Deduplicate contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and products
HubSpot automatically deduplicates your contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and products when they're created through a form submission or an import.
Where the above deduplication isn't thorough enough, you can also manually manage possible duplicates if you're a user in a Professional or Enterprise account by using the duplicate management tool to deduplicate contacts and companies.
Automatic deduplication in HubSpot
HubSpot deduplicates objects that are created in the CRM (e.g., imports, forms submissions) in the following ways:
Deduplicate contacts by usertoken
When a new contact is added to HubSpot through a form submission, HubSpot checks a contact's user token (i.e., hubspotutk cookie) to see if it matches an existing contact.
Please note: if you've turned on GDPR functionality in your account, a user must accept your privacy policy banner in order for this cookie to be associated with their contact record.
For example, if two form submissions come from the same browser and computer, the submissions will be merged into one record because HubSpot will detect the same user token for both submissions.
The information from the second form submission will overwrite the information from the first submission because they have the same cookie stored in their browser. This will happen only if the email address from the second submission doesn't already exist as a contact in HubSpot.
If you want each form submission from the same browser to create a new contact, enable the Always create new contact for new email setting in your form options. This can be useful in specific situations, such as collecting contact details at a trade show on a single device.
Deduplicate contacts by email address
When a new contact is added through import, form submission, or API, HubSpot will look for a matching value in the Email property. If a contact already exists in your account with the same email address, the new contact information will be added to the existing contact record.
For example: if you import a list of contacts that includes "admin@hubspot.com", and an existing contact in your account has the email address "admin@hubspot.com", the imported information will be added to that specific contact record.
Deduplicate companies by company domain
When a new company is added through import, HubSpot looks at the Company domain name property value to deduplicate companies. If a company with the same company domain name already exists in your account, the new company information will be added to the existing company record.
If you do not include this property in your import, each row of your import file will be imported as a new company record.
Please note: companies created through API will not be deduplicated by the Company domain name property.
Deduplicate contacts, companies, deals, tickets, or product by object ID
When a new contact, company, deal, ticket, or product is added through import, you can use a unique object ID to match up these records with existing records in HubSpot. This object ID can be used to deduplicate records during the import process, or to search for a specific record in HubSpot.
To get the Contact ID, Company ID, Deal ID, Ticket ID, or Product ID, you can export your records or view a specific object's properties for their ID (e.g., their Contact ID property).
Include the Contact ID, Company ID, Deal ID, Ticket ID, or Product ID column in your file when you import your records into HubSpot. During the import process, select the Update existing [records] using "object ID" exported from HubSpot checkbox when you choose your file.
Please note: if you include the object ID column in your file, any rows that do not have a value for the record ID will not be imported during the import process. Contacts imported with the Contact ID won't update the Email property. Companies imported with the Company ID won't update the Company domain name property.
Manually deduplicate contacts and companies (Professional and Enterprise only)
Users with Admin permissions and the edit access with Everything selected for contacts and companies can deduplicate contacts and companies in their account using the duplicate management tool.
The duplicate management tool identifies duplicates by comparing two records' names, email addresses, IP countries, phone numbers, zip codes, and company names. HubSpot displays up to 2,000 of the most likely duplicates and will refresh these results every few weeks.
In your HubSpot account, navigate to contacts or companies.
In the upper right, click the Actions dropdown menu and select Manage duplicates.
View a list of duplicate contact or company pairs for your review.
Please note: if HubSpot displays a parent company as a duplicate of a child company, you will not be able to review or dismiss this pair as a duplicate. You must remove the parent-child relationship before you can merge them.
Analyze duplicate contacts or companies and decide if they should be merged.
If the two records are not duplicates, in the dialog box, click Cancel. Then, in the table, click Dismiss to remove this identified pair from the Manage duplicates dashboard.
Please note: merging two duplicates can trigger a workflow if the newly updated properties match any of the workflow triggers.
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