Facebook Pixel Helper Tutorial – What is it & How to use it?

When you are doing Facebook advertising, Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome Extension is the ultimate must have chrome extension you should use every day to make sure that your Facebook Pixel is working correctly.

In this tutorial, we are going to explain everything you have to know about using Facebook Pixel Helper. We will show you all the functionalities it offers and how you can take advantage of them. We will also answer some of the most frequently asked questions related to Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome Extension.

What is the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome Extension?

Facebook Pixel Helper is a Chrome extension developed by Facebook to help you troubleshoot or check the Facebook Pixels that are currently deployed on your website. By using Pixel Helper you can also get more information about Facebook standard and custom events and custom conversions that were triggered on the website such as what values were sent to Facebook and what errors prevent the Pixel from sending the right information to Facebook.

You can download and install the Pixel Helper chrome extension by clicking here.

You can watch a video tutorial on Facebook Pixel Helper as well:

How to use Facebook Pixel Helper?

Once you installed the Pixel Helper Chrome Extension you should see it on the top right corner. So, without further hesitation, open your website and you can see if the Pixel Helper can detect the Pixel code on your website as the Pixel Helper will turn blue and green number will also appear the Pixel Helper icon:

Even if you didn’t customize the Pixel codes yet, you should be able to see at least a basic Pageview event if you installed the Pixel the right way.

If the Pixel Helper couldn’t find any Pixel on the website, the Pixel Helper icon won’t turn blue as you can in this picture:

If at least one Facebook Pixel code is detected on the website, you can click on the Pixel Helper Icon and get more information about them. In the following screenshot, you can see that there are three Pixel codes placed on the website, and all of them fired the Pageview Pixel event without any issues:

The white checkmark on the green circle indicates that custom or standard Pixel events have been fired. Two Facebook Pixels also detected microdata on the website, that is why you can see the number 5 in the upper right corner on the Pixel Helper icon.

Facebook Pixel Helper Standard Event Explanation

The easiest way to explain the things we can see on the Pixel Helper is via an example. This ViewContent event has been fired on mvmtwatches.com website.

(By the way, that is a great way to learn the Facebook Pixel and see advanced implementations of the Facebook Pixel by always checking the Pixel Helper on other websites and see what kind of Pixel events fired on the page and what parameters they send in to Facebook).

As you can see, first you can see what customer parameter were sent to Facebook with the ViewContent event:

Custom Parameters Sent via Pixel Helper

Then as they also enabled Facebook advanced matching for better tracking, you can see that they also send in first and last name, phone number and zip code. (of course, this data is hashed, so you don’t have to worry about user privacy)

Advanced Matching Parameters Sent

And finally, you can get more information also about the event in general. Pixel Helper also shows you how the Pixel event was set up (in this case, manually), how long it took to load the event (if it takes too much time, the tracking will be inaccurate), where the code is located and you can even see the Pixel code that sent in the custom parameters by clicking on the Show button as we did it below:

Event Info – Facebook Pixel Helper

Pixel Helper to detect implementation errors

When the Pixel Helper is detecting some errors, it can indicate it in two main ways. If the Pixel event was sent in but there were some errors the yellow or the red exclamation mark icon will shop up with a warning:

As you can see in this example, the warning is triggered by the value parameter not formatted correctly and Facebook won’t be able to interpret this data in this format.

If you see something like this, you should make sure that the error is corrected as soon as possible, so your FB ads reporting is not messed up and Facebook can optimize your ads also the right way.

Other common errors you can see on Facebook Pixel Helper:

• Pixel Took Too Long to Load
• Pixel is not paired with a product catalog
• You Have Opted Out of Tracking
• Invalid Pixel ID
• Pixel activated multiple times
• Pixel did not load
• Pixel Advanced Matching

You can get more information about these Facebook Pixel Helper error messages and how you can troubleshoot them here. (keep in mind that sometimes issues that the Pixel Helper identifies as errors are actually not errors, Facebook Pixel Helper is not perfect in identifying what an error is.)

Automatically Detected Information – Pixel Helper

The Pixel Helper will also detect elements on the page that you might have not set up yet but your Pixel still detects it and most likely collects this information.

These two types of automatically detected elements are button clicks and microdata tags.

Button Click Automatically Detected

The Button Click Automatically Detected will show up when there is a click event detected by Pixel that you haven’t set up yet, but could be useful for your tracking.

Microdata Tags Automatically Detected

The Microdata tags on your website can provide more information about your products using a standardized format. There are three formats that Facebook can accept: Schema.org, OpenGraph and JSON-LD.

As most websites rarely implement these tags, in most cases you will see these empty metadata tags when you click on the text ‘Microdata Automatically Detected in the Pixel Helper:

Custom Conversion Events on Pixel Helper

If you implemented custom conversions in your Facebook Pixel set up, it will be also shown in the Pixel Helper with a different icon than the standard or custom Pixel events:

As you can see in this example, the custom conversion ‘Check Cart’ was sent in to Facebook via the Pixel. No event category was provided and the value of this custom conversion is also missing in this case.

Facebook Pixel Helper to get Facebook Ads clients

Facebook Pixel Helper can be also used to get Facebook ads clients for yourself whether you work for an agency or work as a freelancer. There are two main ways to get clients with the help of Pixel Helper.

Facebook Pixel Implementation service

The more straightforward way is once you get really good with Facebook Pixel, setting up and troubleshooting standard and custom events, and other technical aspects of Facebook, you can sell Pixel implementation as a service.

And the easier way to sell this kind of service is not to sell it to website owners who don’t use Pixel and don’t even know what it is good for. The better way is to sell for website owners who know that Pixel is important but their implementation is still messed up or far from complete.

Use Facebook Pixel Errors to get Facebook Clients

The second way will apply to more people which is to acquire businesses as regular Facebook ads clients. If you can see that their Facebook Pixel events implementation is messed up but you can see that they advertise on Facebook with a significant budget spent, you can be sure that they also do other things wrong in their Facebook advertising.

So. whether they use the services of another agency, work with a freelancer or they have an in-house team, using the messed up Facebook Pixel as a selling point can work really well. You can provide the Pixel implementation as a free service to get their trust and make money on the standard FB ads management or sell the Pixel implementation in the package as an upsell as well.

Frequently Asked Questions – Facebook Pixel Helper