Meta pixel for WhatsApp conversions

This is what closes the loop with your ads. Up to here your agent sells over WhatsApp; from here on Meta finds out who actually bought, and with that information it refines who it shows your ads to. The dashboard is in Spanish, so its buttons and labels are named here as you will see them on screen, with the English in parentheses the first time. Meta’s own screens appear in whatever language your Meta account uses; the screenshots are from the Spanish interface.

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A pixel without a website

The classic pixel is a piece of code that lives on a website and tells Meta every time someone buys. In a WhatsApp funnel there is no website and no browser, so that code doesn’t exist. What there is, is this: when a customer matches one of your rules (they reach a chapter of the sales playbook, or your agent records a sale), DarkFunnels sends Meta a notification (Meta calls it an “event”) through its Conversions API, the channel Meta offers for notifications that don’t come from a website. Along with the notification travel the data Meta needs to recognize the person: the phone number, the first name, the last name and the country, first converted into a fingerprint that cannot be reversed. Meta doesn’t receive that data in the clear. What does not travel is the conversation. What it’s good for:

• Meta can optimize your campaigns for purchases and not only for conversations started, when it enables that objective on your account (further down we tell you what that depends on).
• You can normally build audiences of real buyers and lookalike audiences based on them.
• In Ads Manager you see purchases next to each ad, not just chats.

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Before you start: the three things to know

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What you need to get from Events Manager

Three pieces of information, all three from the same place: Meta’s Events Manager (at business.facebook.com/events_manager). If your ad account already has a pixel, skip to step 2. To get there, from Ads Manager hover over the icon bar on the left: the menu expands with the names and Events Manager is at the bottom.

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Connect it in DarkFunnels

So far Meta knows you exist. You still haven’t told it when to notify it: that’s what the rules are for, and without rules nothing is sent, except the test.

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The rules: when each event is sent

Each rule is a sentence: when a customer in this funnel does such a thing, Meta receives such an event. For almost every business two are enough: records a sale → Purchase and the chapter where the customer has already shown interest → Lead. The details worth knowing:

• Chapter 1 can’t be chosen. Every contact is born there. Rules start at 2.
• The rule points at the chapter number, not at its name. If you reorder or delete chapters in the playbook, the rule keeps pointing at the same number: the dashboard reminds you of this when you create it, and it’s worth reviewing your rules after touching the playbook.
• A jump skips the ones in between. If your agent moves the customer from chapter 2 to 4, the rule for 3 doesn’t fire.
• Each arrival is sent once. The system records what it has already delivered and doesn’t repeat it. If the customer leaves the chapter and comes back in later, that’s another arrival and another notification goes out.
• If two rules on the same pixel match the same occurrence, the one you created first wins. If you have two pixels, each one sends its own notification.
• Moving the customer between chapters by hand also counts. If you drag a customer in the Capítulos (Chapters) view of Clientes or change their chapter from their profile, the rule fires just as if your agent had done it.
• A rule can’t be edited. To change it, remove it with the wastebasket icon on its row and create the new one.
• Each pixel allows up to 50 rules.
• Voiding a sale doesn’t subtract anything. The Conversions API has no refund notification and doesn’t accept subtracting a purchase: the Purchase already sent stays.

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If you have an old «chapter → Compra» rule

It used to be possible to send Compra (Purchase) on reaching a chapter. Today the dashboard no longer allows it, because that purchase reaches Meta without the amount of the sale. If you type «Purchase» as a custom event in a chapter rule, the dashboard rejects it with «Compra necesita el monto de la venta…» (Purchase needs the sale amount…). If your pixel already had a rule like that, it keeps working (and sending purchases with no amount) until you delete it. You’ll see it with this notice in red underneath: Do it in that order. If you try to create the sale rule first (or any other one that sends Compra on recording a conversion in that same funnel), the dashboard won’t let you and warns you: «Este embudo ya manda Compra al llegar a un capítulo. Borra esa regla antes de crear Compra al registrar una venta, o Meta contará dos compras.» (This funnel already sends Purchase on reaching a chapter. Delete that rule before creating Purchase on recording a sale, or Meta will count two purchases.)

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What each send tells you

Two things on the tab tell you whether the pixel is working: the Cobertura del píxel (Pixel coverage) line, at the top, and Últimos envíos (Recent sends), on each pixel. You don’t have to ask anyone for a technical log.

