Automated Deduplication

How to handle duplicate leads in bulk operations

Jeppe Liisberg avatar
Written by Jeppe Liisberg
Updated over a week ago

This article will explain how to setup, test and run a bulk deduplication on one or more lists in your account. If you are looking for a general introduction to duplicates, check out our article on duplicates. If you want to know exactly what happens when leads are merged, check out our article on merging.

If you have many duplicates, you should start by checking your configuration. First, you need to make sure the duplicate detection is legit, meaning that the dupes we detect are actually dupes. Go to Manage -> Duplicates and create a duplicate report. Review the leads and check if it looks sane. 

Example duplicate report

If the system detect duplicates that are not duplicates, you may want to adjust how we do the detection in the first place. This is done from the list configuration page under "Dedupe".

The "Dedupe" settings page under list configuration

Once you have confirmed that all your lists has the right settings, you can move on to running a bulk deduplication job. If you change settings on a list, please allow the system some time to reset and redo the detection routines.

To start a bulk deduplication job, go to Manage -> Duplicates and review the Dedupe section on the right hand side.

Strategy

Dedupe only new and keep others

The deduplication won't touch any leads that are not in state "New". This is the safest operation as new leads usually does not contain any activity that can be lost.

Keep won over call back over lost over archived over new

Value won leads over the others, meaning that won leads should always be kept intact during the deduplication. Likewise, value call backs higher than all others but won leads, and so on.

Example: If two dupes are "New" and "Won", the "Won" lead will be kept and the "New" lead will be deduped using the selected dedupe method.

Example: If two dupes are "Call back" and "New", the "Call back" lead will be kept and the "New" lead will be deduped using the selected dedupe method.

Keep call back over new over won over lost over archived

Value leads currently queued over completed leads.

Example: If two dupes are "New" and "Won", the "New" lead will be kept and the "Won" lead will be deduped using the selected dedupe method.

Example: If two dupes are "Call back" and "Lost", the "Call back" lead will be kept and the "Lost" lead will be deduped using the selected dedupe method.

Method

Dry run

Run the deduplication and collect number on how many leads would be affected by the chosen strategy on the chosen lists. A dry run does not change anything and is safe to run just to see what will happen if a real deduplication was run.

Merge

Merges "Merging" into "Keeping". The "Keeping" lead will not have any data overwritten.

  • Only empty fields will have data added from the merging lead

  • Activity log will be moved, so all entries from both leads belongs to the keeping lead after the merge.

  • The state will be the state of the keeping lead

  • Data for fields on the merging leads list, that does not exist on the keeping leads list, will be lost.

  • After the merge, only the keeping lead will remain, so if the merging lead was on another list, it will be gone from that list.

Delete

The "Merging" lead will be deleted along with its activity log.
WARNING - if existing activity is deleted, this also affects reports. For example leads that were won, that is deleted, will have the winning event deleted, and that win will no longer appear in the reports.

Ignore

myphoner will not report these leads as duplicates anymore.

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