How to Track Purchases on Facebook Ads: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide

You’ve got Facebook ads up and running and you want people to be purchasing, right? But where are the sales coming from? Your ads may be driving potential sales, or are they just wasting money and time? If you don’t know for sure, don’t worry. Most novice advertisers think the exact same thing, and the truth is, many pro advertisers still mess it up as well. This is why it’s one of the game-changers you can do for your Facebook ads is learning how to track purchases. It reveals to you in simple figures, what you are doing well and what is successfully costing you money without your knowledge.

From setting up your Facebook Pixel to using the Facebook Conversions API, from reading your conversions within Ads Manager to dealing with the most common tracking pitfalls that quietly wreck everyone’s numbers in Facebook. There’s no confusing tech jargon here. Nothing fancy, just direct instructions to help you create a solid Facebook ads purchase tracking system, regardless of how little coding experience you have. At the end, you will definitely have a clear idea of what ads are generating profit and what ones are consuming your budget. Let’s get into it.

Why You Should Track Your Sales

Imagine this. This week you pay $100 for advertisements. You make a few clicks, and possibly a couple sales appear in your store. But you don’t know which ad was responsible for the sale, which of your audience responded, or even if the sale was Facebook-generated or not. Well that’s a problem, and this is a more common problem than you think.

Without proper tracking, you don’t have a marketing campaign going on in the real sense of the term. You’re hoping you have enough money and that the numbers are in your favor. Completely changing the track of flips. After being configured properly, you will be aware of which ads, which audience, and which creative actually converts to a sale, rather than just a click. You no longer waste money on ads that are flashy on the surface, but don’t convert well when you look at the numbers. One of the few numbers that tells you if your advertising is profitable is your ROAS, which is a shortened version of return on ad spend, and you can now measure it, improve it and do so! Plus, you get to create much larger lookalike and retargeting audiences because Facebook can only locate more people like your buyers if it knows who your buyers are in the first place.

Most importantly: Tracking hands you control. You cease to be emotional about a “bad” day of sales or too excited about one “good” day and begin making the decisions you need to make, based on facts and logic, not emotion. This is typically the most valuable change any of the tactics in this guide can make.

Why Tracking Purchases Got Harder, and Why It Still Matters

It would be better to understand why it is no longer sufficient to just install a pixel and then be done with it. There was a time a few years ago when you only needed one Facebook Pixel. Things have changed a lot today. Most major browsers have now blocked third-party cookies by default, people regularly use the same phone and laptop before buying, and with a single tap users can turn off tracking across apps and websites on their iPhone. All these visual losses come together to create a somewhat hazy image as to what really is going on when you report.

But the reality of it all is that browser-only tracking is often under-representative of the actual purchases you’ve made. This makes your cost-per-purchase appear higher than it really is, and may make you pause otherwise good ads because of the number. It also takes Facebook’s own ad optimization for a ride, as the purchase information you provide drives the algorithm. Without all of that information, Facebook optimizes your campaign based on a skewed perspective of reality instead of what’s actually happening on your website.

As a result, Meta has created a patch for the Pixel that complements it instead of replacing it. When you add the Facebook Pixel and a thing called the “Conversions API” which we’ll get to right here, you’ve got two distinct avenues for the identical purchase facts. One goes through the customer’s browser, one goes from your website’s server direct to Facebook’s server without going through the customer’s browser. Now, when you combine browser and server based tracking like that you’ll have a much more full and reliable view of your sales—even now, in a privacy-conscious world. It’s exactly this setup that we will be constructing together in this step-by-step guide.

The following are some items to have before you begin

There are a couple of things to ensure before you start to make sure the rest of this process goes smoothly. You’ll need to have a Facebook Business Manager account because that’s where your pixel, ad accounts, and reporting are housed. You’ll also need access to the back end of your website, which can be a Shopify store, WordPress with WooCommerce, or any custom site. In addition, you will need something to sell, a functioning checkout process and a thank-you page that a customer will reach after making a purchase. Lastly, take between 30 minutes and an hour to go through the steps below at a leisurely pace. That really is all they wanted. The previous conditions do not require you to be a developer and no previous knowledge of tracking tools is required.

