Facebook and Instagram ads learn from your sales. When someone buys, your Meta Pixel (and, ideally, the Conversions API) tells Meta, and Meta shows your ads to more people like them. If purchases aren't reaching Meta, your ads optimise for the wrong thing, and your reports show sales as zero even when you're making them.
It's one of the most common problems we see, and it's easy to check.
Step 1: Open Events Manager
In Meta Business Suite, go to Events Manager and choose your pixel (it may be called a dataset). Look at the Overview tab for the last 7 days.
Step 2: Check the four key events
A healthy store usually shows all of these, in this order of volume:
- PageView: someone opened a page
- ViewContent: someone viewed a product
- AddToCart: someone added a product to their cart
- Purchase: someone bought
If you see PageView but nothing below it, your pixel is installed but your store isn't sending shopping events.
Step 3: Look for these warning signs
- No events in the last 48 hours. The pixel may have been removed by a theme change, an app update or a cookie banner blocking it.
- Purchases but no add-to-carts. Usually means only the checkout is tracked.
- More purchases than add-to-carts. Usually means purchases are being counted twice, often because both a theme snippet and an app are sending them. Make sure each event is only sent once, or that the pixel and Conversions API share an event ID so Meta can remove duplicates.
- A different pixel ID on your site. Common after changing agencies or apps. Your store should send events to the pixel connected to your ad account.
Step 4: Use your platform's built-in connection
Shopify's Facebook & Instagram app, Wix's Facebook and Instagram integration, and the official Meta for WooCommerce plugin all set up the pixel and Conversions API together. Using one of them, and removing any old manual pixel code, fixes most problems.
Check it regularly, not once
Tracking breaks quietly. A theme update, a new app or a cookie banner change can stop events without any visible error on your site. A weekly glance at Events Manager, or an automatic check, catches it before you've spent a month of ad budget flying blind.