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Pixel coverage

As soon as you have a pixel, the Manda tus ventas reales a Meta card adds a line like this one: Cobertura del píxel: 8 de 10 ventas de los últimos 7 días llegaron a Meta con su monto. (Pixel coverage: 8 of 10 sales from the last 7 days reached Meta with their amount.) It counts the sales your agent recorded in the last 7 days, across all your funnels, and how many of them reached Meta as a Purchase with their amount. If your agent didn’t sell that week, it tells you so: «tu agente no registró ventas en los últimos 7 días» (your agent didn’t record any sales in the last 7 days). If you see a dash (—), it couldn’t be calculated at that moment: open the tab again later. If the two numbers don’t match, the difference is usually in one of these cases:

• The funnel of those sales has no sale rule. That funnel needs Registra una venta → Compra (Purchase) (or Cualquier conversión → Compra).
• The pixel was paused, or didn’t exist yet, when the sale was made. Those sales count in the total, but they weren’t sent and won’t be. The figure catches up on its own as the days go by.
• The send came out Omitido (Skipped) or Falló (Failed). The reason is in Últimos envíos.
• The sale rule sends another event (a custom one, for example): it reaches Meta, but this line only counts Purchases.
• The Purchase went out through an old chapter rule. That one carries no amount and doesn’t count.
• The sale was recorded without an amount or without a currency. It reaches Meta as a Purchase, but without an amount, and this line doesn’t count it.

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Recent sends

Click Últimos envíos on the pixel’s card: you’ll see the last 20 notifications, one row each with its status, the event, where it came from (capítulo (chapter), conversión (conversion) or prueba (test)), the reason if something went wrong, and the time. To close it, Ocultar envíos (Hide sends). Failures with Meta are not retried automatically: a revoked token is not going to start working again by insisting. That’s why the error stays visible here instead of spinning silently. On Meta’s side, the activity shows up in the dataset’s Overview tab, and Meta warns it can take up to 30 minutes to show it.

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The ad click

When a customer messages you from a “Send WhatsApp message” ad, their message usually carries, hidden, the ad they came from and a click identifier. We store it alongside the contact without you having to do anything, and if the same customer comes back through another ad, the latest one is kept. You won’t see the click identifier on their profile: the send to Meta uses it. With that there are two ways of telling Meta what happened:

• By phone number, the usual one. Meta receives the fingerprint of the number and matches it to the person; if that person saw or tapped your ads, it attributes it with its usual rules. The customer needs to write with a visible number and with a recognized country. If they arrive with a hidden number and didn’t come from an ad either, the notification is skipped. If they came from an ad, it goes out anyway, but without the WhatsApp Business account ID (the one in the next point) the click doesn’t travel: Meta only receives the fingerprints of the first name, the last name and the country, and an internal identifier, so it’s hard for Meta to match it.
• By the exact click, if, when creating the pixel, you also save the WhatsApp Business account ID. That ID belongs to numbers registered on the WhatsApp Business Platform (Meta’s official API), and it’s visible in Business settings → Accounts → WhatsApp accounts.

In DarkFunnels your number is connected by scanning a QR code or with a code, not through that API. That’s why you normally won’t have that ID: leave it empty and the notifications will go by phone number, as explained above. If your number is also on that platform and you save the ID, the card shows the Atribución por clic (Click attribution) badge: the notification for a customer who arrived from an ad goes out marked as a messaging conversion and Meta hangs it off the specific ad; the notification for everyone else goes by phone number. In that mode, Lead travels with the name Meta uses for messaging, and Meta understands a shorter list of events there: an appointment or a custom event may not count. The ad each customer came from is also used by the Anuncios (Ads) page, which brings together what you spend on Meta with what happened in your chats. If you don’t see it in your Ventas menu, it isn’t available on your account yet. It’s covered in Connect your Meta ads.

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In Ads Manager

For purchases to appear in the campaign results, the ad has to read from the same dataset. Edit the click-to-WhatsApp ad and scroll down to the Tracking block, below the welcome template: tick Website events and check that the dataset shown is the one you connected here. Click Publish. The real notifications appear in the dataset’s Overview and in the campaign reports later, with Meta’s delay. If you’ve just connected, give it a few hours before concluding that something is broken.

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Common problems

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What the pixel doesn’t do

So you don’t get a surprise:

• It doesn’t send the sales you enter yourself on the customer’s profile (from Clientes or Conversaciones), even if the AI filled in the form for you. Nor the sale the system records on its own when an order your agent didn’t record in the chat is charged: for Meta, what counts is what the agent recorded.
• It doesn’t subtract anything when a sale is voided.
• It doesn’t send notifications more than 7 days old, nor while the pixel is paused or has no rules.
• It doesn’t pass Meta the content of the conversations. What does travel: the fingerprints of the phone number, the first name and the last name, the country and an internal contact identifier; on conversions, the amount, the currency, the product code and the order identifier, when there are any; and, if you use click attribution, the click identifier and the one for your WhatsApp Business account, which are Meta’s data, not yours.
• It doesn’t move money and doesn’t touch your campaigns or your ads: it only sends notifications to Meta.

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And now

Message your agent from another phone (with the number visible, and with the test code already removed if you don’t want it to come out as a test), let it take you to your rule’s chapter and look at Últimos envíos: that’s the honest test. When your agent starts selling, the Cobertura del píxel line will tell you how many of those sales reached Meta. If the ad reads from that dataset, in a few hours the real purchases start appearing next to your ads.