Step One: Create Your Facebook Pixel

It’s like a sales detective who quietly observes the visitors of your website, and that’s the Facebook Pixel, now officially known as the Meta Pixel. It’s a relatively small piece of code that tracks users’ activity after they click on your ad and then reports that back to Facebook so you can view it in your reporting later.
Making one is easy, just go over to Facebook Events Manager. Then click on Connect Data Sources, and choose Web as the type of data source you are connecting to. Now, click Meta Pixel and Start Getting Started. Facebook will then prompt you to give your pixel a name and enter your website URL, then click Continue. That’s really just about all there is. Now your pixel is in your account and you can use it in the next step to link it to your actual website.

Step Two: Add the Pixel to Your Website

Now that you’ve got your pixel connected, the next step is to tie it in to your website, which will depend on which platform you’re working with.

The easiest solution if you have your store on Shopify is to click into Online Store > Preferences and add your Pixel ID right into the Facebook section. The easier way to do that, however, is to link your store via the official Facebook and Instagram sales channel app, as this also installs the pixel for you and ensures it’s always up to date with changes on the Facebook end.

The simplest way is to install the official Facebook for WooCommerce plugin if you’re using WordPress and WooCommerce. When it is activated, the only thing you have to do is log in to your Facebook account in the plugin’s settings screen and your pixel is added automatically to each page once you successfully connect it.
With a completely custom website, there’s a little more hand work, but it’s still very manageable. The pixel base code will be copied from the Events Manager and pasted into the head section of each page on your site so it is always loading on all pages, regardless of which page your visitor enters first. If you are already using Google Tag Manager for this type of tracking, you can load the pixel in GTM, which means that the tracking is likely to stay cleaner the longer you continue to grow your tracking implementation. Fortunately, most modern platforms make this easy with built-in feature sets or plugins these days, so you’re unlikely to have to work with raw code yourself.

Step Three: Set Up the Purchase Event

Once the pixel is placed on your site, it’s time to tell it what to search for. In this instance, it’s when someone makes a purchase. Facebook terms it a standard event and Purchase is one of 17 built-in standard events you can make use of, together with others such as ViewContent, AddToCart and InitiateCheckout, every monitoring a different stage of the purchasing journey. The real code for a purchase event is more or less like this:

fbq('track', 'Purchase', {
value: 49.99,
currency: 'USD'
});

This should be located on your thank you page the page a customer will visit after successful checkout, because this is when Facebook should record it as a sale, not just a “potential sale.This should be displayed on your thank you page the page after successful checkout because that’s when it should be counted as a sale, not a “potential sale”, in Facebook’s eyes. This usually happens automatically if you’re using Shopify or WooCommerce with the official integrations listed above so you don’t need to enter any code by hand.

There’s more to this, however, than simply the minimal. Giving additional information, like the product’s content ID or SKU, and the type of content, along with the value and currency, isn’t only for your benefit when you are reporting. It directly enhances the ability of Facebook to accurately match and learn from your purchase information when enabled by using the Conversions API which we will be discussing next. If a standard event doesn’t quite capture what you want to measure, for example, you want to measure sales of a certain product line, or purchases above a certain dollar threshold, you can create a custom conversion, without any code changes, using URL rules instead.

Step Four: Add the Conversions API for More Accurate Tracking

Many novice guides fail to go through this step and this is the most crucial one of this entire article. The Facebook Pixel is on its own entirely reliant on the customer’s browser to transmit information back to Facebook. The issue is that ad blockers, privacy-focused browsers and iPhone tracking permissions all affect it one way or another and they all erode how much of your actual purchase data makes it through.

The Conversions API, or CAPI, is the solution to this problem: It sends the exact same purchase data directly from your website’s server to Facebook’s server, without relying on the customer’s browser whatsoever, and without them knowing you’re doing it. Combining the two together is exactly what Meta suggests for people that really want to track Facebook ads purchases, it essentially provides you two different channels with the exact same info. Sometimes the browser-based pixel doesn’t catch an event due to a blocker or the browser privacy setting, but the server-side event often catches the event and vice versa.

This no longer requires a developer to get it running either. You can integrate the Conversions API Gateway within the Events Manager in just minutes, as opposed to weeks that was common with a manual integration, and without any coding whatsoever. If you are using Shopify, WooCommerce or using Google Tag Manager’s server-side container, you’ll often find that there is a partner integration that will allow you to enable this with a few clicks in your current dashboard. However, with specific technical requirements, a developer can still integrate directly with the Meta API for full manual control of a business that uses a fully custom platform.

Regardless of the path you take, there is one detail you shouldn’t overlook: enabling event deduplication so you can match the event ID on your Pixel with your Conversions API events. If you do not have this, the same sale could be recorded by the browser and by the server, which will mistakenly boost your sales figures and make your true ROI from your ad spend seem higher than it really is. The combination of Pixel and CAPI makes for a trustworthy setup and that can only be achieved by getting the deduplication part right.

