Tip: Shopify + Facebook Ads Conversions - Add Payment Info Event Versus Purchase Event

This is for Shopify owners who use the Facebook Pixel for conversion campaigns in their Shopify stores, and use the following:
PayPal
Apple Pay
​Amazon Payments

You might see a discrepancy in your data concerning purchases when optimizing for conversions that may drive up your ad costs.
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Your number of sales may not correlate with how many times the Purchase Event is fired by the Facebook Pixel.

To review, there are 4 main conversion events: View Page then Add to Cart then Checkout then Purchase.

Your goal as a Shopify owner is to get the shopper to the Purchase page event. That doesn't always happen when someone buys, however.

When a shopper uses PayPal, ApplePay, or Amazon Payments, an extra conversion event happens between Checkout and Purchase: The Add Payment Info event which looks like a Loading screen.

This happens because PayPal or whatever service gives you a new page from their website outside of Shopify where you log in to PayPal. When you log in, the transaction completes, and you get a "Thank You" page. 

Shoppers may exit out of the "Thank You" page without actually getting to the Purchase event. You still made the sale, but the Facebook Pixel does not capture it.

So if your data does not correlate with the sales you made, you may be driving up ad costs.

However, you still need to optimize and set your conversion goal to be Purchase event as that is what Facebook uses to gauge how likely a person will buy from you.

In short:
1. When a shopper uses Paypal, Amazon Payments, or Apple Pay to make a purchase, the "Add Payment Info" event is fired by the Facebook Pixel, which is an extra page.
2. A shopper will receive a "Thank You" page. Most shoppers will exit out of this page and not get to the "Purchase" event.
3. You still need to optimize and set your goal for the "Purchase" event.