How contacts are "merged"?

General Discussion
1

I wonder how contact merging works? Suppose the following situation:

  1. I have enabled anonymous tracking in my website. I have anonymous user 65 being tracked

  2. I import some contacts from an e-mail list I have. So Mautic created user 80 with the e-mail customer@somedomain.com

  3. Later on, anonymous user 65 signs up in my website using a form, and types e-mail customer@somedomain.com.

I believe Mautic will update anonymous user 65 with the e-mail, and it will now be identified. However, the same “real” user is another contact in Mautic, with id 80, because I imported that e-mail before. Given that e-mail is an unique identifier, how things will work?

Thank you in advance!

2

First user with that email should get updated with any new data from the form.
So whichever user got that email address added the first time should be updated with any new data from tracking or a form.
So if user 80 was created prior than 65, I guess further data should be attached to this user.

What is the order of creation in your example?
What was the actual result in your case?

A different problem might be what happens to the “other” user, worth checking too.

1 Like
3

I didn’t test it. In this hypothetical example, user 65 was created first.
I’m asking it because this is probably what will happen, I’m tracking visitors to my website and now I’d like to import some contacts. Probably some of the anonymous users I’m tracking are some of the contacts I’m going to import, but they will be created as different ones. When tracking continues, the anonymous user will be identified and then there will be two e-mails.

One reason for my question is which things I should care for when importing contacts when I’m already tracking . This is something that came to my mind, are there others? What is the correct way to import e-mail contacts into an existing Mautic setup?

4

I’m gonna park a comment here because I think that’s what’s currently happening to my instance.

I noticed after importing a list to Segment A, some contacts in Segment B are missing. I assume this is because they were merged and ultimately ended up in Segment A.

I don’t want that to happen.