Meta Pixel Not Tracking Purchases? Check These 7 Causes Before You Reinstall It

The short answer

If your purchases dropped soon after you added a cookie banner, the banner is almost certainly the cause. The Meta Pixel starts in a paused state and needs a signal to switch on. Many banners send the pause and never send the switch.

Reinstalling the pixel will not fix that. Here is the full list, in the order worth checking.

1. Your cookie banner never sends the "on" signal

Meta's developer documentation describes pausing pixel fires until consent is granted, then sending them once it is. The two states are revoke (paused) and grant (active).

Plenty of banners handle the first half correctly and forget the second. The pixel then waits forever.

How to test: open your site in a private window, accept cookies, then open your browser's network tab and look for requests going to facebook.com/tr. If nothing appears after you accept, the "on" signal never arrived.

2. You have two pixels on the page

A theme app and a manual install both adding the pixel is very common on Shopify. Two base codes on one page deduplicate events unpredictably.

How to test: view the page source and count how many times fbq('init' appears. It should be once.

3. The Conversions API is not switched on

Ad blockers and browser tracking protection stop browser events. Without a server-side path, those purchases never reach Meta at all.

How to test: in Events Manager, check whether your purchase events show a server source as well as a browser one.

4. Your thank-you page unloads too fast

Confirmation pages that redirect or render after payment can close before the request is sent.

How to test: watch the network tab on the confirmation page specifically. Testing on your homepage proves nothing.

5. Pixel and Conversions API are double counting

When both are live, each event needs a matching event_id and event_name. Mismatched values mean Meta either discards events or counts them twice.

6. Your checkout is on a different domain

Off-site checkouts break the pixel's domain configuration. Verify the checkout domain is the one your pixel is set up for.

7. Server events ignore consent entirely

This one is the reverse problem. Conversions API events sit outside your browser code, so nothing in your banner touches them. Many setups gate the browser correctly and keep sending server events for people who declined.

How to test: decline consent, complete a test purchase, then look for a server event in Events Manager. If one appears, that path is ungated.

The consent side of all this is covered properly in this guide to facebook ads consent tracking , including the Google Tag Manager route.

Why this keeps happening

Google Consent Mode v2 and Meta's pixel consent are separate systems with different APIs. Configuring Google's does nothing for the Meta Pixel. So teams set up one, assume the rest are covered, and end up with a pixel that is either always on or permanently paused. Then a deploy changes something and purchases quietly stop arriving for a fortnight.

Where Seers AI helps

Seers AI is a cookie consent management platform built for exactly this problem. It records the visitor's decision once and sends the matching signal to Meta, Google and Microsoft from a single integration, so the pixel is paused when it should be and active the moment someone accepts.

There are ready-made builds for Shopify, WordPress, Magento and Drupal, so the pause and switch behaviour is correct without editing theme files. A free cookie audit will tell you whether your pixel is gated, ungated, or stuck.

The point is not the banner. It is knowing your purchase events arrive because the signal reaches Meta, rather than hoping they do.