Ivanna Holubovska
AuthorBrowser tracking is becoming less reliable because of ad blockers, decreased cookie lifetime, and intelligent tracking prevention. The iOS 14 update made everything even more complicated. For these reasons, Facebook started encouraging all advertisers to move their tracking to the server-side and implement Facebook conversion API. With the Facebook CAPI, you can run tracking on the server-side or combine browser and server methods. If you decide to integrate Facebook Pixel and Facebook conversion API, these two methods will work together and make your tracking more accurate.
In this article, I want to show you how to set up a Facebook conversion API on BigCommerce. This method works for the Stencil theme and optimized one-page checkout. Recently, one of our clients asked to move all his Facebook events to the server-side. We were not able to find a pre-built solution and had to design everything from scratch.
To set up Facebook conversion CAPI on BigCommerce, you’ll need to do the following:
1. Set up Google Tag Manager Web container.
2. Send events and parameters to the data layer.
3. Move Facebook pixel from BigCommerce to Google Tag Manager Web container.
4. Set up Google Tag Manager Server Container.
5. Set up Facebook conversion API inside the Server Container.
Facebook recommends having both browser tracking and server tracking implemented. To prevent data duplication, you should set up event deduplication using the eventID method.
But Facebook Conversion API can work as a replacement for your standard pixel tracking. Though Facebook does not recommend using only server tracking, it may improve the page speed of your site.
Facebook recommends using FB pixel in parallel with FB CAPI. In this case, both data sources will send identical information to Facebook. And if one doesn’t work (for example, a pixel will be blocked by the ad blocker), the second one will pick up blocked data.
Your events need to send a unique event ID to Facebook to set up proper event deduplication. If an event with the same name and event ID is sent to Facebook within 5 minutes, the events will be deduplicated. In this case, Facebook will process web events and deduplicate server events.
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