Hey all, so here’s a problem I’ve been having for some time.
We have a campaign on Meta created on October 22nd. According to Meta’s platform, a day after, on October 23rd of this year, the ad generated 27 conversions. However, this is incorrect, as our Shopify website only registered 7 actual payments on the same date. As it was created on October 22nd, it doesn’t appear to be an attribution setup issue on Meta. The only difference in Shopify is that manual sales were processed as Draft Orders this day, which are created directly in Shopify without any link to Meta. We suspect that these Draft Orders are somehow being included in Meta Ads reporting, as they seem to be passing from Shopify, leading to highly inaccurate data. We’ve noticed that other Shopify stores are experiencing the same issue.
To continue on with this at a micro level as opposed to a macro level, I’ve seen the same thing.
I’ve identified on a day when a single order was processed (a draft order), that Meta claimed it as an attributable sale using a 1-day view attribution method.
Now this seems sneaky. As the order was put through manually for a customer over the phone, the customer had no agency in the transaction. Their business email and phone number was included in the draft order details.
My question is, what of the below appears to have happened?
Meta is being sneaky and over-attributing for an order that it can not reconcile to an actual user via the pixel?
Meta has been smart enough to take the email and/or phone detail of the customer from the draft order, correlate it to a Meta account via the pixel, and identify that they viewed an ad on the same day?
Meta has tracked the owner of the business, who put the draft order through, via the Meta pixel as seeing an ad the same day the order was put through?
Do you know how you can exclude draft orders from conversion tracking (when using Facebook & Instagram Sales Channel integration for tracking or GTM)? So far I’ve no luck with either Shopify or Meta support resolving this
Thanks for this! I can’t see anything in the above that shows being able to exclude Draft Orders from the Meta tracking using GTM, are you able to expand on this? Thanks
There is no way currently to solve this. I’m working on a work around right now to import data from multiple Ads platforms and Shopify to solve this. Will post link in a few days.
I tried from A couple of my clients Shopify websites and meta ad managers. I created a draft order there. but meta did not attribute the order as conversion. Not event pixel tracked the conversions in test event.
I configured their Facebook pixel and conversion API through Google Tag Manager GTM.
Thanks that’s good to hear. In the GTM set up was there anything to had to exclude to ensure Draft Orders weren’t tracked?
I think what’s happening for everyone is whoever is placing a Draft Order is then seeing an Ad within 24 hours, and it’s being picked up as a 1 day View Through Conversion.
It sounds like the issue stems from Meta Ads incorrectly attributing Draft Orders as conversions, even though they weren’t linked to the actual ad campaigns. Draft Orders in Shopify may be counted as sales by Meta’s tracking system, leading to inflated conversion data. This could be due to Meta’s reporting algorithms picking up on order status changes or event triggers, regardless of whether the orders were completed through Meta. To resolve this, you may need to filter out Draft Orders or adjust your Shopify and Meta tracking integration to ensure only completed sales are reported as conversions.
Sam, would you mind breaking down how you accomplish this? Our Meta Ads Account is currently counting all draft order submissions as Meta conversions and we’re stuck on trying to remedy this. Meta and Shopify support have been of no assistance.
I actually got some helpful information from Meta today. They confirmed that if you are using the Meta app (Facebook & Instagram Sales Channel app) for Pixel and CAPI tracking then CAPI will share Draft Orders and tracking them as purchases. It’s most likely that these are tracked as 1 day view through conversions when the whoever inputted the draft order sees an Ad within 24 hours.
They provided the below solutions. I haven’t implemented them yet, but hopefully will be helpful to some of you.
Unfortunate that it took this long to get some kind of options. I ended up removing 1 day view through at the adset level and that solved it, but ads tanked. Likely because of all of the social proof on the ads got reset ?
In regards to the last 3 steps:
1.) No clue how to do this, but this would be ideal IMO.
2.) GTM is super clunky and does not always fire correctly.
3.) I spoke to Elevar and they could not solve this.
I like the idea of excluding internal IP addresses though. Do you think that IP address would ever change randomly? Any thoughts how well this would work?
I assume if you set this up via Google Tag Manager, you would want to disconnect your other connection? I currently have mine connected via the Shopify app to connect products and collections so wouldn’t want to mess this up.
