Facebook now lets businesses
match user IDs across Messenger
and their own apps, sites

Facebook previously gave businesses one ID when someone contacted them on Messenger and another when that person logged into their apps or sites.

   A A boring story made interesting:

If you contact a brand through Facebook Messenger and also log into the brand’s mobile app using your Facebook account, the brand has no idea that you’re the same person. Or it had no idea — until now.

On Tuesday, Facebook made it possible for businesses to match the ID it creates when people interact with a business’s Messenger account with the separate ID it creates when people log into the business’s app or website using their Facebook account. The full details about how businesses can do this matching can be found here on Facebook’s site for developers.

As a result of this matching, a brand can use the information it gathers about a person through its mobile app, such as past purchases, when it communicates with that person on Messenger, such as when deciding to notify someone about a new product. And if a business operates multiple apps and sites or owns multiple Facebook Pages, it can match a person across all those places, assuming the person logged in via Facebook to those other apps and sites or contacted those other Pages on Messenger.

By unifying these IDs, marketers are also able to take into account people’s interactions across Messenger and their own apps and/or sites when targeting ads. Consider the earlier example of someone who contacted a business on Messenger and logged into its app. Now that the brand knows not only that the person purchased a product on its app but had also voiced an issue with it on Messenger, the brand could look for other customers who fit the bill and group the Facebook-related IDs it has for those users into a list to target them with discount-waving, win-you-back ads using Facebook’s Custom Audiences ad targeting option.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk Markethive Founding Member