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Signals is Plainrouter’s first-party conversion measurement layer. It receives website events through a managed collection subdomain or a same-origin forwarding route, records what happened, and can deliver consented events to a connected Meta dataset.

The short version

The snippet records one identity-free arrival per page load. With full consent, your website can also send conversion events for eligible destination delivery.
One workspace is one Signals tenant. The workspace owns the collection domain, publishable key, Signals API secret, identity retention, destination history, and event ledger.

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How data moves

1

Your server or browser records an event

The Signals pixel sends an arrival once per document load before consent evaluation. Your server can use the Conversion API, and the pixel can send consented purchases, leads, checkouts, and custom events separately.
2

Your serving path receives it

Requests use a managed hostname such as collect.example.com or a generated same-origin forwarding route. Plainrouter validates the authorized Signal and website origin before accepting the event.
3

Plainrouter stores the event

Arrival records retain UTC-hour time, workspace context and bounded page, source, campaign and device dimensions without visitor identity, IP addresses, raw user-agent strings or commerce data. Review retained arrival fields. Conversion events use their own consent-aware event and delivery records.
4

Eligible events reach Meta

When you connect a Meta dataset and grant advertising consent, Plainrouter sends the server event through Conversions API. The managed browser Pixel sends a paired copy with the same event ID for deduplication.
5

Stored measurements become health evidence

Signals health combines the event ledger, delivery ledger, stored Event Match Quality snapshots, and daily reconciliation reports. It does not make a live Meta Marketing API call when the page loads.
Use Dashboard for paid-account performance and arrival comparisons. Use Signals for installation, destinations, health and pre-consent cookie scans. Recorded consent choices are available separately from conversion delivery evidence.

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What Signals measures

Signals health and reconciliation are account- or dataset-level measurements. They do not provide campaign, ad set, ad, spend, budget, learning-phase, or target-level CPA state.
The identity-free arrival runs once on initialization regardless of consent. Consent controls the separate conversion-event, identifier, and advertising-delivery paths: The v4 snippet can consume supported external consent signals or display a configured Plainrouter fallback card. Choose and verify the consent source. For an explicit adapter, connect your consent-management platform by calling signalq("consent", input) with the structured permission state whenever the visitor’s choice changes. A consent update does not send another arrival. See Track events and consent for examples and click-ID handling. Server-side POST /events requests must include a consent_basis of consent or legitimate_interest. Requests using consent must include granted downstream advertising state. Plainrouter stores the normalized consent decision with the event and allows Meta delivery only for observed, joined, attributed events with consent.

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Identity retention

New Signals setup uses the default 90-day visitor identity retention without a retention questionnaire. Customer event reads separately follow the plan window unless an explicit shorter workspace setting applies. New workspaces leave that shorter setting unset; this does not extend the default lifetime of visitor identity. The authenticated admin API supports an explicit 30- or 90-day setting, or null to clear it, subject to server-side policy. Clearing the shorter setting returns event reads to the plan window; it does not disable identity deletion. Check Workspace settings → Identity retention and Read window separately. See reporting windows. Retention changes must pass the server-side retention policy. MCP does not expose a retention setter. The former retention-instruction history and export are no longer available; the retention policy still applies.

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Browser and server deduplication

When Meta is connected, one signalq("track", ...) call can produce both a managed browser Pixel event and a server-side Conversions API event. Plainrouter assigns the same UUID to both copies so Meta can deduplicate them. Do not keep a separate Pixel or CAPI integration sending the same events to the same dataset after you validate the managed setup. Duplicate integrations can inflate reporting.

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Why do the numbers differ?

Compare metric definitions, report settings and collection behavior in Why numbers differ.

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Setup path

Configure DNS

Connect a first-party collection hostname.

Install the pixel

Add consent-aware browser measurement and receive the first qualifying arrival.

Verify ingestion

Run an identity-free API or MCP diagnostic without completing onboarding.

Configure serving

Install the generated block for your hosting stack.

Track events

Add consent, identity, and conversion events.

Connect Meta

Select the destination ad account and dataset.