How to Confirm Your Facebook Pixel is Working

June 10, 2019
How to confirm your Facebook Pixel is tracking conversion events

Before you launch your ads on Facebook for the first time is always good to do one last check of a few things: your targeting is correct, your ads have no spelling or grammar errors, your budget is correct, and that your Facebook pixel is working. In this blog I’ll be going over a quick and easy method of checking to make sure your Facebook pixel is installed properly and indeed working.

The Facebook Pixel

The Facebook pixel is a snippet of html code that is placed on your website. This pixel allows Facebook to track and report what actions a user takes after click on a Facebook ad. If you are familiar with the Google Analytics tag, it works much like that. It’s important to have the Facebook pixel installed correctly so that you can accurately track conversions and other website events that you’ve deemed as important actions users may take on your site.

Ensuring your Facebook pixel is working

The first step to making sure you pixel is working is to make sure that the pixel is present on your page! If you’ve just added the HTML code to your website Facebook’s UI won’t show any traffic just yet. If that is the case you can download the Facebook pixel helper widget. Once you’ve installed the widget follow these steps to make sure it’s live on your website:

  1. 1. Go to your website.
  2. 2. Select the facebook pixel helper widget.
  3. 3. If the pixel is active you should see a message like this:
  4. 4. If you pixel is not active you’ll see a message like this:

The next thing to do would be to check if your conversion event is working. For this I’ll be focusing on a custom conversion event which tracks conversions when a user hits a specific thank-page URL.

  1. 1. Go to your thank-page URL
  2. 2. Open the Facebook pixel helper
  3. 3. If the Facebook pixel helper sees the pixel and the pixel ID matches that in your Ad account you are good to go!
  4. 4. If you do not see the pixel or a pixel with a different ID check your code or follow Facebook’s easy pixel set up guide.

Tracking is the most important part of advertising. By following these steps you’ll quickly be able to see if your Facebook pixel is working properly or not.