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Advanced Matching in Facebook Pixel

July 20, 2018ByChristine Lu

As an enhancement to our existing advanced matching, we've released an automatic version of advanced matching for the Facebook pixel. This version is designed to help advertisers easily leverage their customer data to track more conversions and build larger remarketing audiences.

Advanced matching includes two methods: manual (existing) and automatic (new).

Manual Advanced Matching Method

The manual method feature enables advertisers to leverage their own customer data, such as email address, phone number, and so on. This method allows advertisers to report on more conversions, optimize their ads against more conversion data, and reach more people on Facebook with their website custom audiences or dynamic ads.

To enable this feature, modify the default FB pixel code to pass data into the pixel init call. Previously, you may have had this line in your pixel code:

fbq('init', '<FB_PIXEL_ID>');

Update the pixel code to pass customer data:

fbq('init', '<FB_PIXEL_ID>', { 
    em: '{{_email_}}', // Data will be hashed automatically via a dedicated function in FB pixel
    ph: '{{_phone_number_}}',
    fn: '{{_first_name_}}'
    ....
})

We will hash Contact Information that you send to us via a Facebook JavaScript pixel for matching purposes prior to transmission. When using a Facebook image pixel or other Facebook Business Tools, you or your service provider must hash Contact Information in a manner specified by us before transmission.

Below is an example passing in email (a@b.com), first name (frank), and phone number (14108891234).

<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none"
src="https://www.facebook.com/tr/?id=12345678910&amp;ev=Purchase&amp;ud[em]=fb98d44ad7501a959f3f4f4a3f004fe2d9e581ea6207e218c4b02c08a4d75adf&amp;ud[fn]=77646f5a4f3166637627abe998e7a1470fe72d8b430f067dafa86263f1f23f94&amp;ud[ph]=b096a1f9e07810cca55a4b0114e721dda19ff2d6a2ab028b71adc06a34d46132&amp;cd[value]=0.00&amp;cd[currency]=USD" />

Automatic Advanced Matching Method

Many businesses capture 'email address' as part of events like InitiateCheckout, Purchase, and CompleteRegistration. Our automatic advanced matching technology enables businesses to use their current pixel set up (no additional code required) to associate website text fields, such as email addresses, with corresponding events.

Automatic advanced matching can improve the performance of your ads by increasing your custom audience size, attributing more conversions, better optimization, and higher reach for your re-marketing campaigns.

  • Increase your custom audience size: Custom audiences enable you to target people who have interacted with your website. With more advertiser-provided data, we're able to better match these website visitors to people on Facebook and increase the size of your custom audience
  • Increase the number of attributed conversions: Additional customer data allows us to connect more of the conversions that happen on your website to people on Facebook. With this information, you'll have a more complete picture of the impact of your ads on website purchases and other conversions.

The automatic advanced matching feature has driven great results for our clients. For example:

  • During the beta phase, advertisers saw an average ~8% increase in matched purchases, with many seeing double-digit increases.
  • One of the world's largest meal-kit companies saw a ~27% increase in attributed conversions.

With automatic advanced matching, advertisers simply opt-in to the feature through a toggle.

Advertisers who implement the pixel for the first time can opt into automatic advanced matching when setting up the pixel, while existing users can opt-in via Events Manager > the Settings tab.



Once the advertiser has enabled automatic advanced matching, they can see the lift in event match rate in the Events Manager dashboard.



In summary, we highly recommend any advertiser who has placed the Facebook pixel on their website to consider enabling advanced matching to help you find more conversions, improve optimization, and re-market to more people — which could significantly increase the ROI of your Facebook campaigns.

Learn more about how to:

Data Privacy

With automatic advanced matching, we can capture the hashed customer data (ex: email addresses) you collect from your website during processes like checkout, account sign-in, or registration. Hashing is the process we use to transform data for security reasons. We can then use hashed identifiers to better match people visiting your website with people on Facebook, which can lead to more attributed conversions for your Facebook campaigns and a larger size of your custom audiences.

Note: The pixel advanced matching process is not designed to collect any sensitive information, such as passwords or financial, health or government data. We only use hashed customer data that an advertiser sends via the pixel to match more pixel events for that advertiser’s pixel in accordance with our Data Policy, Cookies Policy, and your agreement with us.

The Facebook pixel uses secure https connection, so that any data transmitted from the browser will make it to our servers safely.

To learn more about this topic, see Facebook pixel.


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