Conversion Deduplication
Conversion deduplication is the process of preventing the same conversion from being counted or paid more than once. It catches re-fired pixels, page refreshes, and the same person or order arriving twice, so nobody is credited or paid for a duplicate.
Conversion deduplication — dedup for short — keeps one real conversion from being recorded, counted, or paid as several. Pixels get re-fired, buyers refresh the thank-you page, servers retry after a timeout, and the same person sometimes submits twice. Without dedup, each of those would mint a new conversion and a new payout. Dedup is the discipline that collapses them back to one, so your counts are honest and no affiliate is paid twice for the same result.
Three layers of dedup
Deduplication works on progressively broader signals:
- Transaction ID dedup. The strongest and simplest: send a unique
txnper conversion (an order ID). Re-firing with the sametxnupdates the existing conversion instead of creating a new one. Retries and refreshes become safe. - Dedup rules. Catch the same order or person across different transaction IDs, by matching a stable field — usually email or phone. One person can't be counted twice even if the transaction IDs differ.
- Per-click dedup. Limit one click to at most one counted conversion per event, catching a second fire from the same click even with no transaction ID.
A worked example
A visitor buys, and your thank-you page's conversion pixel fires with txn=order-8837. The customer refreshes the page — the pixel fires again with the same txn. Dedup recognizes it and updates the original conversion rather than creating a second $250 sale. Separately, in a CPL program, the same person submits two forms with different order IDs but the same email; an Email dedup rule flags the second as a duplicate, records it at $0, and fires no affiliate postback. Nobody is paid twice, and both duplicates stay visible in reports so you can audit them.
What happens to a duplicate
A duplicate isn't discarded — it's recorded, tagged Duplicate, set to $0 revenue and payout, and excluded from performance counts. You keep the audit trail without the double-count.
How this works in LimeliJourney
In LimeliJourney, dedup is explicit and visible — the tracking system's Deduplication tab always shows exactly what's active and where it's inherited from. The core idea is "the place where you set dedup is how far it matches," from advertiser-wide down to a single event on a single offer, most specific wins. Transaction-ID dedup is on by default; add rules on email, phone, or any parameter your pixel sends (email and phone are hashed before matching, never stored raw). Always send a txn — with no key, re-fires can't be caught. Every duplicate is filterable by Disposition in the Conversions Report.