changes how much email a contact gets.

The 26A release changed one thing here: a Fatigue Level update no longer changes a contact’s Date Modified. Before that every weekly model run touched every contact whose level changed so segments and programs that filter on Date Modified picked up contacts nobody had edited. If you built workarounds for that, review them.

Where Fatigue Analysis falls short

Fatigue Analysis does what Oracle built it to do, which is show you which contacts are tiring and how many of them there are. The problems start when you lean on it to control frequency.

The first is that it measures and doesn’t enforce. A Fatigue Level only changes what a campaign does if the campaign checks it. Like the frequency caps teams build in Eloqua, the check has to be in every segment or every campaign. A campaign built without it sends as usual and nothing tells you it was left out.

The second is timing. The model runs once a week over six months of history so a contact who is Just Right on Monday can be sent a heavy week of email before their level changes and the field tells you about it afterwards. Nor does the field know what has been sent since the last model run or what other campaigns are about to send. If three campaigns check a Just Right contact on the same afternoon all three see Just Right and all three send.

The third is what the model looks at. Oracle documents it as using sends and opens and doesn’t mention clicks, form submissions or unsubscribes so a contact who opens every email and never acts on one can still score as Just Right.

Finally, excluding is a blunt instrument. Take Oversaturated contacts out of every send and they also miss the renewal notice and the event they registered for. A tired contact needs fewer emails but still the ones that matter to them and a decision step that can only say yes or no has no way to tell those apart.

Turning fatigue levels into frequency limits

A better way to use Fatigue Analysis is to give each fatigue tier its own limit instead of using it to exclude people. For example:

• Undersaturated and Just Right: your standard limit, say three emails a week.
• Saturated: two a week.
• Oversaturated: one a week.

Inactive mixes new contacts with contacts nobody has emailed in 45 days so decide on it separately.

Natively each tier needs its own rule: a shared filter for Saturated contacts sent two or more emails in the last seven days, another for Oversaturated contacts sent one or more, and so on, combined into one filter that a decision step checks before every email. This works with the same weaknesses as any native cap: every campaign has to include the check, campaigns sending at the same time can all pass it and nothing decides which email gets the contact’s one slot.

The Email Governor enforces limits like these in one place. You set how many emails a contact can receive in a given period, with tighter limits for the segments that need them so a segment built on Fatigue Level can carry its own limit. Every governed campaign draws on the same count and when an Oversaturated contact has room for one email this week the campaign priorities decide which one it is, so a renewal notice goes out ahead of a newsletter.

Because the model reruns every week the limits adjust as contacts change. As a Saturated contact gets less email and starts opening again, Fatigue Analysis should move them back toward Just Right and their limit rises with them. And while Fatigue Level updates weekly, the Email Governor’s reporting tracks fatigue as you send so you can see contacts drifting toward an unsubscribe before the next model run.