Facebook event matching impacts your advertising campaigns' targeting, attribution and cost-efficiency. In early 2024, Meta updated its Event Match Quality (EMQ) interface. Event match quality scores are available for all standard and custom web activities, such as page views, cart additions, and purchases. These scores reflect data from the past 48 hours, so sending event data to consistently keep scores up-to-date and accurate is essential.
Event Match Quality measures how well the customer data from your server events matches Meta accounts. Better matches allow you to target ads to people who are more likely to engage and link their actions to your ads. Higher EMQ boosts the chances of matching events to Meta accounts, enhancing conversion tracking and ad delivery to potential converters. This results in improved ad performance and lower costs per action. The screenshot below shows an example of the Meta Event Match Quality score page interface.
Event data you need to collect to reach the optimal quality score falls under data privacy regulations. Let’s look at strategies that can help your user data management practices align with GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, CCPA and other applicable privacy regulations.
Under GDPR and other EU data protection regulations, you must obtain end-user consent before sending data via our SDK. Thus, you must ensure that your SDK implementation meets these consent requirements. Implement clear and concise consent forms informing users about the collected data. Inform users the purpose of data collection and how it will be used for data matching. Ensure that consent is detailed and that you give users the choice to opt in or out of specific data processing activities.
Define what data you need for your event matching and avoid collecting any excessive data. Make sure each type of data you collect serves a clear purpose. When you use the FB SDK for App Events, Meta business terms require that you have an appropriate legal basis for collecting and processing users' information.
Before you send data to Facebook for matching, use hashing algorithms to anonymize personal user information. This will help you protect user data while keeping event match quality high.
By the way, the Stape Anonymizer power-up is available for all Stape users. Its main goal is to remove or anonymize user data from Google Analytics 4.
Build privacy into how you collect and handle data from the start. Regularly review your data practices to meet GDPR and other legal standards. Revise your privacy policies to clearly explain how you collect, use, and share user data for event matching. Being open about your data practices builds trust and helps you meet GDPR’s rules for clear communication with users.
Privacy laws are constantly changing, so keep up with the latest updates to GDPR, the ePrivacy Directive, and other related regulations. Adjust your business processes to stay compliant and keep your event match quality on track. If you work with data that falls under privacy regulations, it’s always a safer choice to have a strong legal team that can help you navigate the ever-evolving regulations and laws.
Use Facebook’s tools like the Conversions API to manage what data you share better. Make sure it fits with your privacy goals. This way, you can improve event match quality without compromising user privacy.
Keep an eye on your event match quality using Facebook’s reports, but do it in a way that respects privacy. Check your match rates regularly and adjust to improve results while protecting user data.
Tip: You can find more tips on increasing Facebook event match quality on our blog and HelpDesk.
Applying these best practices will help you balance event match quality and privacy regulations. Now, let’s move on to our next point: the influence of iOS privacy changes on Facebook event match quality.
Since iOS 14 was released, Facebook's ability to access user information through cookies has been significantly restricted. iOS users can opt out of third-party tracking, and apps must request permission from Apple users to collect data.
Before iOS 14.5, Facebook linked your iPhone's IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) with your Facebook account, which allowed them to connect ads seen to purchases made. After the update and changes, the decline in event match quality ratings for iOS users was massive.
Meta has updated its guidance on setting up the Advertiser Tracking Enabled parameter. You are no longer required to set the Advertiser Tracking Enabled parameter for Facebook SDK for iOS 17.0.0 and later versions. Meta now relies on Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) system API to determine ATT permission status for app events sent through Facebook SDK for iOS 17.0.0 and later versions.
What’s more, Private Cloud Compute (PCC), recently introduced by Apple, is a groundbreaking cloud intelligence system designed specifically for private AI processing. With this feature, Apple ensures that personal user data sent to PCC isn’t accessible to anyone other than the user - not even to Apple. Apple claims that PCC is the most advanced security architecture ever deployed for cloud AI compute at scale. We have yet to see how it impacts advertisers.
One thing is clear- turning to privacy-complaint tracking methods is the only way forward. Server-side tagging is one of the best ways to keep up with the privacy regulations and boost event match quality. With our 100% European-owned cloud servers for sGTM, you can use Google Analytics in a GDPR-compliant way with Stape.
While getting optimal event match quality is a top task on every marketer’s to-do list, it is tricky with the present data privacy regulations and iOS privacy changes. In this post, we discussed strategies that can help your user data management practices align with GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, CCPA and other applicable privacy regulations.
Server-side tracking is one of the best tools that can help you improve Facebook event match quality while staying compliant with privacy data regulations. At Stape, we are implementing a comprehensive data governance system, achieving compliance with applicable data protection laws, namely the GDPR and the UK Data Protection Act 2018.
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