If you’re not using Face­book’s Advanced Match­ing Pix­el, con­trib­u­tor Justin Freid says you’re miss­ing out — and he explains why you need to adopt it.

Face­book has become a sta­ple with­in mar­ket­ing plans across many indus­tries. The abil­i­ty to reach their enor­mous user base using behav­ioral and demo­graph­ic data allows you to expose your adver­tise­ments to an extreme­ly tar­get­ed audience.

Yet there are even more ben­e­fits to adver­tis­ing on Face­book that many brands are not tak­ing advan­tage of, per­haps because of a lack of aware­ness or con­fu­sion about its util­i­ty. One of those fea­tures is the Advanced Match­ing Pixel.

What is the Facebook Advanced Matching Pixel?

Face­book has pro­vid­ed its Advanced Match­ing Pix­el since 2016. It gives adver­tis­ers the abil­i­ty to con­nect their cus­tomer data — such as email address­es, phone num­bers and oth­er demo­graph­ic data — to their Face­book campaigns.

Pri­or to this, adver­tis­ers couldn’t track whether the audi­ences they adver­tised to on Face­book con­vert­ed or not unless the con­ver­sion hap­pened with­in a brows­er that also had the Face­book cook­ie present. But when this launched, it allowed adver­tis­ers to con­nect users to con­ver­sions, even when they were using oth­er browsers, when they’d just cleared their cook­ies and so on.

Addi­tion­al­ly, the Pix­el gave adver­tis­ers the abil­i­ty to find and reach their own cus­tomers (those rep­re­sent­ed in their data­bas­es) with Face­book Adver­tis­ing and allowed them to prospect for new cus­tomers whose pro­files resem­ble their exist­ing ones.

Ear­li­er this month, Face­book launched a new and improved ver­sion of the Advanced Match­ing Pix­el, which pro­vides adver­tis­ers with even more data. Face­book now offers two ver­sions of their pix­el, Man­u­al and Automatic.

What does the new automatic version of the pixel offer?

Face­book specif­i­cal­ly calls out two oppor­tu­ni­ties that the auto­mat­ic ver­sion of the pix­el offers ver­sus the man­u­al option.

Increased custom audience sizes

Cus­tom audi­ences is a great fea­ture that allows you to use your own data or a third-par­ty data provider to cre­ate an audi­ence to tar­get on Face­book. The auto­mat­ed ver­sion of the pix­el will allow you to “auto­mat­i­cal­ly” and con­tin­u­ous­ly sync your cus­tomer data and match it with indi­vid­u­als on Face­book. In the­o­ry, the stronger con­nec­tion will allow you to col­lect more audi­ence and/or con­ver­sion data, giv­ing you more oppor­tu­ni­ties to opti­mize your campaigns.

Increased number of conversions tied to FB advertising

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, many mar­keters still oper­ate on the last-click attri­bu­tion mod­el. This leads to SEM and/or organ­ic search get­ting the lion’s share of con­ver­sion. But, as all of us know through the the­o­ry of behav­ioral eco­nom­ics, those touch points along the con­ver­sion path from dis­play, out of home, TV and social net­works like Face­book, do pro­vide value.

While this does not solve all of the attri­bu­tion mod­el­ing issues in mar­ket­ing, this pix­el will allow you to see who was exposed to your ads on Face­book and lat­er con­vert­ed. By doing this, you’ll have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how well Face­book is con­tribut­ing to your over­all mar­ket­ing mix. If you hap­pen to be using Facebook’s con­ver­sion opti­miza­tion capa­bil­i­ties or a third-par­ty tool, this addi­tion­al data can be fed into the bid­ding algo­rithm to adjust as needed.

How do I implement the new version of the pixel?

If you are already using the Advanced Match­ing Pix­el, the imple­men­ta­tion is easy. As shown on Facebook’s devel­op­ment forum, you can lit­er­al­ly click a but­ton to change over from the man­u­al to the auto­mat­ic ver­sion of the pix­el. There is also flex­i­bil­i­ty on what data is col­lect­ed with­in the pixel.

Why should advertisers use the Automatic Advanced Matching pixel?

Ulti­mate­ly, the more data you have on how your cam­paigns per­form, the bet­ter. But you have to be able to gath­er insights and exe­cute on the data. Thank­ful­ly, the data being deliv­ered through this Advanced Pix­el is actionable.

While it is in a silo of adver­tis­ing relat­ed to Face­book, it can direct­ly help you with increas­ing your cus­tom audi­ences and remar­ket­ing lists, while also pro­vid­ing more con­ver­sa­tion data you can use for optimization.

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