If you have spent any time around our DOTS Lead Validation or DOTS Lead Validation International services you may have run across the input to the service, ‘TestType’. This input is arguably one of the most important inputs to the Lead Validation services, and this is your guide to understanding how to use it effectively in your Lead Validation requests.

What are test types?

Test Types help us personalize the results from the Lead Validation services to help fit the data that you want verified. The biggest reason we use test types in our services is that we want our Lead Validation service to know which data points to validate, and how to contrast and compare them against each other. The test type will specify the data points that will be analyzed and ultimately return an overall score that reflects the quality of the data points you have.

Business and Residential test types

Our test types typically analyze two different categories of lead information: Business leads and Residential leads. Business test types generally have “business” or “b” in the name. These test types will give better scores to things like business addresses and phone numbers associated with businesses. The business test types will penalize a lead if residential information is given, and conversely residential test types will penalize lead information if it is found to be associated with businesses.

Which test type should I use?

Our baseline residential test type that analyzes all sets of data is “normal1p” which tests for Name, Phone, Address, Email and IP Address. If you submit a lead to the service without one of these datapoints, then the service will penalize the lead as having missing data. Depending on your use case, this may or may not be helpful. If you are taking information on a user-entered form and want all data points provided, then this may help ensure that you get quality lead info and not just garbage information from your users.

However, if you simply don’t collect some of these data points you will likely want to look at other test types that are more suited to the data you do have present. We also have a variety of other test types that are available for use. Only collect name, address and phone? Use “n-a-p”. Want to validate everything but IP address? Use the “noip” test type when sending validation requests. Below is a table of some commonly used test types, the data points they analyze and whether they analyze business or residential information.

Test Type	Inputs	Business or Residential
normal1p	Name, Address, Phone, Email and IP address	Residential
normal2p	Same as normal1p but takes in a 2nd phone number	Residential
noip	Analyzes everything but IP address. Has the option for a 2nd phone number	Residential
n-a-p	Name, Address and Phone	Residential
business	Name, Address, phone, Email and IP Address	Business
businessonly	Performs same checks as the business test type but more harshly penalizes residential inputs	Business
business-noip	Performs the same checks as the business test type but does not check IP	Business

Custom test types

The above list is by no means a complete list of all our test types. If you don’t see a test type that meets your needs there is good news; we can create custom test types for you that best suit the data you have! We can create special rules and scoring behaviors for a test type. The best way forward for this is to schedule a call with our Applications Engineering team to go over your requirements, and we can ensure you get the validated lead information that you are looking for.

Want to learn more? Reach out to us at support@serviceobjects.com