Meta’s Conversions API (CAPI) enables an advertiser to feed Meta conversion data. This allows advertisers to retarget existing customers, i.e., folks that have already converted. While this is useful data to share with Meta it doesn’t do what Meta’s pixel used to be able to do and doesn’t help you identify visitors that left without buying for retargeting purposes.

Think of the Identity Pixel as a pre-CAPI layer, useful for recovering ad remarketing audiences and integrating them into your Audience Manager—a capability once offered via Facebook Ad Pixel, but not directly offered by CAPI.

Well, if you advertise with Meta you know that Meta requires all advertisers, e.g., online stores, to paste Meta’s pixel code on their websites. When a visitor arrives at the advertiser’s website, Meta identifies the visitor and uses it’s pixel to place identifier cookies on the visitor’s computer or phone. When that visitor then visits another site with Meta’s pixel on it, and this time leaves without buying, Meta would use the cookie to identify the visitor and add him or her to Meta’s retargeting audience list for that site.

Most people use Meta and leave it open on their device. As long as the Meta app is open it knows who you are and shares your identity with all sites you visit provided the sites have the Meta pixel installed (which almost everyone does!). So Meta leveraged its wide usage, and the fact that people often leave Meta open on their phones and computers, to pass your identity to store sites you might be shopping on - and it used cookies to store this ID on your computer or phone. If you then left without buying it was easy for Meta to retarget you with a retargeting ad.

As detailed above, Google started phasing out third-party cookies, which is the tech that Meta laregly relies on to identify website visitors. While Meta has come up with some mitigation measures everyone is seeing depressed conversion rates and rising cost per lead. Why? Because Meta cannot accurately identify website visitors like they used to and so their retargeting accuracy has come down. Advertisers now need to have their own pixels that can capture 1st-party data, enrich it, and send it back to ad platforms.

Google’s focus is on deprecating third-party cookies, which is what Meta’s pixel is reliant on to identify your abandoning website visitors for retargeting. By way of contrast, the Identity Pixel is cookie-less and, therefore, not impacted in the same way as Meta’s pixel technology.

Advantage+ will not save the day for your retargeting campaigns, which is already suffering from cookie deprecation and require a cookie-less solution like the Identity Pixel. Even your prospecting campaigns for cold leads could benefit from the Identity Pixel. While FB is pushing advertisers to Advantage+, the quality of its AI output is highly dependent on the size and quality of the data it is fed. The more data you can “train” Facebook’s AI with, the better. And there is no better data than your own site data, which is exactly what the Identity Pixel feeds Facebook.

With iOS 14 and now the loss of cookies, Facebook audiences have shrunk dramatically. AI is helping Facebook to build back those audiences and ensure targeting capabilities don’t completely fade away but the more data you can provide Facebook the better the audience will be.