Resolve duplicate profiles

If you inadvertently create duplicate instances of a profile, you can merge them and consolidate information to accurately represent a single "profile" in your workspace.

How merging profiles works

You can merge profiles manually or automatically. When you merge two profiles, you pick a primary profile and a secondary profile. The primary profile remains after the merge and the secondary is deleted. This process is permanent: you cannot recover the secondary profile. Depending on the data type, the primary profile may retain its data or inherit the data from the secondary profile.

When the primary profile inherits the data from the secondary profile

The primary profile inherits the following information from the secondary profile:

• Attributes that are not set, or are empty, on the primary will be overwritten if the secondary profile has values for the attributes.

• Event history: the most recent 29 days of events are merged immediately. It can take up to an hour to merge older events. Events merged from the secondary profile cannot trigger automations.

• Campaign journeys that the primary person has not entered

  A journey is a profile’s path through an automation workflow. If the secondary profile has started a journey that the primary profile has not, the primary profile continues on that automation journey after the merge.

  If the secondary profile has completed journeys that the primary profile has not, the primary profile gains these historical journeys after the merge. This may be important for determining entry (or re-entry) criteria for subsequent automations, segments, etc.

• Manual segments that the primary profile did not already belong to

• Message delivery history

• Conversions

  A conversion happens when a profile performs an action (enters/leaves a segment or sends an event) after interacting with a message (receives, opens, clicks) within a time window. Considering this, it’s possible one of the profiles has performed the action and the other hasn’t. In this situation:

  • If the primary profile performs the action while the secondary only interacts with the message (no action performed), the primary profile will not inherit a conversion. The primary profile will only inherit the interaction from the secondary profile.
  • If the secondary profile performs the action, the primary profile will inherit a conversion AS LONG AS the action is an event OR the primary profile inherits the attribute change that made the secondary profile enter/leave the goal segment.

• Relationships and relationship attributes that the primary did not have

When the primary profile retains its data

When both the primary and secondary profiles have conflicting data—both profiles have the same attribute, subscription preference topic, or have experienced the same automation—we pick a “winner” to resolve the conflict; the “winner” value remains after the merge, and the “loser” is lost with the secondary profile. See the sections below to learn more about how we resolve conflicts in the merge process.

Resolving conflicts between attributes

If the primary and secondary profiles both have the same attribute, and the primary profile’s attribute value is not empty, the primary profile’s attribute “wins”: it remains on the merged profile and the secondary profile’s attribute value is lost in the merge.

For example, if both the primary and secondary profiles have a first_name attribute, the first_name on the primary profile remains and the attribute on the secondary profile is lost in the merge.

Resolving conflicts between subscription topic preferences

If you’ve enabled a subscription center in your workspace, then profiles have subscription topic preferences. The subscription topic preferences of the primary profile “win” over the secondary profile. These preferences remain on the merged profile and the secondary profile’s preferences are lost.

For example, if you have a subscription topic “Product Education” and it’s set to TRUE for the primary profile but FALSE for the secondary profile, the merged profile will have a value of TRUE.

In workspace settings, you can change this behavior to respect the most restrictive unsubscribe settings, regardless of which profile is primary or secondary. Learn more about preserving unsubscribes on merge below.

Resolving conflicts between relationships

If the primary and secondary profiles both have the same relationship, the primary profile’s relationship attributes “win.” We add relationship attributes from the secondary to the primary if the primary did not have these attributes. We also overwrite empty values in the primary if the value is populated in a relationship attribute in the secondary profile.

Resolving conflicts between automation journeys

A journey is a profile’s path through an automation. If the primary and secondary profiles have both started or completed the same automation, we pick a “winner” journey to remain on the merged profile. The “winner” depends on whether the profiles have completed a journey in the past or are active in an automation at the time of the merge.

If both profiles are active in an automation, the primary profile continues its automation journey. The secondary profile exits its journey early.

If both profiles have completed an automation, the merged profile keeps the most recently started automation journey. The history of completed automations doesn’t necessarily affect profiles, but you may use it as re-entry criteria for follow-up automation or segment membership.

