Meta - How Brij Supports Meta's Advanced Matching For Your Brand

Overview

This article explains how Meta’s Advanced Matching works, with a focus on how it integrates with Brij experiences. By setting up Meta tracking on your Brij experiences, you can improve user identification across all pages under your domain, including Shopify pages and other connected sites.

How Tracking Works

In the web world, tracking refers to monitoring user actions on a website. One of the most common applications of tracking is through ad platform pixels or tags, such as the Meta Pixel, which can be added to your site so the platform can understand how users interact with it.

Put simply, tracking can be defined as the combination of identifying a user and recording their actions.

Platforms may use different methods to track users and events, but in the ad tech world they generally function in similar ways. In this article, we’ll dive into the specifics of the Meta Pixel.

How a user gets defined

As soon as your website loads, the Meta Pixel fires (either through GTM or hardcoded in the document head) and sets a cookie in the browser. That cookie value remains the same for as long as the browser allows. Cookie lifetimes differ by browser: Chrome caps explicit expiries at 400 days, while Safari limits script-set cookies to 7 days of inactivity.

The cookie value serves as the user identifier.

When someone takes actions on a website where the Meta Pixel is installed (such as page views, add-to-carts, or sign-ups), these events are sent to Meta along with the cookie value.

The user identifier remains the same, but the event names change. Meta can tell that the user associated with cookie 1234 has performed multiple actions on a website.

If you’re familiar with Chrome DevTools, you can see this in action by opening the Network tab and examining the payload of events sent to Meta. In the example below, using the SKIMS website, you can see two distinct events (distinguished by event name) being sent to Meta, both tied to the same user identifier (represented by the FBP cookie).

A user represented solely by a cookie value is anonymous. For example, Meta cannot link cookie 1234 to an actual Facebook profile because there isn’t a proper key to match against. But that can change.

If user represented by cookie 1234 performs an event that exposes their PII, such as making a purchase or signing up with their email, the PII is hashed and sent to Meta along with the cookie and the event. Meta refers to this as sending an Advanced Matching parameter.

This allows Meta to match the hashed PII with the information stored on their servers. They can now identify that the user represented by cookie 1234 corresponds to the Facebook profile registered under brij@email.com.

And any new events triggered where the same cookie exists will now be associated with that profile.

Why subdomains are crucial for tracking

A cookie value is unique per domain.

Meta's cookie is set at the root domain (aka naked domain), which means its value stays the same across all subdomains.

If a user is identified on a subdomain, the root domain benefits from that identification, and vice versa.

How to Leverage User Identification Through Brij

If you are hosting your Brij experiences on a subdomain and you implement the Meta Pixel through GTM or hardcoded, once a user registers through Brij, that user also becomes recognizable on your main website.

This allows you to retarget them if they take actions such as adding items to their cart or viewing a product in your storefront.

The reverse is also true!

If someone makes a purchase on your storefront and is tracked via the Meta Pixel, they will also be recognizable by Meta when they access your Brij experiences. This gives you the ability to set up remarketing campaigns in Meta for the sweepstakes, rebates, or any other experiences you are running with Brij.

TL:DR

Set up the Meta Pixel on your Brij experiences to:

• Improve match rates → more conversions attributed and lower CPA.

• Grow retargeting pools across your root domain and subdomains.

• Stabilize measurement when cookies are short-lived in some browsers.