What exactly is Advanced Matching in the Facebook Pixel
According to Facebook, using Advanced Matching can result in increase performance for your ads:
“During the beta phase, we have observed over 10% increase in attributed conversions and 20% increase in reach of retargeting campaigns” – Facebook News
But what is Advanced Matching and how does it work? And most important, can you use it on your WooCommerce website?
To answer this questions, you have to remember how Facebook identifies who is visiting a page and who is making a conversion on a website. It does it by using cookies, so they can tell when a certain user is on your website and when completes a transaction. Based on this info, they can add the user in a Custom Audience, they can optimize Ads delivery and make Dynamic Ads work in an optimum way. But there are situations when the user doesn’t have cookies enabled in that particular moment or maybe is logged out from Facebook. In this cases, the ads system is clueless about what’s going on with the ads and it can’t tell who is visiting the site or who is purchasing your products. You can’t add the user in a Custom Audience since there is no possibility to make a match with an existing FB user account and the Dynamic Ads will not stop for that particular user despite the product being purchased since FB can’t tell that a conversion has occurred.
This is where Advanced Matching is coming into rescue, if not completely, at least in part. Once you have the user data you can send it to Facebook through the Pixel Code. There are quite a few data types that Facebook can read, but you are not required to send all of them. It is always a good idea to send the most you can, of course. There is no public information about how Facebook does the matching and what’s involved in this process. We can assume that their algorithm gathers all the info from the pixel on your site, then put it together with other bits of data and info that they have and try to make the best identification possible.
How to Enable Advanced Matching on WordPress with PixelYourSite Pro
You can enable Advanced Matching on the PixelYourSite Pro first tab, just under the Pixel ID field. For WordPress users, it will pull the default data like First Name, Last Name and Email.
Advanced Matching on WooCommerce
If Advanced Matching is enabled and you are using WooCommerce, this is how it will work:
A. When an existing logged in client visits your site, the data from your store database will be used in the pixel code for advanced matching.
B. When someone completes a transaction, advanced matching will be used on the WooCommerce Thank You Page. This will work for new clients as well, dramatically improving Custom Audiences based on the Purchase event and conversion attribution.
This is the set of data used for WooCommerce Advanced Matching:
- Phone
- First Name
- Last Name
- City
- State
- ZIP
- Country
And that’s how the code will look like if a certain famous northern citizen will buy something from your store (highly plausible if you are in the winter gear niche) :
fbq(‘init’, ‘xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx’ , { email: ‘JohnSnow@ilovechristmas.com’, phone: ‘1234567890’, fn: ‘John’, ln: ‘Snow’, ct: ‘Castle Black’, st: ‘Winterfell’, zip: ‘321winteriscoming’, country: ‘KN’ } );
Data Privacy
The privacy of the data for this feature is handled by Facebook and is straight forward:
“Any customer data you pass through the Facebook pixel is hashed locally on the browser before it goes to the Facebook servers for matching. This hashing process turns your data into short encrypted messages that cannot be tampered with. We use these hashes to match pixel events with people on Facebook. Then Facebook deletes all matched and unmatched hashes immediately after the matching process ends. We do not collect or store any personally identifiable information on our servers.” – Facebook News
Should you use it?
Yes, because it will improve your overall results, as official data from Facebook itself shows. The quality of your Custom Audiences will improve and so will happen with any Lookalike Audience built on them. Your conversion attribution will be better too. Dynamic Ads will also gain from this because the attribution of the transaction (conversion) will be more accurate.
Is this a game-changing feature? No, by no means, but it is something worth having. As you probably know, making small but consistent and rigorous improvements to your ads can make a real difference in the long run.
That’s why we have this feature available for all our pro users. If you are not already one of them, click here to download PixelYourSite Pro
