Inside Meta's Events Manager there's a number almost nobody looks at: Event Match Quality, or EMQ. It runs from 1 to 10 and, in practice, it's one of the factors that most determines how much it costs you to get a sale.
What exactly it measures
When your store tells Meta a purchase happened, it doesn't just send "there was a purchase." It sends information about who bought: email, phone, name, location, browser identifiers.
Meta uses that data to match the purchase to a real person on Facebook or Instagram. EMQ measures how well that match works.
If you send a lot of useful information, Meta identifies the person and learns from them. If you send little, the purchase is orphaned: it counts as a conversion in the report, but it teaches the algorithm very little.
A conversion Meta can't attribute to a person is almost a wasted conversion. It shows up in your report, but it doesn't improve your optimization, doesn't feed your lookalike audiences and doesn't lower your CPA.
How to read your score
- 1 to 4 — bad. You're almost certainly sending only the browser event, with no enriched data. You're wasting budget.
- 5 to 6 — weak. Typical of a native store integration left unconfigured. There's a lot of room to improve.
- 7 to 8 — good. You're sending server data with identity parameters.
- 9 to 10 — very good. Meta identifies almost all of your buyers.
You'll find it in Events Manager: select your pixel and look at the match quality column for each event. Pay special attention to Purchase: it's the one that carries the most weight.
Why raising it lowers your CPA
Meta's algorithm works by similarity. It takes your buyers, finds the patterns they share and looks for similar people. The more buyers it can identify accurately, the sharper the pattern.
Going from an EMQ of 5 to 9 doesn't change how many sales you made. It changes how many of those sales the algorithm can use to find you more buyers. That's the whole game.
How to raise it
- Send events from the server, not just from the browser. This is what moves the needle most.
- Enrich with identity data: hashed email and phone, name, city, postal code, country.
- Keep click identifiers even when the browser deletes the cookie.
- Deduplicate so Meta doesn't count the same purchase twice.
- Filter out bots, which drag down the average.
The Escalafy Pixel does all five automatically — no code to touch, no tag container to configure. And since Escalafy already knows all your costs, on top of raising your EMQ it shows you which of those recovered conversions left you real profit after product, shipping, fees and installments.
The bottom line
Go to your Events Manager now and check the EMQ on your purchase event. If it's below 7, you're looking at one of the cheapest levers there is to lower your cost per sale — and it doesn't require touching a single campaign.
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What Escalafy does for your store
Connect your channels and see the truth behind your numbers. No Excel, in real time.