Event Match Quality Below 7? The CAPI Fix Checklist

A low Event Match Quality (EMQ) score is Meta telling you it can’t reliably match your conversion events to real people — so your Conversions API data is worth less than it should be. We’ve taken accounts from an EMQ of 4.2 to 8.1, and the fix is almost always the same handful of parameters. Here’s the checklist.

What is Event Match Quality?

Event Match Quality is Meta’s 0–10 score for how well the customer information you send with each Conversions API event lets Meta match it to a Facebook or Instagram user. Higher EMQ means better attribution, better optimisation and more recovered conversions.

Below ~6 you’re leaving performance on the table; above ~8 you’re in good shape. The score is driven almost entirely by which customer parameters you send and how cleanly they’re formatted.

How do you raise EMQ above 7?

Send more high-value match parameters with every event — hashed email, phone, first/last name, city, postcode, plus the external ID and Facebook click ID (fbc) and browser ID (fbp). Make sure they’re correctly normalised and SHA-256 hashed. Adding email and phone alone usually moves EMQ the most.

The common failures: missing fbc/fbp, sending un-hashed or wrongly-formatted data, or only sending email when phone and name are available. Capture the click IDs server-side and pass everything you legitimately hold.

Why does EMQ matter for spend?

Meta optimises delivery against matched events. Poorly matched events mean Meta misjudges who converts, so it spends on the wrong audiences. Raising EMQ directly improves how accurately your budget is allocated.

This is why EMQ is part of any serious Meta Pixel and CAPI setup — it’s not a vanity metric, it’s a spend-efficiency lever.

Which parameters move EMQ the most?

Hashed email and phone number give the biggest lift, followed by the Facebook click ID (fbc) and browser ID (fbp). After those, first and last name, city, postcode and an external ID each add incremental matching. Sending the full set together — correctly normalised — is what reliably pushes EMQ past 8.

Order of impact in practice: email, then phone, then fbc, then fbp, then name plus location plus external ID. Email and phone alone often move a score from the 4–5 range into the 7s; the click IDs and supporting fields take it the rest of the way. The catch is formatting — an email must be trimmed and lower-cased before hashing, a phone number must be in E.164 format (+44…), or Meta silently fails the match.

How do you check your current EMQ score?

Open Meta Events Manager, select your dataset, and look at each event under the Overview tab — the Event Match Quality score sits next to each server event. Check it per event, not just overall, because one weak event can drag the whole account down.

Review it weekly for the first month after any change, then monthly. A score that drops suddenly usually means a deployment broke a parameter — a renamed field, a consent change, or click IDs that stopped being captured. Catching that quickly is the difference between a week of mis-spend and a quarter of it.

Frequently asked questions