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Referral Factory prevents the same person from being added as a lead more than once within a single campaign. This ensures each referrer gets fair credit and prevents double-counting.
How duplicate detection works
Duplicate detection is based on email address and is scoped to each campaign individually.
When a new lead is added to a campaign — whether through a referral link, manual entry, or an integration — Referral Factory checks whether that email already exists in that campaign. If it does, the new entry is rejected and the original referrer keeps the credit.
What this means in practice
Here are the most common scenarios:
- Two referrers share a link with the same person — the person can only join once. Whichever referrer's link they used first is credited with the referral.
- A referrer tries to manually add a lead that already exists — the system shows a validation error and the duplicate is not created.
- An integration sends a contact that already exists — the existing record is updated with any new data from the integration, but it stays assigned to the original referrer.
- Same person across different campaigns — this is allowed. A person can be a lead in Campaign A (referred by Alice) and also a lead in Campaign B (referred by Bob). Duplicate detection only applies within a single campaign.
CRM duplicate handling
When syncing leads to an external CRM (such as HubSpot or Intercom), duplicate handling depends on the integration settings. Some integrations let you choose whether to update existing contacts or skip them.
See How does Referral Factory handle duplicate contacts in Intercom? for a CRM-specific example.