This article goes through common errors seen in Meta's Events Manager
Events Manager is an automated alert system that generates automatic messages to notify you when any data falls outside of the norms of what Facebook is expecting. When you receive an alert, it’s a reminder to double check the install. 95% of the time when we run a close inspection, there are no concerning issues found.
Common Meta Events Manager Errors
- New Domain Sending Data
- Invalid Key Match Parameter
- Potentially Violating Personal Data
- External Id Matching Errors
- Missing Value Parameters
- Redundant Purchase Event
New Domain Sending Data
This simply means that Facebook is now getting data from the Pop6serve.com server and it’s letting you know. This is not concerning and can be ignored.
Invalid Key Match Parameter
This means that Facebook tried to match the data in a payload and ran into an issue. Because we track data across sessions and try to stitch this together into a single user experience, occasionally we share Facebook session data (fbp) that has expired. If we send 100,000 events without issue and send a single event with an expired fbp cookie, this flag will show up. This is not concerning because it happens with a very low incidence. Additionally, it is least concerning when it occurs with upper-funnel events like PageView and/or ViewContent events.
Potentially Violating Personal Data
This flag is notifying you of a real problem, however this has nothing to do with Popsixle. The standard Facebook pixel scrapes info from the UTM key-value pairs in every URL that loads on your site. Occasionally the keys will indicate that the UTM contains personal information, which is something that can create legal risk for your business. However, Popsixle is a server side technology and isn’t tied to these UTMs - all of the data Popsixle processes and sends Facebook is first de-identified so there is a 0% chance that Popsixel can produce this error.
External Id Matching Errors
This means that Facebook isn’t successfully able to match browser and pixel events on the External ID parameter. Matching on External ID is a secondary process, after first trying to match in Event ID or fbp. If the match can’t be made, it simply means not of all your data is getting stitched together 100% of the time. Given we pass fbp 90-95% of the time, this is not cause for concern - simply an automated notification that two sets of external IDs were used. You can dismiss this alert without need for alarm.
Missing Value Parameters
Anytime we send a ViewContent, AddToCart or Purchase Event, there should be a monetary value associated with the event.
If you receive an alert indicating that the Values are missing, this is worth letting us know about. Most likely it happened as a one-off and is not a sign of a major issue, however our team will do a deep dive to ensure your install is working as expected.
Redundant Purchase Event
This is an error worth bringing to our attention. While most of the time this is caused by Shopify apps like Bold and Recharge that enable cross-selling, up-selling as part of the checkout process, we do want to do an account health check if you’re seeing this event.
General Note:
Something important to remember about Events Manager is that it is sharing information about all the data that arrives at the front door of Facebook’s system. It doesn’t tell you what data gets dropped and what data gets accepted. It provides some scores around event deduplication, but it doesn’t remove deduplicated data from the event counts or any views.
Most customers start using Popsixle because they’ve had signal loss issues due to iOS 14. This is when a majority of the data your pixel receives ends up getting dropped due to iOS14 opt-outs. The number one thing that Popsixle helps with is sending compliant, 1st-party data directly from your website - these events don’t get dropped.
At this time, our software cannot prevent all Events Manager errors from happening. We believe that having an acceptably low rate of errors is better than not having Popsixle and having major signal loss issues.
If you are uncomfortable with the errors you are seeing, we can change your install structure a few different ways:
- We can install Popsixle on its own, new pixel. This eliminates any possibility of event duplication. But this also means you have to create new ad campaigns that are configured to the new pixel.
- You can choose to turn off your standard Shopify-CAPI connection to prevent two sets of server events from being processed. To do this, log into your Shopify shop admin panel. Go to the Facebook Sales Channel > Settings > Share Data and downgrade the level of data sharing. Enhanced and Maximum both include CAPI server events, so choose the Standard level of data sharing to turn off the Shopify-CAPI connection