Facebook CAPI and Google Enhanced Conversions don’t need cookies. They use hashed customer data—email, phone number, name, and address—for conversion matching. WooCommerce collects all of this at checkout. The purchase event, your most important conversion, happens after you have customer data. Cookie deprecation changes how you track visitors TO the purchase. It doesn’t change tracking the purchase itself.
Why Cookie Panic Misses the Point
Every article about cookie deprecation creates the same fear: tracking is dying, attribution is broken, ad platforms can’t match conversions anymore. Here’s what they don’t explain: Facebook and Google rebuilt their conversion infrastructure specifically for this moment.
Facebook Conversions API accepts hashed email, phone, name, and address—no cookies required for conversion matching. Google Enhanced Conversions does the same thing. Both platforms shifted from probabilistic cookie matching to deterministic customer data matching years ago. The APIs were designed for exactly this situation.
The confusion comes from conflating two different tracking problems. Tracking anonymous visitors browsing your site? Yes, that’s getting harder. Cookies helped there. But tracking confirmed purchases where customers give you their contact information? That never required cookies in the first place.
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What CAPI and Enhanced Conversions Actually Need
Both Facebook CAPI and Google Enhanced Conversions use the same matching approach. They accept hashed first-party customer data and match it against their user databases. No browser. No cookie. Just data you already collect.
Facebook Conversions API Requirements
Meta’s documentation is explicit about what CAPI accepts for matching:
- Email address: SHA-256 hashed, lowercase, trimmed
- Phone number: SHA-256 hashed, E.164 format
- First name: SHA-256 hashed, lowercase
- Last name: SHA-256 hashed, lowercase
- City, state, country, postal code: All hashed
That’s it. No fbclid. No _fbp cookie. No browser-based pixel fire required. CAPI sends conversion data server-to-server using customer information as the matching key.
Google Enhanced Conversions Requirements
Google Enhanced Conversions follows the same pattern:
- Email: SHA-256 hashed
- Phone number: SHA-256 hashed
- Name and address: SHA-256 hashed
Google matches this hashed data against signed-in Google users. When someone clicks your ad while signed into Google, then purchases on your site, Google matches the hashed email from your conversion to their user record. Cookie blocked? Doesn’t matter. The email matches.
WooCommerce Already Collects Everything
Look at your WooCommerce checkout form. Required fields typically include email, phone, billing name, and billing address. Optional fields capture even more. A single WooCommerce order contains everything CAPI and Enhanced Conversions need for attribution.
The data flow works like this:
- Customer completes checkout
- WooCommerce stores order with customer details
- Your server hashes the customer data using SHA-256
- Hashed data sends to Facebook and Google server-to-server
- Platforms match the hash to their user databases
- Conversion attributes to the correct ad campaign
No pixel. No cookie. No browser involvement at the conversion moment. The data goes directly from your server to their servers.
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The Purchase Event Is Different
Cookie deprecation hits hardest at the top of the funnel. Page views, add-to-cart events, initiate-checkout—these happen before you have customer data. Browsers can block tracking here because no identifying information exists yet.
Purchase events are fundamentally different. The conversion happens after checkout. You have the customer’s email. You have their phone number. You have their address. Cookie consent? Irrelevant to the conversion data itself—you collected it for the transaction.
Think about it this way: you don’t need to track customers TO the purchase. You have their data AT the purchase. The question isn’t whether you can attribute the conversion. The question is whether you’re sending that data to your ad platforms correctly.
What About Upper-Funnel Events?
Page views and add-to-cart events still benefit from browser-based tracking when available. Ad blockers (used by 31.5% of users globally according to Statista) and Safari’s 7-day cookie limit do impact these events. But these are awareness metrics, not conversion metrics.
For WooCommerce stores, purchase revenue attribution matters most for ad optimization. ROAS calculations depend on accurate purchase data. And purchase data doesn’t depend on cookies.
SHA-256 Hashing Protects Privacy
A common concern: sending customer data to Facebook and Google. The hashing mechanism addresses this.
SHA-256 creates a one-way hash. Facebook and Google can’t reverse-engineer the original email from the hash. They can only check if the hash matches their records. If someone’s email hash matches a Facebook user’s email hash, the conversion attributes. The actual email never transmits in readable form.
Here’s how it works in practice. Your customer’s email is . SHA-256 hashing converts this to a 64-character string like 2c98e6c9a93c93b69e0b4e… (truncated). Facebook receives only this hash. They hash their user database the same way. If the hashes match, attribution happens. The plain-text email never crosses the wire.
This is the same hashing standard used across the industry for secure data matching. It’s how Enhanced Conversions and CAPI maintain privacy compliance while enabling attribution. Your customers’ PII stays protected while your ad platforms get the matching data they need.
