Got burned by a bad tracking pixel at a Shopify store in Austin

I was at a client meeting in Austin last month and their Facebook ads manager was bragging about a 5x ROAS. I asked to see the backend and the pixel was firing double on cart views. They had been running ad sets for 6 weeks based on that bad data and had overspent by like $2,000. Has anyone else caught a tracking setup that looked good but was actually broken?

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gavin3651mo ago

Did you check if the pixel was also counting the confirmation page as a separate cart view? That exact issue cost me about a grand before I caught it, I just set up a Google Tag Manager preview mode to catch double fires in real time. Throwing in a simple event deduplication rule fixed the whole mess immediately.

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claire_young761mo ago

Gotta say, that hit close to home because I went through the exact same thing last quarter and it drove me insane. I had cart views showing up as double what they actually were and it totally screwed my ROAS numbers for weeks. Your idea about using GTM preview mode is solid, I wish I had thought of that earlier instead of just guessing at what was happening. The deduplication rule is a lifesaver once you get it set up right. Seriously, props for sharing that because it can save someone a lot of headache and wasted ad spend.

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