How to identify profiles

How you identify profiles to merge depends on your workspace settings. Which identifiers are enabled—email, phone, or both? Go to General Workspace Settings to find out.

If email or phone is enabled, you can identify profiles by that identifier, plus cio_id and id. You can also automatically merge profiles in this case.

If both email and phone are disabled, you can identify profiles only by cio_id or id. You must also ensure id is set to “Reference profiles by cio_id” to make the merge possible.

Merge two profiles together

When you merge two profiles, you pick a primary profile and merge a secondary profile into it. The primary profile remains after the merge and the secondary is deleted.

Merging profiles may cause the primary profile to enter or exit segments and automations based on information you merge from the secondary profile. Make sure that you understand how a merge will impact the primary profile before you initiate a merge.

1. Go to the Profiles page.

2. Click Merge. You can pick profiles before you click merge.

   

3. Select your Primary and Secondary people and click Next.

   If you already selected profiles, you can click Swap to reverse your primary and secondary profiles. Remember, when you merge profiles, the primary gains some information from the secondary profile, and any data that is not merged to the primary profile is lost.

   

4. Review your changes one last time. When you're sure you want to merge people, click Confirm and merge.

   You can search for attributes on the primary profile, ensuring that the values on the primary profile are correct before you finish your merge.

   You’ll also see a count of the attributes, events, and deliveries on each profile. Items remaining on the Secondary profile are lost.

When you confirm a merge, you’ll go to the newly merged profile’s page. Attribute changes take effect immediately, but event history may take a moment.

Merge profiles via the API

You can also merge profiles using the Track API. The payload contains primary and secondary profile objects. As when you merge profiles from the Profiles page, the primary profile remains after the merge. The secondary profile’s information is merged into the primary, and then it is deleted.

  curl --request POST \
  --url https://track.customer.io/api/v1/merge_customers \
  --header "Authorization: Basic $(echo -n site_id:api_key | base64)" \
  --header 'content-type: application/json' \
  --data '{"primary":{"email":"cool.person@company.com"}, "secondary":{"email":"cperson@gmail.com"}}'

Automatically merge profiles

By default, new workspaces use email, phone, and id as identifiers. While this makes it easy to identify profiles, there are some situations where you can inadvertently create duplicate profiles—two profiles with different identifiers for the same profile. Customer.io can automatically merge these duplicates for you if you turn on the following settings:

• Multi-identifier profile merge merges profiles whose identifiers are complementary—each profile has identifier values the other doesn’t.
• Auto-merge on update merges profiles when an identify call tries to set an identifier to a value that already belongs to a different profile, as long as the two profiles are complementary on every other identifier.

You can enable Multi-identifier profile merge on its own, but Auto-merge on update requires you to enable Multi-identifier profile merge as well. If your incoming identifier data is reliable, you should enable both settings to reduce duplicate profiles and Failed Attribute Change errors. See Enable auto-merge for your workspace below for instructions.

These settings apply to incoming data on an ongoing basis. Separately, when you enable email or phone as an identifier for an existing workspace, you choose how to merge profiles that already share the same value—a one-time cleanup that’s part of the enable process.

Multi-identifier profile merge

If your workspace supports email, phone, or id as identifiers, and you created your workspace after September 24, 2021, you can enable Multi-identifier profile merge. With this setting on, Customer.io merges two profiles when you send an identify call with identifiers that belong to different profiles—provided all of the following are true:

• Two identifiers in the request (for example, an id and an email, or an id and a phone) match different profiles.
• Each of those identifiers matches exactly one profile.
• The profiles are complementary: each profile is missing the identifier value that matched the other profile, and they don’t conflict on any other identifier.

When Customer.io merges these profiles, the older profile is the Primary and the younger profile is the secondary.

Auto-merge on update

Auto-merge on update extends the Multi-identifier profile merge feature to cover cases in which an identify call tries to change an identifier to a value that already belongs to a different profile.

Without this setting, Customer.io silently drops the identifier change and records a Failed Attribute Change. With this setting on, Customer.io merges the two profiles automatically—as long as the profiles are clearly the same profile.

