Merging contact profiles in Ometria

Ometria uses the following fields to merge contact profiles:

• Email address (email)
• Customer ID (customer_id)

If a contact enters Ometria with information in either of these fields which matches the information in an existing profile, all of their information will be merged into the existing profile. 

See also: Contacts and profiles

Same email, different customer id

Only one contact can exist in Ometria for the same combination of email address and customer ID.

This means you can have multiple contacts with the same email address associated with various different customer IDs, but you can’t have more than one contact with the same email address AND customer ID.

If Ometria receives data containing a contact with a recognised email address but a different customer ID, it will attempt to merge these contacts into single customer profiles.

This means that you could have more than one profile with the same email address.

E.g. Jane has three contact profiles in Ometria using the same email address but three different customer IDs:

• email=jane@example.com, customer_id=123
• email=jane@example.com, customer_id=456
• email=jane@example.com, customer_id not provided

Or, Jane has three contact profiles in Ometria using the same customer ID, but different email addresses:

• email=jane@example.com, customer_id=123
• email=janiej@example.com, customer_id=123
• email not provided, customer_id=123

But she can’t have more than one profile with the same email address and customer ID.

One identifier with multiple matches

If a contact enters Ometria with only one identifier - i.e. either email OR customer ID, but not both - and there are existing profiles that match, the contact data is merged with the most recently ingested contact. 

This is regardless of subscription status or any other timestamp.

E.g. Jane enters Ometria with the email address jane@example.com, and no customer ID. There are two other contact profiles using jane@example.com (with two different different customer IDs) - one was ingested in January 2019, another in January 2022. Ometria will merge the incoming data with the profile from January 2022. 

Merging a profile with empty fields

If the contact entering Ometria has other fields which contain information that doesn't match an existing profile, e.g. first name, gender, custom fields etc. or there are blank fields, Ometria uses the standard rules of priority to merge the information based on how the contact enters Ometria:

1. The Ometria preference centre
2. API, App, CSV
3. Ometria form
4. Importer (e.g. Magento or Shopify)
5. Third party sync

Common questions

If I update an existing contact’s email address or customer ID, will it get reassigned to another contact? 

No.

Once a listing has been assigned to a contact profile in Ometria, it is never reassigned to another contact.

Can Ometria stop customer duplications from happening?

No.

It's not possible to stop duplications from ever happening. 

For example, Ometria might receive:

{"customer_id": "123", "email": "bob@example.com"}

And then a second listing which creates a new contact profile:

{"email": "bobs_other_address@example.com"}

…and then a third listing, telling us that the first two profiles were related:

{"customer_id": "123", "email": "bobs_other_address@example.com"}

Two contact profiles have been created and they have both been identified as unique contacts.