Step Five: Test If It’s Working

It’s important to do this step, because it really is more important than people think. The first step is to install the Meta Pixel Helper extension for Chrome that will verify if your pixel is firing correctly as you navigate your own website. After installation, check your site to see if you have a green check mark in the extension button. Then create a mock purchase, either by going to your thank-you page or by making a test purchase, whichever you prefer, and make sure that Purchase is recorded with the proper currency and value.

After confirming this, it’s helpful to take another step further, and open the Test Events tab within Events Manager. This view displays events from both the Pixel and the Conversions API side by side and in real time, so you can ensure that both are firing properly and that there is a match between them, instead of just verifying that the side in the browser is firing correctly. If it doesn’t look right at this point, it’s much easier to double-check your code placement or contact your developer or the platform’s support team at this time, before you begin to use real money in ads for campaigns that run on top of broken code.

Step Six: View Your Sales in Ads Manager

When it’s all set up, you will finally have your sales data available right inside Ads Manager next to all of your campaign metrics. Click on Columns in Ads Manager and select your ad campaign then click into Columns and select Customize Columns from the menu. Then, add Website Purchases, Cost per Purchase and Purchase Value to your view, then apply and save the layout, so you can find it next time. From here, you’ll be sure of which ad caused a sale and know exactly how much the sale cost you.

One part that confuses a lot of people in this phase is understanding windows of attribution, so it’s important that you get this right. If you’re not careful, Facebook will attribute a sale to an ad based on a seven day click model, which means that if someone clicks your ad and purchases something later that week, they will be counted, not just individuals who buy on the same day. So don’t worry if your numbers are unusually low today.

Someone may have done this yesterday or a few days ago and just finished it this morning. This is a point where comparing your seven day click results against a one day click view is actually useful, as it will give you a clue as to how much of your traffic is converting fast, and how much extra time it takes to convert, which will show you a true reflection of your customers buying behaviour.

Understanding Event Match Quality

While most beginner tutorials simply do not address it, it does have an impact on the tracking itself, without that being obvious. It is referred to as Event Match Quality or EMQ. On the inside of Events Manager, click on your Purchase event, and you will see an EMQ score out of 10. This score indicates the extent to which Facebook can match your purchase data to a logged-in Facebook user, instead of as an anonymous, un-contextualized action in space.

The more information you can include with each purchase, the more similar it is to the information you already have in your profile, the more this score goes up – information you can include on purchase include a customer’s e-mail address or phone number, all of which are never shared openly with the public, but are always kept secure in Facebook’s hands. The higher it goes, the more Facebook can fine-tune its ads targeting and get results from genuine buyers, rather than guesses. A good rule of thumb is that the Purchase event score should be in the high eights to low nines out of 10. If yours is notably lower, then it’s most likely because you’re missing some important customer data that you would already have on your checkout page, such as an email address or phone number, none of which happens to be being transferred over to the Conversions API, so it’s probably a pretty simple fix once you know what to look for.

Server-Side Tracking with Google Tag Manager

There’s another tool that you should be familiar with if you don’t want to flip between several different tools, especially after you start spending more money on ads in your store. With server-side Google Tag Manager, you can deploy a server container between your website and the platforms you send data to, like Facebook, and you can send data on the platform’s behalf without having to build one from scratch. For those who are already using Google Tag Manager for their tracking, adding a server container on top of that is often not much more complicated, as the structure is already known.

This will not be required for every store, and for many small businesses it will be just fine to use the Conversions API Gateway that was introduced previously, which will require much less of you on the technical side. If you’re already familiar with working in the server side, however, then using this approach will enable you to handle not only your Facebook tracking code, but your Google Analytics or other marketing tags too, which can save valuable time as your stack continues to expand.

Bonus Tip: Leverage UTM Tags and Cross-Check With Google Analytics

You’re looking for someone else, in addition to Facebook’s sales figures, to second guess your Facebook sales? The best way to do this is to use UTM tags in your ad URLs. These small tags give Google Analytics 4, or whatever analytics tool you choose, not only the number of visitors who have visited your website, but also which adverts and ads sets and campaigns they came from. Even if you’ve never created a tracking link in your life, tools like Google’s own Campaign URL Builder make it easy to create these tags.

