Q: My leads keep getting flagged as duplicates even though they're different people. What am I doing wrong?

Q: My leads keep getting flagged as duplicates even though they're different people. What am I doing wrong?

A: The usual culprit is the network's dedup window — the period during which a repeat email, phone, or device fingerprint counts as the same lead. Most networks dedup on a 30, 60, or 90-day window, and some dedup across ALL advertisers on the platform, not just your offer.

Three mistakes that cause false duplicates:

— You're sending the same test lead from QA into the live funnel. Tag test traffic so it never hits the postback.
— Your form pre-fills a default phone or country code, so 200 'different' users share one number.
— You strip the plus-sign or leading zero on phone numbers inconsistently, so the network normalizes two formats into one.

Fix: ask your manager for the exact dedup key (email? phone? hashed device?) and window length. Then check your own database for that same key BEFORE you fire the lead. If it's already there, you know the rejection is coming.

Short version: dedup is a key plus a time window. Learn both, check your own side first.

Still stuck? Drop your case in the comments.