To help maintain clean and accurate contact data, zkipster Audience automatically suggests when two Contact's 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.
Use Cases for Deduplication
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.
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:
Audience checks for duplicates daily. But if you'd like to run an instant check, click the 'Update' button highlighted above. Please note: after clicking 'Update', you'll need to wait 10 minutes before running another check.
The Duplicates tab on the left-hand side will display the 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 skip 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.
Deduplicating Contacts
Clicking on the arrow icon on the right side of the duplicate record will display the contact profiles that are potential duplicates. You can also use the search bar at the top of the list to quickly locate Contacts.
The Matching Field column shows which Field has been flagged as a duplicate entry.
The Duplicates column displays how many instances of this value are repeated across your Contacts.
Use the checkbox, located to the left of each Contact profile to select them.
If you are sure that the Contacts are not duplicates, click on 'Dismiss'.
If you would like to delete the Contact, click on 'Delete'.
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 on the 'Resolve' screen.
Merging Contacts from the 'Resolve' screen
The left-most column with a gold background is the Merge Preview, which displays what data will be included in your Contact once the selected Contact profiles are merged.
Master: With a blue background, you can select which Contact to use as the Master Contact by clicking the button in their corresponding column for the 'Master' row. When merging Contacts, all Fields will be populated with data from the Master Contact. Once a Master Contact is selected, you can override any field with data from one of the duplicate Contacts or by manually typing/selecting the value to replace it.
If you select a new Master Contact while there are unsaved changes in your Merge Preview, you will be prompted to confirm the selection of this Master Contact. If you click 'Set New Master', all changes to the Contacts in your Merge Preview will be discarded.
To edit what data will be saved in your merged Contact's Profile, you can type the information directly into the box corresponding to each Field (for example, 'Nickname', or 'Salutation', or select from the list of possible responses if the Field is configured as a Dropdown or Color Field. When you have finished, click 'Merge' to save your Contact exactly as they appear in the Merge Preview. Click 'Dismiss' to cancel the deduplication.
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