When we merge profiles

In general, we only merge when the identifier being updated is the only overlap between the profiles. All other identifiers must be complementary: one profile has a value and the other doesn’t.

Specifically, we merge profiles when all of the following are true:

• Both Multi-identifier profile merge and Auto-merge on update are enabled for the workspace.
• The identify call is eligible to update the identifier in question, according to the rules for updating identifiers.
• An identifier attribute in the request body (for example, email) belongs to a different profile than the one in the identify request.
• The two profiles are complementary on every identifier except the one being updated. That means:
  • Neither profile has a conflicting identifier value other than the one being updated. For example, if the request references a profile by id and the conflicting profile has a different id, we can’t automatically merge the profiles.
  • Neither profile has an identifier value that isn’t in the request.

What happens when profiles merge

When we merge profiles, we merge the secondary profile’s attributes into the primary profile and delete the secondary profile. If the primary profile and secondary profile both have an attribute with different values, the primary profile’s value wins.

The merged profile also keeps:

• The primary profile’s cio_id. A cio_id is a canonical, immutable identifier, so Customer.io always preserves the primary profile’s cio_id. Auto-merge on update selects the primary profile the same way Multi-identifier profile merge does: the older profile wins.
• The incoming request’s value for the identifier being updated. This is the one exception to “primary wins”—Customer.io trusts that the request reflects the current state of the world.

When we can’t merge profiles automatically

If we can’t merge profiles under the rules above, Customer.io records a Failed Attribute Change for the identifier in the request. You need to resolve the conflict yourself, either by merging the profiles manually or by correcting your data pipeline.

Example: both profiles have an id:

• Profile A: id=12345, email=ami-home@example.com
• Profile B: id=67890, email=ami-work@example.com
• Request: identifier id=12345, attribute email=ami-work@example.com

Both profiles have an id, and the values differ. Customer.io can’t tell which id is correct, so we can’t automatically merge the profiles. You need to merge these profiles yourself.

Preserve unsubscribes on merge

Profile merges preserve the subscription preferences of the primary profile by default. However, you can change the default behavior in Workspace settings > Merge options.

If you’d like to preserve unsubscribes, the most restrictive preferences across both the primary and secondary profiles, turn on Preserve unsubscribes on merge.

If either profile explicitly unsubscribed (globally or from a topic/channel), the merged profile is unsubscribed.

For example, if one profile is unsubscribed from “Promotions” and subscribed to “Product updates” while the other profile is reversed—it’s subscribed to “Promotions” and unsubscribed from “Product updates”, then the merged profile is unsubscribed from BOTH subscription topics.

This setting applies to both automatic and manual merges.

Enable auto-merge for your workspace

You can enable Multi-identifier profile merge on its own, or enable both settings. Auto-merge on update requires Multi-identifier profile merge, so you can’t turn it on by itself.

1. Go to Settings > Workspace Settings.
2. Click Settings next to Merge options.
3. Enable Multi-identifier profile merge.
4. (Optional) Enable Auto-merge on update.

Merged profiles in the profile activity

When you merge profiles, the profile activity reports a Profiles merged activity on the primary profile. The activity Source shows how the merge was performed, through the Profiles page, the API, or automatically (if your workspace has the setting enabled).

Merged profiles in data warehouse sync

Like the Profile activity, profile merges are represented in your data warehouse as attribute changes and a deleted profile.

• In the Profiles table, the secondary profile is deleted.
• In the Attributes table, the primary profile shows new entries for each attribute inherited from the secondary profile in the merge.

Segment membership and automation triggers after a merge

When you merge profiles, you may cause the primary profile to enter or exit segments and automations. In many cases, these changes are easy to understand—the primary profile directly inherits a manual segment membership or an attribute that adds the profile to a data-driven segment.

However, it’s important to remember that the primary profile also inherits automation and delivery history from the secondary profile, both of which can affect segment membership and automation filters. For example, if both the primary and secondary profiles received the same message, the merged profile will become a member of a data-driven segment of profiles that received that message more than once.