Facebook Pixel
Facebook pixel lets you track your store visitors, giving you a lot of data about your customer's behavior. You can use that data to more effectively plan your ad campaigns to get even more customers. Installation takes a couple of minutes, with no technical skills whatsoever.
Understanding the Facebook pixel
The Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that helps you understand actions customers take on your website/store. The pixel will “know” when your store visitors:
- view products and categories
- search products
- add items to the shopping cart
- enter the checkout flow
- start the checkout
- complete the checkout, etc.
Later this data allows you to:
- Retarget your visitors with ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network. For example, you can find people who have visited a specific page or taken the desired action in your store and then offer these customers a 15% off coupon through a targeted Facebook ad to spur conversions. Also, the pixel can help you advertise to people similar to your existing customers.
- Measure conversions and sales so that you know exactly how your ads are performing.
- Set up Dynamic Ads to automatically promote multiple products or your entire product catalog on Facebook, across all devices.
Verifying your domain on Facebook
After Apple iOS 14 privacy policy updates, Facebook created new algorithms to optimize ad campaigns for iOS 14 users. Now, you have to verify the ownership of your domain so you can create conversion events. For example, you need to verify your domain to create retargeting campaigns.
Once you verify your domain, you can create and manage up to 8 conversion events that can be used for campaign optimization. You can learn more about how Apple iOS 14 release may affect your ads.
Currently, if you sell on the free Ecwid Instant Site, you won’t be able to create Facebook ads conversion campaigns. Still, you can create other types of Facebook ad formats. To create conversion-focused events for your Facebook ads, you should first connect your own domain to your Instant site, and then verify it. Note that verifying with meta tags for Instant Site is available on Ecwid paid plans. You can find detailed information about new aggregated event measurement in Facebook Help Center.
To verify domain on Facebook:
- Get the meta tag from Facebook:
- From your Facebook Business Manager, go to Settings → More Business Settings → Brand Safety → Domains.
- Click Add New Domains.
- Type the address of your site and click Add Domain. The domain will be added to your assets.
- Click on the domain you want to verify and choose Meta Tag Verification tab and copy your meta tag code.
- Add the meta tag to your Instant Site:
- From your Ecwid admin, go to Website → SEO.
- In the Header meta tags and site verification block, click Add code.
- Paste your meta tag code.
- Save the changes.
- Return to Facebook Business Manager and click the Verify button in the Meta Tag Verification tab.
If you use Ecwid Instant Site with your own custom domain, you have two options to verify the ownership either by adding a meta tag or using the DNS Verification option:
- Get the TXT record from Facebook:
- From your Facebook Business Manager, go to Settings → More Business Settings → Brand Safety → Domains.
- Click Add New Domains and enter the address of your site. Then click Add domain.
- Click on the DNS Verification tab and copy your txt record.
- Add the TXT record to your domain:
- Log into the account with your domain provider to access your domain settings.
- Add the TXT entry to your DNS records.
- Add @ to the Host field, if it is required by your domain registrar.
- Wait till these changes propagate (usually it takes a few minutes, but in some cases may last longer, up to 72 hours), then click the Verify button in the DNS Verification tab.
The exact steps on adding a TXT record to a domain vary with different domain providers. If you are not sure how to add this record to your domain, please contact your domain provider to get the detailed instructions.
- From your Facebook Business Manager, go to Settings → More Business Settings → Brand Safety → Domains.
- Click Add New Domains.
- Type the address of your site and click Add Domain. The domain will be added to your assets.
- Click on the domain you want to verify and choose one of the three domain verification methods:
- Add a meta tag to your domain’s home page (recommended).
- Upload an HTML file to your web directory and confirm ownership of your domain in Business Manager.
- Add a DNS TXT entry to your DNS record to confirm ownership of your domain.
- Follow the Facebook wizard to complete the verification. For more details, watch a quick video about verifying a domain on Facebook.
After verifying the domain, you can create and install the Facebook pixel to your Ecwid store. You can also configure and prioritize your top 8 events on your domain. You can learn more about configuring events in Facebook Help Center →
Installing the Facebook pixel to your Ecwid store
The installation is easy for everyone regardless of technical skills. You can create new pixel or connect the existing one when connecting your store to Facebook. This way is more suitable for those who want to sell on Facebook.
If you don’t want to sell on Facebook, you can generate your Pixel ID in the Ads Manager, the Facebook service where you can view, check and change your Facebook ad campaigns. Then you need to add the pixel to your Ecwid admin.
To create and install the Facebook pixel to your Ecwid store:
- Open your Facebook Ads Manager.
