Meta Pixel Purchase & Conversion Tracking with GTM

Last Modified on February 18, 2024

Is your Meta Pixel optimized to track conversions separately from regular events?

Your conversions are the most important events you can track on your website. However, if you’re not using the Meta Pixel’s Purchase Tracking feature, you could be missing out on essential conversion data.

In our previous guides, we have set up our Meta Base Tracking Pixel and Custom Event Tracking. Now, we need to tell Meta what to optimize for.

That’s why we need to set up Meta Pixel Conversion Tracking, also called Purchase Tracking in Meta Ads. Thus, we will set up Meta Pixel Conversion Tracking and transfer the value of our conversion to Meta.

🚨 Note: If you’re new to Google Tag Manager, check out our in-depth GTM tutorial.

An overview of what we’ll cover in this guide:

• The Purchase Event Explained
• How to Set Purchase Amount Dynamically in GTM
• Creating a Custom Conversion
• Submit Changes and Publish

So let’s dive in.

The Purchase Event Explained

Welcome back to our demo shop. In our last guide, we have installed our Meta Base Pixel, which you must have installed to pick up other interactions.

I re-installed the Pageview and Add To Cart events when users click the Add to Cart button.

Now, a crucial thing for Meta Ads is missing – purchase tracking. Go to Set up and then click Manually Install the Code Yourself.

We have already installed this Meta Base Pixel code on our page, and if you click Continue, you have the custom events.

For Meta Pixel conversion tracking, we want to select the Purchase event. For the Purchase event, you deploy the tracking code.

How to Set Purchase Amount Dynamically in GTM?

If you have a 99-dollar conversion value and USD currency, it will make your data much better. The currency is usually not changing but sometimes could be dynamic as well.

Thus, not all of our purchases should be marked as 99 dollars. You would need to insert this dynamically with the help of Google Tag Manager. So, to give you an example, let’s go to our demo shop and buy a product.

In any online store, you would land on an order received page or a thank you page, where you would see how much you have spent on your order.

This 342 dollars is the amount that we want to send to Meta and dynamically fill into the event.

How can we get the amount into Google Tag Manager dynamically? There are different methods, and we have discussed them in our guide on Conversion Values.

The most robust way is to build a custom data layout.

Now, since I’m here on a Woocommerce store, I’ve installed a plugin by Thomas Geiger, which is the Google Tag Manager for WordPress. This plugin will fill the data layer for you automatically if you are on a website.

We need to enter the preview and debug mode to see the data layer and where the information is. To do this, click the Preview button.

So let’s do that and then go through another conversion. Once I’m back on the thank you page, I can look into my data layer and see how it was filled with values.

In our case, we have this data layer push, the gtm4wp.orderCompletedEEC. You can note that the transactionTotal resembles the total amount bought by the user.

You also have a transactionCurrency here, which you could use if you had different currencies in your store. In our case, the currency does not change, so I won’t pull this from the data layer.

Create Data Layer Variable

I will try to pull the transaction total from the data layer. To do this, I will build a variable in Google Tag Manager.

Variables are like placeholders, so you can build them dynamically to pull them from places like the data layer. I will Choose variable type as a Data Layer Variable. It will allow me to access the information from the data layer.

Give this variable a name. We have named it as dlv-transactionTotal. The only configuration needed is the Data Layer Variable Name.

That is the key that we see in the Javascript object. So in our case, it will be transactionTotal. Click on Save. Now, it is available in the Google Tag Manager as a variable.

Set Up FB Purchase Event Tag

What does that mean? And where can we use them?

We can go to the next step and copy our JavaScript code.

<script>
fbq('track', 'Purchase', {
value: 99,
currency: "USD",
});
</script>

We then implement this as a New Tag. Here, we will select a Custom HTML tag.

Give the tag a name. For the HTML code, paste the JavaScript code that you had copied.

Now, we need to customize this because we don’t want all our products to result in 99 dollars once this fires.

So, we will dynamically insert our variable, which can be done with two curly brackets. This opens up a menu with all your different variables in here.

You can click on our dlv-transactionTotal, and that should be replaced dynamically with whatever is in the data layer.

Create Conversion Trigger

Next, we can build a trigger. We would want to deploy that on our final checkout page. Thus, we could look at the URL and deploy this on our order-received page if that is in the URL.

Click the plus sign ( + ) here and create a new trigger.

We will fire this on the pageview tag of our thank you page and name this pv – Thank You.

Now, this will be the Page View tag.

But this trigger will only fire on Some Page Views, where the Page URL contains our order-received. Let’s Save the trigger.

Testing

We’re almost done! Now, we need to deploy and test our Tag.

Save our Meta Purchase Pixel.

Now, Refresh our page.

Let’s go through another conversion. Here, when we get to our Order received page, we see that our Fb – Event – Purchase tag has fired.

Now, in our Meta Pixel Helper, we see that Purchase information was transferred with the value of 45.00.

It corresponds dynamically to the Checkout total inserted through our variable. Thus, this works as expected.

Let’s move over to our Meta Analytics, and go into the Event Debugging. Again, we see an Event Purchase that was fired with a value of 45.

Creating a Custom Conversion

Now, on Meta, we could use this for our Custom Conversions. Thus, you could create a New Custom Conversion.

For this, click Custom Conversions → Create Custom Conversion in your Meta Pixel.

Here, choose Purchase Event as a Custom Conversion.

Once this is set up, you can get columns filled that correspond to the conversion value of your campaigns.

For example, if you have a campaign in the Ads Manager, you should be able to see the actual conversion value in a column that you can add to your Ads account.

Go to Ads Manager →  Add other columns and select Total Conversion Value.

Thus, this column should be filled with the amount that is transferred later on. This will give you some more data on how many clicks you received and how much money you made in the end. So, you will have a meaningful dataset in your account.

Submit Changes and Publish

Now don’t forget that this is currently running on only our browser. We still need to deploy this as a version so that the Tag will fire for all users. To do that, you can click the Submit button.

Now, enter a Version Name and Publish this to all your users so it is live on your website. Thus, this is how you set up Meta Pixel Conversion Tracking for purchases.

FAQ

Summary

Alright, so there you have it! That is how you can set up Meta Pixel conversion tracking for various user actions with the help of Google Tag Manager. In this guide, we learned how to set it up, particularly for Purchase tracking. 

To build a higher quality audience in your Meta Ads, you can delay Meta Pixel and eliminate bounced users.

Are you tracking your purchase & conversion events? Let us know in the comments below!