People
Everyone who has filled in a form or been added as a lead, kept as one record per person with their details, leads and history.
A person is one human being on one site: their name, email, phone, company, tags, and any extra fields you keep about them. A lead is one piece of business with that person. The same person can come back three times over two years and have three leads — but they stay one person, with one history.
People is a Pro feature. On Basic the People tab shows a lock. See Basic and Pro plans.
Where people come from
You never create a person on their own. One appears whenever:
- someone submits a form on your published site,
- you add a lead by hand,
- you import a CSV, or
- a lead arrives through the Zapier or Make app.
Each person remembers how they first arrived. It’s shown at the bottom of their details as First seen date via form, added by hand, import, or API.
People belong to a site. The same email address on two of your sites is two separate people, and they can’t be merged across sites.
How PageFork recognises a returning person
Every time details arrive — from a form, an import, or an app — PageFork looks for an existing person on that site, in this order:
- Same email. Compared without regard to capitals or surrounding
spaces, so
Ada@Example.comandada@example.comare the same. - Same phone number, if the email found nobody.
- No match — a new person is created.
Names are never used for matching. Two people called “John Smith” stay two people unless an email or phone ties them together.
If the email matches one person and the phone matches a different one, the email wins.
What happens on a match
The existing person is kept and only their gaps are filled:
- An empty name, email, phone or company is filled from the new details.
- An empty custom field is filled.
- Anything that already has a value is left alone. A later form submission never overwrites what’s on the person — including values you typed yourself.
The original submission is still stored exactly as it was sent, so nothing the visitor wrote is lost. You’ll find it on the person’s timeline.
If the person was archived, new details arriving restore them.
Then the lead
Once the person is known, PageFork looks at their leads:
- They have an open lead — the new submission is attached to it. No second lead is created.
- All their leads are closed (won or lost), or they have none — a new lead is created in the first open stage of your pipeline.
A person has at most one open lead at a time.
How phone numbers are compared
People type phone numbers in many ways, so PageFork compares a cleaned version rather than the text as written:
- A number that includes a country code (
+44 20 7946 0958) is read as a full international number. - A number written in local format (
020 7946 0958) is read using the site’s phone country. - Spaces, dashes, brackets and dots are ignored.
The phone country isn’t something you set. The first time a form
submission on the site includes a number with a + country code,
PageFork takes that country as the site’s default and re-reads the
local-format numbers it already holds.
Until then, local-format numbers are compared by their digits only, so
020 7946 0958 and +44 20 7946 0958 may not be recognised as the same
number yet.
A value needs at least 7 digits to be treated as a phone number. The number you see on the person is always shown as it was originally typed.
The People view
Open Leads in the sidebar, pick a site, and choose the People tab.
| Column | Shows |
|---|---|
| Name | The person’s name, or their email or phone if no name is known |
| Email, Phone, Company | Their contact details |
| Open lead | The stage of their open lead, or No open lead |
| Leads | How many leads they’ve had in total |
| Last activity | When something last happened with them |
The list is ordered by most recent activity, 25 people to a page. Archived people are hidden.
Search people looks in name, email, phone and company.
Clicking a row opens the person’s open lead if they have one — that is usually what you want to work on. If they have no open lead, it opens their person page.
Two buttons can appear above the list:
- Duplicates — shown when PageFork spots people who may be the same. See Merging duplicates.
- Import CSV — owners and admins only. See Importing people.
The person page
The person page gathers everything about one person across all their leads. You reach it from the People view, or from a lead by opening the More actions menu and choosing View person.
Header
The header shows the name, company, email and phone, with Call and Email shortcuts that open your phone or mail app. Beneath it are the stage of the open lead, and counts of leads and submissions.
The main button depends on the person:
- Open lead — jumps to their open lead record.
- New lead — shown when they have no open lead. It starts a fresh lead for the same person, with their details already filled in.
Details
Click any of Name, Email, Phone or Company to edit it. Press Enter to save or Escape to cancel. Clearing a value and saving removes it.
Below them are the person’s tags and custom fields, each editable in place.
If you change the email to one that another person on the site already has, PageFork refuses and offers Merge instead — two people can’t share an email.
Leads
Every lead this person has had, newest first, with its stage, where it came from, its value, and when it was opened or closed. Click one to open it.
Activity
One timeline for the whole person, across all their leads:
- Notes, calls, emails and meetings you’ve logged.
- Every form submission they’ve sent.
- History: when they were added, leads created, stage moves, won and lost, owner changes, follow-ups added and completed, details changed or corrected, merges, archiving.
On a phone, Details and Activity are two tabs.
Good to know
A person shows as “Unnamed lead”. No name, email or phone is known for them. Open the person and add a name.
A new submission didn’t create a new lead. The person already had an open lead, so the submission was attached to it. Open that lead to see both submissions on its timeline.
The same person appears twice. They used a different email and phone the second time, so nothing tied the two together. Merge them.
You need to remove someone completely. See Erasing a person.