Find and Merge Duplicate People

Marketo automatically de-duplicates when new people enter the system. However, your CRM may have initially sent duplicates to Marketo. Here’s how to merge them.

CAUTION

Merging people is permanent, there is no “undo” option.

PREREQUISITES

Finding and merging duplicates will involve the use of built-in/system smart lists.

NOTE

Marketo will not automatically de-dupe against a Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics sync, or when you manually enter people.

Find Duplicates

  1. Go to the Database area.

    CAUTION

    Merging people in Marketo may not work if you use a Salesforce Person Account. Please merge the records in Salesforce if possible.

  2. Select the Possible Duplicates system smart list and click on the People tab.

    NOTE

Merge People Manually

CAUTION

When merging people, if the losing person has a Marketo custom object, it will not get re-associated to the winning person. Please re-parent the custom object prior to performing the merge.

  1. Select the duplicates by holding Ctrl/Cmd and clicking, then click Merge People.

    TIP

    You could have two or more duplicates for the same person - select them all at once.

  2. You will see the values between the records that don’t match. Select the value you want to keep for each field. Click Merge when done. If you don’t want either value, you can check Custom and enter a value of your choice.

    NOTE

    When manually merging people, the first person selected will be the “winner.” So in the People tab if you are merging record IDs 198 and 199, and you happen to click on 199 first, 199 will be the record ID of the merged people. This also applies if more than two records are merged.

    TIP

    Merging is better than deleting. You’ll conserve all history (page visits, link clicks, email opens, form fills, etc.).

Effect in Salesforce

If you have Salesforce integration, there are a few notes about the effect of merging Leads in Salesforce.

  • When merging only Leads or only Contacts, they merge per normal Salesforce rules.
  • When merging Leads and Contacts together, all Leads are converted to Contacts prior to merging per normal Salesforce rules.

For specifics of Salesforce behavior when merging Leads or Contacts, please check the following Salesforce documents:

Bulk Merging

If you have too many duplicates to manually merge, contact the Adobe Account Team (your Account Manager) to discuss your options.

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