How to effectively prevent Marketo from generating duplicates?

Emma,

Are these dupes from the CRM originally?

How are leads entering your funnel? If they are entering Marketo and it's creating dupes, then there is something wrong and you should call Support.

Yeah, I would second this comment from Josh, it depends how the leads are coming into Marketo. If the leads are coming through a form fillout, list upload etc they should be de-duped by email address. This is the only criteria Marketo uses out of the box. If the email address is different (or does not exist) a dupe may be created. If dupes are being created when the lead is coming in through Marketo forms, you definitely need to log this with Support for investigation.

The problem lies if the leads are coming in through your CRM. If a lead already exists in Marketo, and a duplicate lead is created in your CRM, Marketo will NOT de-dupe that lead as it is synced to Marketo from the CRM, even if the email address is the same. In this scenario it is actually in your CRM that you need to make strategic changes to the way information is entered. There are tools for Dynamics that will enable you to prevent dupes being created, if this is the problem that exists you may need to look into this.

Hi Josh and Veronica,

Thank you so much for your post:)

Our dups come from both CRM and Marketo. However the number of dups(possible duplicates list) in Marketo is almost 4-5 times more than that in CRM. Therefore, I would say, one fourth of our dups come from CRM syncing. Others seem like from Marketo itself. I checked a couple of dups activity logs. Let's say Emma came to Maketo Forms  in June and December. For some reason, Marketo did not recognize Emma in Dec. Then a dup is created....

So there is no way I can set up de-dup rules manually in Marketo, right?

No - you can't do this manually. De-duping is an automatic function on email address.

Marketo not de-duping on form fillout is a concern. Can I confirm - are you collecting the email address as part of the form fillout? And, is this a Marketo form on a Marketo landing page you are using? Or a Marketo form on a non-Marketo landing page?

I think this may be veering close to needing you to log a Support request.

Actually we are collecting forms on both a Marketo Landing Page and a non-Marketo landing page...But some dups I checked, they do come from diferent sources. Duplicates are such a headache..... Seriously.... 

Thanks, Veronica~

If a marketo form is creating a duplicate and you're capturing the email address and the emails are the same, this is incorrect functionality. Log a support request and we'll fix it :)

Thanks Veronica~~That definitely helps:)

Once last quick question please. Do you have any recommendation of third party de-dup solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online please? I notice that Marketo has a "Ring Lead" for SF, but not sure whether there is any solution out there for MSFT....

Happy New Year! Hope you have a happy an healthy 2014!

Hi Emma - Hopefully somebody else will post with a recommendation, I personally haven't used anything for Dynamics. Check out the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace if you haven't already.

There are some inbuilt tools in Dynamics to prevent users from inputting data that seems to be an exact field match, but these tools as you've probably already figured out weren't really designed for batch/mass deduping and clean up. I found a video on the inbuilt tool that might be useful: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2011/09/12/video-create-and-run-duplicate-detection-rules.aspx#!

Open invitation for anyone else who has experience de-duping in Dynamics to chime in here! 🙂