I’m running into a tracking issue I hope someone can help with.
Meta ads pixels are working properly.
Meta ads events are being passed all the way to add to cart to Google analytics. “Initiated check-out” and “Purchase” events are not being passed on to Google analytics or Shopify.
Those events only happen inside the Shopify cart. Cart events are being passed trough the Facebook & Instagram plug-in and Meta is receiving them.
Why isn’t Shopify and Google analytics not receiving those events?
you should note that this is a common error. i checked some other threads as well and users have faced this issue where the add to cart event is firing properly, but other events such as ‘initiate checkout’ and ‘purchase’ aren’t.
first, please note that many times, issues also happen because of the facebook and instagram app. many users have complained about tracking issues with the app even in the past.
second, these issues related to GA4 tracking mostly happen because GA4’s tracking depend a lot on browser-based scripts.
when browser-based scripts are being used, your tracking can get affected due to:
Ad blockers
Browser privacy settings that block cookies and user consent
Shopify’s checkout limitations
as per my research, one solution to this issue can be server-side tracking with the Conversions API.
i will suggest you to try an app like Facebook pixels by AdNabu. it supports server-side tracking. moreover, using the app, you can track multiple events such as purchase, add to cart, begin checkout, view cart, search, view content, and add payment. and the app also has a shopify-embedded marketing analytics dashboard where you will get to see all tracking data with ease.
you will get all the detailed analytics for all events in Meta Events Manager and with a Shopify dashboard. you can skip the hassle of tracking via GTM.
To better observation, could you please share your website URL? I’d be happy to review it.
If you are using facebook and Instagram app to track the events for pixel then it could be technical bug. As you are not getting the checkout and purchase event you would need to configure GTM script on custom pixel.
To fix the meta pixel issue to track the all conversion events you would need to configure GTM script on custom pixel and configure the tracking via Google Tag manager GTM.
