Does Metadata create duplicate Leads?

Metadata does not create duplicate Leads in your Marketing Automation tool, but there are a few things to note regarding how the Leads get created/updated in your MA tool.

Once a Lead is created in Metadata depending on your MA tool settings that Lead will be either pushed immediately to your MA tool or will wait to be further enriched. For more information on this, please see our data flow kb article.

Once the Lead is pushed to your MA tool the following happens:

• We query into your MA tool to see if the Lead already exists based on the email field that is mapped to the primary email address field in your MA tool.
• If we find a match then we update that Lead.
• If we don't find a match then we create a new Lead.
• If we find duplicates already in your MA tool of that same email then we choose the most recent Lead that was last updated and update that one.

At this point, once we have either created/updated a Lead we pull that Lead ID back to our platform and moving forward will always update that same Lead ID, so if the Lead in your MA tool changes to a different email since we have already associated to that ID we update that same one.

Another thing to note is that it is possible for duplicates to get created in the following scenario:

• If the Field Mapping between your MA tool has the Business Email (what we enrich) mapped to the primary email field in your MA tool
• The Native Lead Sync in your MA tool is turned ON

The Native Lead Sync will create the Lead based on the Opt-In email and we will create based on the Business Email since we enrich this. In this scenario, we recommend switching the Business Email back to a secondary field in the Field Mapping settings so that the Opt-In Email goes to the primary email field.