If you have already implemented Meta Conversions API, you are on the right track, but setting it up alone is not enough. To fully unlock Meta Conversions API potential and drive better results from your ad campaigns, you need to ensure you have the right setup and optimise your Meta Conversions API. 

Without the proper setup and optimisation the data you collect won’t flow properly to the ad platforms effectively leading to missed conversions.

In this blog, we’ll walk through the four key areas Meta recommended focussing on to ensure your Conversions API is not just functional, but truly fueling your campaign performance. Let’s dive in.

Ensuring Proper Setup for Optimising Meta Conversions API

Meta Conversions API plays a crucial role in tracking and sending event and conversion data to the Meta ad platform on the server-side. But before you start sending this data, it’s important to ensure that your Conversions API setup is proper and effective. 

Before you can fully benefit from Meta Conversions API, it’s important to check whether your setup is correctly implemented. Meta outlines four specific areas that require careful setup and regular maintenance to ensure your ad performance stays on track.

4 Key Areas to Focus on for Optimising Meta Conversions API Performance

1. Track the full customer journey

When someone lands on your website—whether from an ad or a search result—they might take certain actions like viewing a product, adding an item to their cart, or submitting a form. These actions are known as events, and tracking them accurately is essential.

To improve tracking accuracy, Meta recommends using the Conversions API together with the Pixel—this is called a standard setup. The reason? The Pixel alone can’t always capture every event, especially when ad blockers or browser privacy settings are involved. The Conversions API fills in those gaps, ensuring that the data you send back to Meta is more complete and reliable.

By using both the Pixel and Conversions API, you’ll capture more of what your users are doing on your site both from the browser and server-side.  This helps Meta with the complete customer journey being tracked inside its platform. 

With the complete funnel data available with Meta, it helps the ad algorithm with accurate signals that power your ad campaigns for maximum performance. 

Once you’re confident the tracking setup is complete, the next step is to enhance the quality of the events you’re sending—which brings us to the next focus area: event effectiveness.

2. Increase Event Effectiveness

The next area to focus on is increasing event effectiveness. Meta recommends using certain parameters that are of high priority to help match your website events with users in the accounts center across Meta technologies like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and all other audience networks. This process is known as event matching.

Meta groups these parameters that it matches to the users into two types:

• Server event parameters
  These describe what action took place—such as visiting a page or making a purchase (called the action source)—along with the time of the event and other relevant event-specific details.
  
• Customer information parameters
  These provide information about the user who took the action, such as external IDs or other identifiers. Meta uses this data to match the event to a real user account.
  Make sure to hash any PII (Personal Identifiable Information) before sending it to Meta, as this protects user privacy and allows for secure matching.
  

Meta also categorizes customer information parameters into three levels: High, Medium, and Low, based on how important they are for improving match quality.

The more parameters you share, the better your Event Match Quality (EMQ) score will be. Make sure to include the high-priority parameters recommended by Meta to improve event matching and overall data quality.

A higher EMQ score means your events are more likely to be matched with the correct Meta user accounts, which leads to stronger signals to Meta’s algorithms and better attribution. Meta recommends aiming for an EMQ score of at least 6 out of 10 for optimal results.

Note: The practical highest EMQ score that would be possible will be 9.3/10, and we have seen that EMQ for most of our clients who use 1PD Ops CAPI Setup. Want to see higher EMQ scores for your brands? Get in touch with our experts now. 

Two Key Metrics to Further Understand Event Effectiveness

To take your event effectiveness a step further, Meta recommends keeping an eye on two important measurements:

1. Event Coverage Metric

This metric shows what percentage of your Pixel events are also being sent through the Conversions API. Meta suggests aiming for an event coverage ratio of at least 75% to ensure solid and consistent data tracking.

2. Additional Conversions Reported

This metric tells you how many extra conversions were captured specifically because you implemented the Conversions API. It’s a useful way to measure how much value your improved data setup is adding to your ad performance—essentially showing how effective your CAPI integration really is.

3. Event Deduplication

As part of Meta’s standard setup, we use both the Conversions API and the Pixel to track events more effectively. But here’s the catch—when both methods are active, there’s a higher chance that the same event might be recorded twice.

This is where Meta’s event deduplication feature plays a crucial role. When the same event is sent from both the Pixel (browser-side) and the Conversions API (server-side), Meta ensures that only one instance is counted to avoid duplication. To make this process effective, Meta recommends aiming for a high deduplication rate as part of your optimization efforts.

You can achieve this in two ways:

• Method 1: Use two deduplication keys—the Event Name and a unique Event ID.
  
• Method 2: Use a combination of Event Name + Event Time, along with either the FBP (Facebook browser ID) or an External ID.
  

Note: If you’re using the second method, make sure the browser event reaches Meta before the server event. This order is important for Meta to properly identify and deduplicate the events.

4. Maintain Data Freshness

Sending event data to Meta in real-time is essential for maintaining data freshness and boosting your ad campaign performance. When events are sent immediately—or within one hour of occurring—they can be used effectively for attribution and ad delivery optimisation, helping your ads reach the right people at the right time.

Meta also provides a clear warning:

• Events sent more than 2 hours after they occur can lead to a significant drop in performance, especially for ads optimized for those events.
  
• Events delayed by 24 hours or more may face major issues with both attribution and ad delivery.
  

To avoid these pitfalls, make sure your event data is sent without delay (even for offline conversions). This gives Meta the best chance to match user actions accurately and optimize your campaigns for better results.

These are the 4 Key Areas to Focus on for Optimising  Your Meta Conversions API Performance.

Conclusion

Meta Conversions API is a powerful tool for tracking events and conversion. But optimizing your Meta Conversions API setup in the right way is key to driving better performance from your ad campaigns. By focusing on the four critical areas, tracking the full customer journey, increasing event effectiveness, ensuring proper event deduplication, and maintaining data freshness, You can ensure your Conversions API is functioning at its best.

Regularly monitoring these aspects will help improve your event quality, boost your EMQ score, and ultimately lead to more accurate attribution and optimised ad delivery.