- Click on the All Tools icon in the left panel and choose Events Manager.
- In the left hand-side menu, click on the green Connect Data Source button.
- In the popup window, hit Web and click Get Started:
- In the Set up Web Events window, select Facebook Pixel and click Connect:
- Enter the name of the pixel and the URL of your Ecwid store in the appropriate fields and click Continue.
- You’ve created the Facebook pixel. The next step is to add it to your Ecwid store. In the Choose how you want to install your pixel code window click the Use a partner button:
- In the Choose a Partner list, choose Ecwid:
- Follow the Facebook wizard to finish adding the pixel to your online store through the Ecwid admin.
If Facebook has issues at the Verify connection step, try to turn off AdBlock if you use one. Also, note that verifying may take up to several minutes. You can always check if the pixel is working at your Events Manager page in Facebook. In the Test Events tab you can check that your events are received correctly. In the Diagnostics tab you can find and resolve issues with the pixel.
Done! Now you have created and added the Facebook pixel to your Ecwid store.
Facebook pixel standard events
After you’ve added a Facebook pixel in Ecwid, the pixel start counting actions that happen on your online store as events. You can use event data to create personalized ads for your customers.
The following events will be sent from Ecwid to Facebook:
- ViewContent: for each time a customer visits your product or category pages.
- Search: for each time a customer uses the search box to find products.
- AddToCart: for each time a customer adds products to the shopping cart without finishing the purchase or clicks "Buy now" button on single product page.
- InitiateCheckout: for each time a customer visits the checkout page.
- AddPaymentInfo: for each time a customer enters payment information in the checkout.
- Purchase: for each time a customer completes a purchase and views the thank you page in the checkout.
Learn more about using Facebook pixel standard events to create campaigns and track conversions at the Facebook Help Center.
Facebook Conversions API
Facebook Conversions API is a tool that sends information about customer events directly from your website to Facebook. Pretty much like pixel, but while pixel takes data from your clients’ browser, Conversions API gets data from the servers. That allows you to obtain more reliable data to optimize ad campaigns. In particular, Conversions API can retrieve information from iOS devices version 14 and above, where otherwise data cannot be collected due to Apple strict privacy laws and browser cookie policies.
Usually, the Conversions API needs to be set up manually on your website. In Ecwid, Facebook Conversions API automatically tracks the most important event in your store, Purchase, so you don’t have to manually set it up. Other events apart from Purchase are tracked as usual through your pixel.
The Conversions API automatically works in your store if those conditions are met:
- You connected your store to Facebook after spring of 2021.
- You set up a pixel.
- Pixel and Facebook Page belong to the same Facebook business of the admin user.
Removing Facebook pixel code from your website
If you've used a Facebook pixel with your website in the past before embed Ecwid into it, you might need to remove its code before adding a new pixel. Adding a second Facebook pixel to your online store and the website could cause duplicate or incorrect data in your reports.
As a website owner, deleting a pixel from your site is as easy as removing the code from your site by deleting the code implemented in your header. If you used the injection method to place the code in your site through services like Wix, Squarespace, and other platforms, it’s also possible to delete the code using that tool. Facebook’s guide specifically uses Squarespace as a reference guide for deleting the pixel from your injected code, but it should also be similar for most online site platforms.
Removing Facebook pixel code from Ecwid
You can remove the existing pixel code from your Ecwid store:
- From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → General → Tracking & Analytics.
- Remove your Facebook pixel ID from the Pixel ID field.
- Save changes.
If you've used a Facebook pixel with Ecwid in the past, you might need to remove its code before adding a new pixel, otherwise it may result in duplicated or partial data. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → General → Cart & Checkout and remove the Facebook pixel codes, if you have any, from the section Custom tracking code on Order Confirmation page:
Next steps
As an e-commerce store owner, you’ll mostly use Facebook Pixel for retargeting (to advertise to people who have visited a specific page or taken the desired action in your store) and conversion tracking (to measure conversions and sales so that you know exactly how your ads are performing and let Facebook optimize your ads for you).
As an Ecwid merchant with connected Facebook Shop, you can set up Facebook ads yourself using Product Catalog feature.
Related articles
Selling on Facebook with Ecwid
Promoting your Facebook shop
Selling on Instagram with Ecwid
Facebook Pixel Strategies to Help You Run More Targeted Ads (Blog)
Checklist: How to Grow a Facebook Business Page for Free (Guide)
Blow Up Your Sales With Ecwid’s New Social Selling Tools on Facebook (Blog)