This is a more important step than it is superficially. Facebook and Google Analytics will never give you the exact same numbers of purchases as both platforms have different rules for counting purchases and attributes, behind the scenes. If both tools are broadly corroborating each other, meaning that sales were increased when you increased the spend on a winning ad and sales went down when you decreased the spend on a winning ad, then that is a very good sign that your tracking setup is healthy and you can trust the data you’re being fed.

What about Third Party Checkouts?

In the case of selling on an online platform such as Teespring, Gumroad or Payhip, it’s a bit different, but the end goal remains the same. Many of these have the option of putting in a tracking pixel straight out of their app marketplace or settings panel, so before thinking of anything more complicated, check their help manual. If this isn’t possible with a specific platform, you can use a tool like Zapier to send purchase data to Facebook in your name. It requires slightly more setup, but is actually achievable without having to hire a developer, and it’s worth it rather than flying blind on platforms which have no direct connection.

The Common Mistakes That Stealthily Defeat Purchase Tracking

There are some small errors that always sneak in even when everything is working perfectly and that is why you always need to double check your numbers as they will creep into your workflow in secret at the back of your head. One of the more prevalent is firing the Purchase event on every single page on your site, other than the thank you page and counting regular page visits as sales, thereby skewing your reported sales figures high. The other common problem is setting the parameters for the value and currency when the event fires, without these two parameters Facebook will not be able to accurately calculate your ROI from your Facebook ads. Another common pitfall is failing to run the Pixel without the Conversions API, this renders you vulnerable to the exact same tracking issues that we touched upon in this guide: the tracking loss to browsers

Another sneaky one is event deduplication, when you don’t know you’re counting the same sale in both Pixel and Conversions API events, it can make it appear as though sales are higher than they really are. Another important reason to avoid comparing data from one day to the next is that the attribution window we’ve talked about can actually mean that purchases that take a few days to follow can be counted as happening two or three days after the initial click. Last but not least, not checking Event Match Quality score – many advertisers do this because they don’t know about it. If you have events firing without any apparent problems, but don’t see a lot of traffic, a low score is restricting Facebook from optimizing your campaign. The majority of these issues are a simple correction if you know where to find them and it’s definitely good practice to check each one within Events Manager every couple of weeks as a ‘quick health check’ on your account.

Turning Your Tracking Data Into Real Decisions

Once tracking is set up, you still need to configure it. The true value is revealed when you really start to use that data to make decisions. When you have purchase data flowing in consistently, you can create a custom audience of your actual buyers and request Facebook to deliver more customers that resemble them, and it’s a much more effective strategy than targeting by guesswork of what your customer might be like. Retargeting can also be done to only the individuals who have added something to their shopping cart or started the checkout process but did not complete it, and these warm audiences are likely to convert at a considerably lower cost than cold audiences who are seeing your brand for the first time.

Accurate purchase information also makes it much easier to determine where to invest your next dollar of ad dollars. Rather than even distributing your spend, however, because it’s always better to be safe than sorry, you can direct more of your spend to ads, audiences, and creatives that are performing well and at a lower cost per purchase, and pause or tweak all of those that aren’t, after providing them a little time and budget to prove themselves. If you have several products, accurate tracking also allows you to set up dynamic ads that automatically display products from your catalog that have been viewed or purchased by people, instead of you having to create and maintain several different ads for all the various products you sell. Once you’re confident in your Facebook numbers, the next question is usually how that channel stacks up against everything else you’re spending on that’s where media mix modeling comes in.

Wrap Up: You’re Now Smarter With Ads

So that’s it. That’s everything you need to know about tracking purchases on Facebook ads from the first pixel up to the full Pixel + Conversions + API solution that will perform well in the current privacy environment and browser restrictions. With this running correctly, your ads can be a lot more effective than they were. No more guessing and more knowing what works and what doesn’t. You can squander money on poorly performing ads without you even realizing it, and you can turn up the pressure on the ads that are working for you without the backlash. It’s a change of attitude from hoping for the best to knowing for sure how to make advertising work for real businesses.

If you are new to all the above, start slow and work up to it. Make sure the pixel is installed properly first, make sure the purchase event is working properly second and only after they are both working properly, layer in the Conversions API. When you’re confident and running all of your ads at optimal performance, you’ll feel much better about your ad budget than you did before you began. At Tech Trick Solutions we make techy stuff easy to do, and that’s what we want to do today. And if you’re putting this much effort into your paid tracking, it’s worth giving the same attention to your organic side here’s how to keep an eye on your SEO rankings daily too.