After you've installed the Facebook pixel on your website, go to a web page the pixel was placed on. If it's working, the pixel will send information back to Facebook and you'll be able to see activity in the Facebook Pixel page in your Ads Manager. Your pixel's status will also be set to Active.

The main graph on the Facebook pixel page shows total pixel traffic over time (the default view for all data on the dashboard is the past 7 days, but you can adjust it using the dropdown on the top right).

At a glance, you can tell whether the data is roughly where you would expect it to be. Does it generally match your website analytics reporting? To check, compare the Total Traffic number in the upper right-hand side with the total number of website visits in the past 7 days (as reported in your website analytics).

Keep in mind data on this page refers to the total number of pixel fires, regardless of whether they were associated with an ad. This means the total number should roughly align with your overall website/page visit volume, not just attributed traffic from Facebook. It's normal that Facebook's numbers may be different from a third party’s, but if there's a very large discrepancy (or you don’t see any pixel traffic), something may be wrong.

After you've checked your total pixel fires, you should ensure your events are being reported correctly. If you have events on any of your web pages, you should see them in your Events tab below your traffic graph. Both Standard and Custom Events will show up on this tab. If you have the wrong Event enabled, or it’s set up on the wrong page, this will help you find it.

Events are case sensitive, so if you accidentally added fbq('track', 'viewcontent'); to one of your web pages instead of the correct standard event code fbq('track', 'ViewContent'); you'll see an event called viewcontent show up in the events tab instead (which will render as a custom event rather than a standard event), so you'll want to edit your pixel code on that page again to replace that code with the correct standard event code. Please note that PageView is the default event that the pixel fires on every page of your website (it's not a standard event).

Troubleshooting Pixel and Event Implementation

We recommend downloading the Facebook Pixel Helper to troubleshoot implementation problems. Keep in mind you have to be using the Chrome browser for it to work. Once the Pixel Helper is installed, a small icon will appear next to your address bar. Navigate to your website in your Chrome browser and click the Pixel Helper icon.

The pop-up will tell what pixels/events were found on the page, and whether they have loaded successfully. If you added standard events to your pixel code on certain pages, you'll need to complete a test conversion for each (ex. add an item to your cart to test an “AddToCart” event) in order to confirm that each event loads on the desired page or action. If your pixel's PageView event loads on every web page, and each of your standard events load successfully (on the desired pages only), you're ready to attach the Facebook pixel to your ads.

If the Pixel Helper tool displays errors or warnings on any of your pages, click Learn More to help resolve the issue. For a full list of possible Pixel Helper tool errors, warnings and recommendations, see our developers site.

In order to resolve most Pixel Helper errors you'll need to check the HTML code on the web page where you received the error. To check the HTML code, go to the desired web page and right-click on the screen, then select “Inspect” and search for your pixel ID (you can usually use “Control + F” or “Command + F” to bring up your browser's search bar).

• If you don't find the pixel ID anywhere in the code, it may have not been placed on that page. If you installed the pixel using a tag manager then you won't see the code on the actual web page, so you'll have to troubleshoot within your tag manager.
• If you do find the pixel ID, check the code carefully against your code in your pixel dashboard (under Actions > View Pixel Code) to make sure everything between the <script> and </script> tags is exactly the same and that the pixel wasn't placed in the middle of another code block on your web page. You should find 2 instances of your pixel ID on each page where you placed the pixel (one in the <script> portion of the code and one in the <no script> portion. If you find more than 2, it's likely that the code has been placed multiple times, so you can delete any additional instances.
• When troubleshooting standard event implementation, make sure the the event code (ex. fbq('track', 'Purchase', {value: '0.00', currency:'USD'}); for a Purchase event) is placed either:

  1. Directly between the “;” after the PageView event and the </script> tag, or;
  2. Directly below the entire base code (in which case you'll need to add <script> directly before the event code and </script> directly after the event code).

Troubleshooting Custom Conversions

One of the most common issues with custom conversion rules is when using the URL Equals option, as it will not count a conversion if someone lands on a version of the URL with any additional text beyond what is pasted into the URL field here (ex: UTM parameters, http vs. https, or even an extra “/” at the end).

To maximize your ability to track your custom conversion accurately, we suggest using URL Contains and pasting the minimum portion of the URL needed to distinguish this page from any other pages on your website (ex: Starting after “www” and ending before “.com”, “.org”).

Troubleshooting Ad Performance

One important thing to note in order track ad performance properly when using the Facebook pixel is that you'll need to customize your ads reporting columns in Ads Manager in order to show the most important data. By default, the Results column for a Website Conversions campaign will display the total number of events/conversions associated with your ads. That means if you have ViewContent, AddToCart and Purchase events on your website, the Results column will display the aggregate number of all these events, and the Cost column will display the cost per the total number of these events as well. If you really only care about the number of Purchases and cost per Purchase, you'll need to customize your columns to select “Purchase (Facebook Pixel)” and “Cost per Purchase (Facebook Pixel)."

If you've just transitioned from the old conversion pixel and are optimizing for conversions, you may experience a few days of decreased performance while the new pixel gathers the data needed to optimize sufficiently. Please review the Optimization section in the Conversion pixel transitioning guide for recommendations and best practices.

If you're optimizing for conversions and find that you're unable to spend your daily budget (due to under-delivery) and are seeing a high cost per conversion, there's a good chance your ads are not getting enough conversions to provide sufficient data to our delivery system in order to optimize (which needs about 25 conversions to start optimizing properly). If you set a target bid, you may also see delivery decrease if our system is unable to get conversions at the desired target bid. This is often due to having small or overlapping audiences, low bid to budget ratio, poor creative/targeting or high negative feedback. Learn more about conversion optimization.