Match quality: why the same sale is worth more to your ad platform with better data

A conversion event that an ad platform cannot attach to a real person is close to worthless. It arrives, it is counted somewhere, and it teaches the bidding model nothing about who to find next. Match quality is the difference between the two, and it is largely under your control.

What actually improves the match

• A click id captured at first touch and kept until the order, rather than whatever survived in the final URL.
• Hashed email and phone from the order, which match even when every cookie is gone.
• Name, city, postcode and country, each of which adds a little on its own and a lot together.
• A stable external id, so repeat purchases by the same person are recognised as such.

Where the data comes from matters

The identity graph is what lets a conversion carry more than the checkout collected. If a customer gave you a phone number two orders ago and this order only has an email, both can go - because both belong to the same resolved person. A tool that only sees the current order can only send the current order.

Reading the score honestly

A per-order match score should be judged against the keys that channel can actually use. An order that came from Google should not be marked down for lacking a Meta browser id it could never have had. Scored that way, the number tells you what to fix; scored naively, it just tells you which channel the order came from.

What to do next

Take your last hundred orders and count how many carry a hashed phone number as well as an email. For most stores that one field is the largest available improvement, and it is usually a checkout setting rather than an engineering project.