Event Match Quality Improves With Customer Data
Facebook measures how well your conversion data matches their users through Event Match Quality (EMQ). Scale runs from 1 to 10. Higher scores mean better matching, which leads to better ad optimization.
Stores sending only pixel data typically score 3-5 on EMQ. The pixel captures limited identifiers—maybe the fbp cookie if it exists, the fbc parameter if the visitor came from a Facebook ad. Browser restrictions reduce these signals further.
Add CAPI with hashed customer data and EMQ jumps to 7-9. Why? Because email and phone number match Facebook users with near certainty. Cookie-based matching is probabilistic. Customer data matching is deterministic. Facebook knows which user purchased because you told them the email, and that email maps to exactly one account.
Google Enhanced Conversions provides similar benefits. Better data in means better optimization out. The ad platforms’ machine learning improves when it knows exactly which users converted versus guessing based on cookie fragments.
Server-Side Makes This Automatic
The missing piece for most WooCommerce stores isn’t the data—it’s the pipeline. Customer data sits in WooCommerce orders. Facebook and Google accept hashed customer data. Something needs to connect them.
Traditional setup requires Google Tag Manager server-side containers, custom configuration, and ongoing maintenance. You need a developer who understands both GTM and the specific API requirements for each platform. For a small WooCommerce store, this complexity often isn’t worth it—so they stick with pixels and accept the data loss.
The technical reality: implementing CAPI manually requires setting up a GTM server container on Google Cloud Platform, configuring the Meta CAPI tag, mapping WooCommerce dataLayer variables to Meta’s expected format, and testing everything through Meta’s Events Manager. Enhanced Conversions has its own setup process. Most store owners never complete this.
Transmute Engine™ bridges this gap for WordPress. When a WooCommerce order completes, Transmute Engine captures the customer data, applies SHA-256 hashing, and sends it to CAPI and Enhanced Conversions automatically. No GTM. No developer. No cookie dependency for your most important conversions.
The result: accurate purchase attribution regardless of what browsers do to cookies. Your ad platforms see conversions. Your ROAS calculations work. Cookie deprecation becomes a non-issue for bottom-line metrics.
What This Means for WooCommerce Store Owners
Cookie deprecation articles often end with doom and gloom. Reality is more nuanced. Yes, tracking anonymous browsers is harder. Yes, upper-funnel events face challenges. But your revenue-generating conversions—the ones ad platforms optimize against—can work better than ever with the right setup.
The shift from cookie-based to data-based attribution actually favors stores that collect good customer information. Every required checkout field becomes an attribution opportunity. Email is nearly universal. Phone numbers are common. Addresses come with every shipping order.
Stores that embrace server-side tracking now will have cleaner data than they did in the cookie era. Deterministic matching on customer data is more reliable than probabilistic matching on fragmented cookies. Your ad platforms get better signals. Better signals mean better optimization. Better optimization means better ROAS.
The winners in the post-cookie world aren’t the ones clinging to client-side pixels. They’re the ones who recognized that purchase data already contains everything needed for attribution—and built the pipelines to use it.
Key Takeaways
- Facebook CAPI and Google Enhanced Conversions use hashed customer data, not cookies—they were designed for a post-cookie world
- WooCommerce checkout already collects everything these platforms need—email, phone, name, and address
- Purchase events happen after you have customer data—cookie blocking doesn’t prevent conversion tracking for completed orders
- SHA-256 hashing protects customer privacy—platforms match hashes without seeing actual contact information
- Server-side tracking sends data directly to platforms—no browser involved at the conversion moment
No. Facebook Conversions API uses hashed customer data (email, phone, name, address) for matching, not cookies. The API was specifically designed to work in a cookieless environment by using deterministic matching on first-party data you collect at checkout.
WooCommerce provides email address, phone number, first name, last name, city, state, country, and postal code at checkout. This data gets SHA-256 hashed before transmission. Facebook uses this hashed data to match conversions to ad clicks.
Enhanced Conversions hashes customer data (email, phone, name, address) using SHA-256 and sends it to Google Ads. Google matches this hashed data against signed-in users to attribute conversions, even when cookies are blocked or limited.
CAPI can work entirely without the pixel for purchase tracking since you have customer data at checkout. However, for upper-funnel events like page views and add-to-cart where you don’t have customer data yet, the pixel still provides value.
Purchase tracking happens after checkout—when you already have customer email, phone, and address. You don’t need cookies to track someone TO the purchase because you have their actual data AT the purchase. Cookie loss affects upper-funnel tracking, not bottom-of-funnel conversions.
Stop worrying about cookies killing your conversion tracking. Start sending your WooCommerce purchase data to the platforms that need it. Learn how Transmute Engine automates this for WordPress stores.
