Merging contacts

Kentico EMS required

Features described on this page require the Kentico EMS license.

In some cases, multiple contacts on your websites may actually represent a single real‑world person. Automatic merging allows you to get rid of duplicates by combining several contacts into a single object.

The system automatically merges contacts that are clearly associated with the same person. This means that the system always merges contacts that are associated with the same email address.  

Automatic merging can occur when new contacts are created or when the data of existing contacts is updated. The merging is only triggered by live site actions such as a form submission, contact registration, or email subscription. Creating contacts or editing them via the administration interface or via the API does not trigger the automatic merging.

After the system merges objects, the result is a single object called a parent.

Automatic merge collisions

When attribute collisions occur during automatic merges, the system uses the values of the child contact. If a collision is detected between the attributes of child contacts and the parent contact does not contain a value in the given field, the priority of the values is undetermined (the system uses the values of the first contact loaded from the database).