Facebook has finally released it’s first major pixel update. We were reporting on it since last week, but I think is now safe to say that it’s available for all of us. We made a short video with the new events as they can be found on our site. You can check them too if you have Pixel Helper Chrome Extension installed. I recommend you test these new events on your website as well.
As you can see, we have several events fired on our website. Some of them are Facebook default, some are added by us:
Custom Events:
- The GeneralEvent – is added by PixelYourSite plugin on every page and it helps to build Custom Audiences – super-useful, we use it for most of our strategies
- Scroll events – we have a few scroll events set to fire on 20% and 50% (some only on product pages). We successfully use these events to retarget specific engaged custom audiences.
Facebook Pixel Default Events:
- PageView – this is an old one, fired on every page since the pixel was launched.
- Microdata – NEW. A new event that Facebook now fires on every page, pulling Schema.org and OpenGraph data.
- SubscribedButtonClick – NEW. A new event that tracks each click on your site. Parameters include formFeatures, buttonText, and buttonFeatures
As you can see, the new events after this update are Microdata and SubscribedButtonClick.
Remember, placing the specific event where you actually need it will still be a highly valuable signal, removing any guessing and potential errors.
How to Use Them
These events are not available (yet?) for Custom Audiences or Custom Conversions. It’s possible that they will be integrated into Facebook Analytics since they collect important info about what your visitors are doing on your site.
It’s not completely clear what plans Facebook has for these particular events, but it looks like they are committed to transforming their pixel into an even more powerful tool.
Do You Want to Track Clicks?
Since is not clear how Facebook is going to use these events, we decided to implement our own click tracking event. Here’s an article on how to track (and use) clicks on your website
14 Responses
Showing up on both my websites now as of this morning. Wasn’t showing last night.
What can we do with Microdata? I’m guessing this new change will also mean they will bring back the ‘Time Spent on Site’ option that they tested out a year ago. It looks like the testing then failed and it didn’t go out to everyone. I wonder if these changes now mean that they’ll hopefully be able to get that working again properly. Exciting times. I can imagine it will open up a whole new range of features in the ad manager soon over the coming months!!!
I think the new SubscribedButtonClick is killing my website. I started getting reports of performance issues (it’s javascript heavy, lots of clicks involved) about 3 days ago. Is it possible to disable it?
Have you known how to disable it? I have the same trouble.
Question about the schema. Does FB have a preferred format? eg json-ld, microdata?
Am not finding any documentation on this.
Anecdotally the sites I’m seeing that FB seems to pick up are using microdata.
This then creates a problem if you’re optimising your site for G, as G prefers json-ld for a lot of things
Thoughts?
Facebook Pixel will extract microdata, open graph, and meta tags, but it seems to be not getting the json-ld, I’ve been trying to figure this out with no luck.
My concern is whether or not the new events are again loading the fbq(‘init’) and the function that loads the //connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js script. If that is happening, it could cause double-firing of other event tags.
No, they are not loading the fbq(‘init’) part again.
We’re seeing an increase of Facebook Pixel errors in trackjs, including the double initing on some older browsers. The Facebook Pixel team and their QA counterparts are pretty new to javascript – for example they were using ES6 Set without doing any babel transforms a few months ago (it was fixed when reported) – this is such a facepalming mistake that I don’t have much faith in the correctness of such a major change.
I am very excited to see the new changes and features and many other reports segment in facebook ad manager I have tried luck with JS with my developer but no luck so far. please share the solution if someone has it for Shopify.
Hi there, I’m trying to use a facebook pixel as a “product catalog source” without any success, I have done and met all the requirements, but the pixel is not available to select as source. Do you know anybody that could install the pixel as a catalog source? I have posted a question here in stackoverflow… https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51428659/how-to-add-products-to-facebook-catalog-using-a-pixel?noredirect=1#comment89879539_51428659
Any help in this issue will be welcome 😀
What does Microdata Automatically Detected? The button is not ticked and not color green. it is a blue flash/lightning button.
Hey Jana I’m having the same issue (Microdata Automatically Detected) in Blue Lightning. Not sure if I should be worried about it. How did you resolve yours?
Hello, can I ask a question, I have a site, it has some button use preventDefault, but after intergrate with facebook pixels codes, it is break, and throw `unable to preventDefault inside passive event listener invocation`, I copy the facebook code in my local, and debug to find after comment this line sumbit function it works fine. https://gist.github.com/sunderls/dfd5293a8b8f24a4ef37189a1d8c1b46#file-fbevents-js-L480,
I used `fbq(‘set’, ‘autoConfig’, false, ‘639998956532516’)` to avoid Microdata and subscribedbuttonclick,
and use `fbq.disablePushState = true;` to avoid overwrite history behavior.
but the problem still exists.
have you guys met this before?
if you had, can you give me some help, thanks you very much, I had search lots of site, really appreciate
Such plugins are very helpful and collect accurate information for us. Truly needed something that could collect the audience and fetch theirs details as well so that we know where we are going wrong or right.