To help maintain clean and accurate contact data, zkipster Audience automatically suggests when two contacts profiles appear to be potential duplicates. This suggestion is triggered when two records share the same values for specific identifying attributes. These include:
Email address;
Phone number;
The same external ID;
Identical social network links;
Exact match on both First Name and Last Name values.
But as a best practice recommendation, users should aim to only create new contact profiles for individuals that do not yet exist in their account.
This article explains how to deduplicate contact profiles in Audience.
How to Spot and Correct Duplicates in Audience
There are different ways a contact profile can be created in Audience:
After you create or import contacts into your Audience account, open the 'Duplicates' section from the left hand side menu to search and merge potential duplicate profiles.
A few things to note:
The Duplicates tab on the left hand side will display a number of how many potential duplicates you might have in your contact list.
When potential duplicates are detected, users are given the opportunity to merge the profiles together or dismiss the suggestion. If the user opts to ignore the suggestion, Audience will remember that decision and will not flag those two records as potential duplicates again in the future.
Before resolving duplicate contact profiles, ensure to click on the "update" button highlighted above to ensure an updated duplicate list.
Deduplicating Contacts
Clicking on the arrow icon on the left side of the duplicate record will display the contact profiles that are potential duplicates.
Use the checkbox on the side of each contact profile to select them.
If you are sure that the contacts are not duplicates, click on 'Dismiss'.
If the contact profiles are indeed duplicated profiles for the same individual, click on the 'Merge' button to deduplicate and merge the selected profiles together:
In cases where conflicting data exists between the two records on the same field, selecting "Merge" will prompt a conflict resolution, allowing the user to choose which values to keep for each field before finalizing the merge. This ensures that valuable data is not overwritten unintentionally.
For example, if you have two contact profiles for the same individual 'Marilyn Johnson' and in one of the profiles her job title is set as 'Director' while in the other profile her job title is set as 'Director of Client Services', zkipster Audience will flag the conflicting field by highlighting it on the profile and allow you to choose which value should be kept and which should be dismissed.
For conflicting data present on contact fields that allow for more than one data value (for example, you can have multiple organizations associated with the same contact profile), the system will automatically populate a corresponding alternative field. You can then choose if it makes sense to keep all data on the same profile or to remove it:
Learn More: How to Resolve Data Conflicts in Audience