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

Boring story made interesting: If you contact a brand though Facebook Messenger and also log in to 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 in to 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 about someone who contacted a business on Messenger and logged in to 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.

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.