Everything you've asked me about EMQ scores

Happy new year! Last week, a customer asked about EMQ's impact on their ad performance. Given how important this metric is for optimizing ROAS, I wanted to share a comprehensive breakdown.

Understanding EMQ's Impact on Your Business

Event Match Quality (EMQ) is Meta's scoring system for measuring how accurately they can match your store's customer data to actual facebook users on their platform. Think of it as a grade for your data quality - the higher the score, the more effectively Meta can find and target potential customers.

We’ve seen stats from customers when EMQ improves from 8.6 to 9.3:

• Cost per acquisition drops by 18% ($42 → $35)

• Customer match rate increases by 24%

• ROAS improves by 22% on average

• Ad spend efficiency increases by ~$2,100/month at $1,000 daily spend

What this means for your brand: Better EMQ scores let Meta's algorithm target more accurately, reducing your customer acquisition costs while improving sales. Every point increase in EMQ directly impacts your profitability.

Why EMQ Scores Change (And When to Worry)

EMQ scores will fluctuate in realtime. The calculations are based on the last 24h to 48h of data sent from your Conversion API. Here are three factors that directly impact your score:

1. Data Completeness: How many identification parameters you send

2. Processing Speed: How your events reach Meta (batched vs real-time)

3. Event Accuracy: Whether events are counted once or duplicated

What this means for your business: Focus on score consistency over time rather than individual fluctuations. Properly implemented server-side tracking should show strong scores within 24 hours.

Never accept extended "adjustment periods” from your server-side tracking solution. Your store should see strong EMQ scores within 24 hours of proper implementation.

The Technical Foundation of High EMQ

Meta prioritizes these parameters (in order of importance):

source: Meta documentation - About event match quality

What this means for your business: Focus on collecting high-priority parameters at crucial customer touchpoints, especially email capture and checkout flow optimization.

Understanding Event Types and Their Impact

EMQ scores vary by event type:

• Purchase events should maintain 8.8-9.3 EMQ

• AddToCart and InitiateCheckout should be 8.0+

• PageView typically ranges 6.5-7.5

Higher funnel events naturally have lower scores because less customer data is available at those stages.

What this means for your brand: Prioritize optimizing your purchase event tracking first, as it has the most direct impact on your advertising performance.

Server-side Implementation Best Practices

For optimal EMQ performance, your server-side tracking should:

1. Extend cookie life to 1 year for better customer data stitching

2. Enrich data with device type, location, and IP

3. Support cross-device tracking

4. Handle express checkout flows properly

5. Process data in real-time

6. Manage deduplication automatically

7. Maintain direct platform connections

What this means for your business: Choose server-side implementations that handle these technical requirements without requiring constant maintenance. Many third-party solutions often introduce delays and data loss through browser-based tracking – so look out for this.

Maintaining High EMQ Scores While Scaling

When increasing ad spend, monitor:

1. Purchase event EMQ (should maintain 8.8-9.3+)

2. Cost per acquisition trends

3. New vs Returning Customer Purchase events

What this means for your business: You can scale confidently when these metrics remain stable. We've seen customers successfully scale from $4k to $14k monthly revenue while maintaining these metrics.

Final Step: Turn On Automatic Advanced Matching

Advanced matching can help you optimize your Meta ads to drive better results. Regardless of your tracking setup, enable Automatic Advanced Matching in Meta's Events Manager. This helps:

• Increase attributed conversions accuracy. Meta can match more of the conversions that happen on your website to people on Meta. This helps you understand the impact of your ads on website conversions.

• Expand custom audience size. Meta is able to better match your website visitors to people on Meta and increase the size of your custom audience.

• Reduce cost-per-conversion through better matching. Conversion-optimized campaigns become more efficient because we can better identify and deliver ads to the types of people likely to take the actions you care about.

Questions? Reply directly to this email – I read every message.

For Aimerce Customers

If you're using Aimerce, we automatically handle:

• Real-time event processing

• Parameter formatting and validation

• Deduplication across all events

• Express checkout tracking

• Cross-device user stitching

• Edge case optimization

You can focus on scaling your ad spend while these technical elements are managed automatically. Essentially, all the call-outs in this article has already been automated on your behalf.

Cheers to making more money in 2025,

✌️ Yiqi