Contacts with the same IP address are being over-written

[KateH]

I have noticed on a number of occassions now that if someone fills in a form from an existing IP address that it overwrites the contact record.  I have records where all the communication is mixed up between two different people and they are put into lists and work flows.  this messes up the history on a contact.

I am having to split the contacts manually and try and work out who should be in which list!

Anyone else had the same problem and is there a way around it?

[hsharp]

Just for clarity, for those who may want further understanding of what this actually does to the contact records. The "Accepted Solution" offered in this thread that shares what HubSpot created as a solution does have an initial "loss" point in the data. Anyone that turns this feature on will lose the following:

• If this option is turned on, when a contact submits the form using a different email on a browser where there is already a cookie, views will not be tracked for this contact. The Pre-populate contact fields with known values option will also be automatically disabled.

This function, as is appears, creates a contact without the cookie - similar to if you manually create a contact or do an import. If you do not care about form pre-populating then this function should suffice.

What I am still watching for, however, is if the two records get merged upon another form submission (what I like to call a hijacking) or will both contacts then have the same IP and both get tracked (now that the other email has its own record).

From the "page views" standpoint, it appears that once this new contact eventually fills out another form the cookie will then be tracked, allowing for both contacts to "share" the cookie. At least, this is what it looks like from some of the records I have manually split in the past and the split contacts come back on their own submitting forms. This is hard to tell though because the actual IP address is no longer captured to see if they are, in fact, still using the same computer.

It would be great if someone from the HubSpot technical team would confirm one way or another. Either way, if I can discern this from record observation I will reply back to this post.

Also, for anyone interested in seeing what records they have that are hijacking, you can create a list with the filters: Email has been updated in the last 1 day AND Create date is more than 1 day ago

You have to look at it daily to get them quickly because there isn't a way to capture past records doing this.

What would be helpful is for HubSpot to create a list filter that pulls the Email Field as having more than one value (aka email) present. This would allow clients to catch any unwanted behaviors as well as quickly identify legitmate cases where someone is using multiple emails.

Sometimes contacts warrant a legitmate merge to prevent duplicates in the system. I often have companies who change their email domain or acquire another company that results in their employees using 2 or even 3 emails. It is a nice feature that HubSpot allows the Email field to contain multiple emails so that we can see this person has multiple emails. I would just like to be able to run a list on this...

[Evans4316]

Disappointing that no alternative other than disabling cookies is an option. : (

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @KateH and everyone,

Just to clarify, cookies don't need to be disabled for HubSpot not to merge contacts. Simply enable this toggle in the Options tab of the forms editor and the behavior will stop.

This "Always create contact for new email address" option is also explained here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/forms/create-forms#customize-your-form-options

Best regards!

[MatthewShepherd · Accepted solution]

Hi @KateH 

Yes, this can happen where contacts are sharing computers and your forms are using cookie tracking to recognise contacts. The answer to this thread 

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Lead-Capture-Tools/Can-I-recreate-contacts-that-were-overwritten-by...

walks through how to turn off cookie tracking on forms (stops forms prepopulating) and how to restore contact's details.

Does this sound like the issue you are having?

[MGhamami]

Hi,

How can I solve this problem for non-HubSpot forms? We have many instances of overwritten data because they use the same IP address. Is there another way besides turning off cookies?

[Evans4316]

While this is a possible solution...This doesn't work for us.

Our management wants cookie tracking.  I'd prefer to have the option to approve these situations as they occur and not have the information automatically overwritten and combined.  Right now...I just stumble across these situations and they are just a pain!

[hsharp]

Exactly. If we need to force a contact split even though they share the same ip/computer, we should be able to do so and be able to have two different contacts having two different email addresses, yet one ip/computer. This issue has really messed up the CRM records where this occurs and we can't get the right email to the right contact because of it, and our sales team gets frustrated when they see the incorrect email/name getting synced, and the sync won't even work with dup prevention measures in place.

Disabling the cookie tracker is just not an option and would contradict everything Hubspot says about the importance of tracking this information & personalizing emails.

They need to figure it out.

[RocketDollar]

Agree with this on this old thread. This always causes issues for us when a spouse, friend, or financial advisor uses the same computer.  Both the original person (usually a customer of ours) and the new person (usually becoming a new customer) The only solution we have is telling them to use an incognito browser window when signing a form.  It's had a few of our customers miss very essential customer emails. 

[Evans4316]

Turning off cookies is not an option for us.

Not having a way of knowing when 2 customers are using the same computer
and stepping on a HBS record is really, really a pain. Usually, it's
something I stumble over and then have to manually split the records.

There has to be a solution! Maybe an approval process to either merge the
records or create a new record!

[KateH]

Thanks Matt, yes that does help!!

[MatthewShepherd]

Glad to hear it. If this answered your question, could you mark my answer as a solution, please?