What is Advanced matching for Meta Ads? A short definition

Advanced Matching in Meta Ads is a Meta Pixel feature that improves attribution and audience building by connecting events on your website to people’s profiles on Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc.).

It does this by sending hashed customer information (like email addresses or phone numbers) with your pixel events.

This allows Meta to match people who saw your ads with what they do on your site, even if they convert on a different device or after a significant delay.

Automatic advanced matching is switched on in Events Manager, in the pixel’s settings. The pixel then picks up fields like email and phone number from forms on your site. Manual advanced matching means you pass the data yourself in the fbq(‘init’) call, using keys like em, ph, fn, ln, ct, zp, country and external_id. The pixel hashes these with SHA-256 before sending.

The Conversions API uses the same customer information parameters. There you hash them yourself, except IP address, user agent, fbc and fbp, which must not be hashed.

Here are some key benefits of using Advanced Matching for Meta Ads:

• Improved Targeting: Reach more relevant users who are more likely to be interested in your product or service.
• Accurate Attribution: Gain a clearer picture of how your Meta Ads campaigns contribute to conversions, even across devices.
• Enhanced Retargeting: Re-engage website visitors or app users with targeted ads on Meta platforms.

Hashing turns the data into a non-readable string before it is sent to Meta, but it is still personal data.

Where you need consent (in the EU, for example), let your cookie banner control the pixel with fbq(‘consent’, ‘revoke’) and fbq(‘consent’, ‘grant’).