Understanding Meta Attribution & Event Tracking in Marketer


At Marketer, we provide a direct connection to your Meta (Facebook) campaign data through your Meta Pixel. This integration makes it essential to ensure that your event data is tracked accurately in order to measure campaign performance correctly.

Ensuring Proper Event Tracking

To validate your event setup, go to Meta Events Manager. It's important to confirm that the following events are being tracked accurately across your site:

  • Page View
  • Product View
  • Add to Cart
  • Initiate Checkout
  • Purchase (the most critical event)

If any of these are missing or improperly configured, your ad performance reporting may be incomplete or inaccurate.


Why Your Meta Metrics May Differ from Shopify

You may notice that the results reported in Meta differ from what you see in your Shopify analytics. This is typically due to the different ways both platforms attribute conversions.

Meta Attribution: Direct vs. Indirect

  • Direct Attribution

Occurs when a user clicks directly on your ad and completes a purchase within the same session. Both Meta and Shopify will typically attribute this sale to the Meta campaign.

  • Indirect Attribution

Happens when Meta determines that your ad influenced a purchase—even if the user didn’t click the ad directly. For example, a user might see your ad on Instagram, then return later via a Google search or by typing your URL directly to complete the purchase. Meta may still attribute the sale to the campaign, based on its tracking systems.


Important:

Shopify does not register indirect attribution. It attributes a sale based only on the final click or session source that led directly to the purchase. This is why Meta and Shopify reports may not always match.


How Marketer Supports Meta Attribution

At Marketer, we understand the importance of both direct and indirect attribution. We trust Meta's systems to accurately determine when a customer was influenced by an ad, even if the conversion happened later or through a different source.

To help support comprehensive tracking, Marketer offers custom tracking options through the Integrations tab in the app. This allows you to align your tracking setup more closely with your business logic and attribution preferences.

Limitations of Meta Tracking

It’s also important to understand what Meta cannot see:

  • Meta cannot detect if a purchase was flagged as suspicious or fraudulent in Shopify or your internal systems.
  • Meta does not know if an order was later canceled, failed, or never actually processed.
  • Meta tracks based on the final URL event (such as a purchase confirmation page). If that event is triggered, Meta considers the conversion complete, regardless of whether the transaction was later reversed.

Always cross-check campaign results with your own internal data to validate purchase integrity.

Final Checklist

If your data appears inaccurate, follow these steps:

  1. Open Meta Events Manager.
  2. Confirm that your Pixel or Dataset is correctly installed on your domain.
  3. Verify that key events are firing properly during the user journey.
  4. Ensure that purchase events only fire on valid, completed transactions.