Merge candidates (BETA)

The Merge candidates screen is where you review contacts Ometria believes are the same person, and where you merge contacts yourself.

Go to Settings > Identity resolution > Merge candidates.

The Live configuration badge means everything here runs on the identifiers and merge threshold currently active on your account. To try different settings, use Preview impact.

There are two tabs. Pending and merged shows what Ometria found on its own. Manual similarity check is where you check contacts yourself.

Pending and merged

A pair appears here when it scored at or above your merge threshold, or matched exactly on a deterministic identifier such as email address or customer ID.

Last merge and Next merge tell you when the matching job last ran and when it runs again. Matching runs once a day, so this table changes in daily batches. Use the time period control to change the range.

Select View reasoning on any row to see the evidence behind the score.

Manual similarity check

Use this tab when you already suspect two contacts are the same person and want to check or merge them yourself, rather than waiting for Ometria to find them.

1. In Add a contact, search by any identifier. You can search by name, email address, customer ID and any other identifier set up on your account. Select the contact from the results.
2. Add at least one more contact. Until you do, Ometria tells you it needs another contact before it can check anything.
3. Select Set as survivor on the contact whose record should be kept. Every other contact is compared against it and merges into it.
4. Review the result, then select Merge contacts.

Added contacts appear as cards under Contacts to merge, each showing its identifiers and contact ID. Remove one with the cross on its card, or start again with Clear selection.

Survivor vs each contact scores the survivor against every other contact you added, one row each, with a confidence percentage and a View reasoning button.

Below that, Ometria tells you what would happen under your live settings. Would not merge automatically means the pair scored below your merge threshold, so the daily job would leave them alone.

Seeing why a pair matched

Select View reasoning from either tab.

The panel opens with your threshold and the verdict for this pair. Will merge means the pair is at or above the threshold. Won't merge means it is below. It then names the survivor and confirms the other contact will be merged into it and fill any gaps.

Contribution is the key column, and it works in both directions:

• A positive number is evidence for a match. The larger it is, the stronger the evidence.
• A negative number is evidence against. Two different email addresses actively push the score down.
• 0.00 means the field told us nothing, usually because one or both contacts have no value for it.

Two things are worth knowing when you read these numbers. A matching field can still contribute very little, because Ometria weights how common a value is. Two contacts sharing a rare surname is strong evidence. Two contacts both called John Smith is weak evidence, because so many people share that name. This is what stops large groups of unrelated contacts being clustered together.

And close is not the same as equal. A date of birth a day apart still contributes, but far less than an exact match.

Which values the merged contact keeps

Choosing a survivor decides which contact ID persists. It does not decide which name, email address or phone number the merged profile shows. Those are chosen afterwards by Ometria's profile rules, based on source and recency, with consent taken into account for email and SMS.

So if one contact has a mistyped email address and the other has the correct one, the merged profile does not automatically keep the survivor's version. See The survivor in contact merging for the full field-by-field rules.

Why a group of duplicates takes several days

Contacts merge in pairs. If four profiles all belong to the same person, two merge on the first run, and the rest are compared against the combined profile on the next one. A large group settles over several days rather than all at once. A candidate that waits loses nothing.

See also

• The survivor in contact merging (BETA)
• Merging contact profiles in Ometria
• Custom identifiers