How Does Mediarails Deduplicate Prospect Records?

In Mediarails, Prospect records will be automatically deduplicated to avoid having multiple records for the same website or social profile. This makes organization of records much easier since your team will always be working off the same record.

For example, if an influencer had two prospect records, you might email the influencer on one record asking them to join your program, and then a week later your coworker might email the same influencer and ask them to join your program on a separate duplicate record, thereby causing confusion.

The Mediarails auto deduplication process helps avoid confusing scenarios and also keep your records organized and concise, with all information being located on a single record.

How Does Mediarails Deduplicate Prospect Records?

The simple answer is that Mediarails detects matching information such as the website or social profile URL. The URL is the main component of deduplication.

If two records are a close match in URLs but are slightly off buy a letter or two, then the system will check supplementary data such as the name of the record and associated email addresses to ensure a correct match. If two URLs are an 80% match but share no similar name or contact information, a match will not be made. This helps avoid mistaken matches from happening.

The complete journey of a record & duplicate record in Mediarails:

1. A new record is created either by enabling a prospecting integration or by manually uploading a CSV. This record becomes the Master record.
   
   - you can always tell a Master record because it will have a Master ID in the Master ID column
   
   - If you ever notice a record that does not have a Master ID it is likely because it was just added to the system and has not yet been deduped.
   
   
2. A duplicate record comes in via a prospecting integration or a manual upload
3. The system detects a 98% match in URLs with the pre-existing Master record
4. The system checks and finds matching email addresses associated
5. The match is positively identified by the system
6. Any data such as a new tag or new contact info that is on the newest version of the record is amended to the Master record.
   - for example, if the Master record already had the tag "Fashion Influencers" and the new record has the tag "Lifestyle Influencers" the Master record would then have both tags associated to the record.
7. After adding the new data onto the Master record, the duplicate is permanently deleted.

Please note that this process can sometimes take a few minutes to occur, especially in cases where a large CSV with thousands of records has been uploaded.

It is also worth noting that prospecting integrations often yield similar results and the same record might be pulled in multiple times.

For example, if you set up three Bing integrations for: "Mom Blogs" "Mommy Blogger" and "Family Advice" the same blog may be pulled in for all three searches. You can clearly identify when this occurs because the record's auto-generated Topics tags would include all three bing queries.