Why would Marketo create a dupe with the same email?

[Matt_Stone2]

I've noticed on a few occasions that Marketo will create a duplicate lead even if the email address is the same and am trying to understand why this would happen. Example log:

You can see in the screenshot that there was an existing lead, then a new form fill out occurred and triggered a "New Lead" activity. Both leads had the same email address and were later merged via a third-party tool, which is why you see the combined log now.

It's worth noting the Fill Out Form activity was not a traditional form fill -- it was done via a server-side post (can't find the documentation anymore, looks like Marketo removed it). The posting used a URL construct like this: http://app-sjp.marketo.com/index.php/leadCapture/save?munchkinId=[MYMUNCHKINID]&formid=[FORMID]&Firs...

Is this just due to the API nature of the form fill? Or is there another explanation as to why the activity wouldn't just match to the existing lead, rather than create a new one?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Matt,

Indeed, you are right, the doc has been removed

Marketo will create duplicates only with the following methods:

• Insertion of a new lead from the CRM (even if a duplicates exists in Marketo)
• Manual entry in Marketo GUI
• Some, not all API calls (the new Push endpoint avoids duplicates)

So I would rather suspect either the API nature of the insert or a change in the way it works. The problem is, server side from post are not really supported by Marketo. So support will not help you. You may want to consider using the form submission in the background (http://developers.marketo.com/blog/make-a-marketo-form-submission-in-the-background/ ) technique, that will deduplicate.

-Greg

[SanfordWhiteman]

Marketo will create duplicates only with the following methods:

Actually, there are other situations:

• Changing the email address in a flow
• A specially constructed form post (I won't get into the details here as it, too, is not officially supported)

Unfortunately, even with an otherwise normal Forms 2.0 standard post, under certain (buggy) situations the dupe checking doesn't fire, adding a general "... and also at other times..." situation.

Without knowing exactly the sequence of ops and the posted data I couldn't tell which one was happening here.

Of course I agree that server-side form post should be discontinued, not only because it's deprecated but because it represents a DoS vulnerability.

[Josh_Hill13]

Hi Matt,

If you received a double post or direct injection to the API like that, Marketo should see the existing email address and update the record.

I wonder if the injected record was really seen correctly or if it really had the "same" email? When Marketo has a merged record, it will merge the logs too, so that's why we see that line in the same log on the final record.

I would click on the  New Lead row number to see what else happened and if it still recorded the fields sent over.

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

And also, on top of Josh's recommendation, look at the form fill out activity details, it will tell you exactly what field values has been recorded during the event and you will be able to check that the email address was indeed the same.

-Greg

[Matt_Stone2]

Looks like you and Josh were correct -- there email was not in fact the same, but I wasn't able to see that anywhere until I drilled into the Form Filled Out details. I guess this is more of an issue with the fuzzy matching of my 3rd party de-duper.

Thanks for the help!