Why and how you should add multiple Facebook pixels to your Shopify store

Facebook Pixel for Shopify lets you collect insights about site visitors so you can improve their experience. But how many Pixels do you need to optimise your site?

You simply can’t afford to ignore Facebook (and Instagram) ads as a powerful source of qualified traffic to your Shopify store. But how do you make sure you’re not wasting money on ads that don’t work?

Enter Facebook Pixel for Shopify

Facebook Pixel exists to help you target the right audience with the right products. It gathers performance data from your store and displays it in your Facebook Advertising dashboard. You can use this information to make informed decisions on what works and tailor your ad campaigns accordingly.

The pixel is also useful for creating Custom Audiences, based on actions people take on your website, like signing up to your mailing list or adding a product to cart. For example, if User A adds the “Joe Biden T-Shirt” product to their cart but doesn’t finish the purchase, you can remind them to do so directly on their social feed with a retargeting campaign.

How many Facebook Pixels do I need to add to my Shopify store?

Many Shopify owners make the mistake of setting up Facebook Pixel tracking without having given adequate thought to their goals, their target audience and the nature of their business.

While the new Facebook Business Manager allows you to add up to 100 pixels, the most successful e-commerce businesses create a single pixel for each type of audience they want to target. The reason is that the longer a Pixel is actively gathering data, the more effective your targeting can become.

So why add multiple Facebook Pixels to Shopify?

While using one Facebook Pixel might be enough to get you started, there are three legitimate reasons why you might want to add more Facebook Pixels to your Shopify store:

If you work with multiple stakeholders

One of the most useful use-cases for multiple Facebook Pixels is when you’re working with external third parties, such as an advertising agency. Your agency could then use their own Facebook Pixel to get data into their own Facebook Advertising account and use this to generate custom audiences to run Dynamic Product Ads.

For backup purposes

Unfortunately, Facebook’s automated flagging system might result in your advertiser account being disabled even if you didn’t break any of the company’s advertising policies. If this happens, you run the risk of losing months of useful retargeting data. Multiple Facebook Pixels can act as a contingency against this by backing up your store data into a separate ad account. This way, you don’t have to start from scratch all over again.

If you have several niche audiences

if your store targets very different audiences, using multiple unique Facebook Pixels makes sense. You can set up each Pixel to track certain e-commerce events and use these to create custom and lookalike audiences. For example, you can use one Pixel to track customers that are interested in a specific product category, one for Weekend Shoppers, and another one to track high-spenders or loyal returning customers. This allows you to segment your audience, run cross-promotions, and find upselling opportunities.

How to implement multiple Facebook pixels in Shopify

By default, Shopify only lets you add one Facebook pixel per store. There are a few ways to get around this limitation: manually hardcode it into the theme files or by using apps available on the Shopify store.

If you go for the manual option, you have to make sure to properly configure all standard and custom events as explained on the developer documentation page.

Some manual solutions include:

Google Tag Manager: After you add the standard Facebook Pixel via Shopify’s interface, you can use GTM to create more custom parameters for the extra pixels.

You should also make sure you get the help of someone with development experience to set up the event data layer properly.

The “addPixelId” method: Entrepreneurs are a tenacious bunch. One StackOverflow user claims to have found a technical solution and documented it on his blog. (Disclaimer: we have not tested this method and it might not work anymore since publication.)

While going the manual route might seem attractive to save money, there may be unexpected behaviours if you haven’t cleaned up your code well enough from older Pixels. This could generate misleading data and lead to less effective ads. A common warning you might be familiar with is the dreaded “multiple pixels with conflicting versions were detected”.

If you choose to try this anyway, you can use the official Facebook tool for troubleshooting Pixel issues. You can get the Facebook Pixel Helper plugin for Chrome to make sure everything is working properly.

Using Shopify apps to add multiple Facebook Pixels to Shopify

If you want to skip all the coding hassle, there are some apps such as MultiPixel, Trackify, and Vitals in the Shopify app store that do it for you.

Your Turn!

Have you worked with multiple Facebook Pixels on Shopify? What approach worked for you?