The F Pixel by Meta

The F Pixel by Meta

Facebook Pixel by Meta

Yes, it’s a Facebook version of Mixpanel or a data analytics tool used to track user behavior across app, web, iOS, or any device with Chrome. The purpose is to collect user data—of course, with consent (whether to be tracked or not 🧑‍💻)—to help business owners run personalized ads and campaigns via Facebook.

It’s as simple to use as embedding an image. This is because, theoretically, for all practical purposes, it’s just a 1px x 1px pixel embedded in your HTML DOM, along with some scripts that send data to Facebook’s servers.

This is what a FB pixel looks like technically -

<script> !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) {if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)}; if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script', '[https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js](https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js)'); fbq('init', [This  is  Pixel  id]); fbq('track', 'PageView'); </script>  <noscript><img  height="1"  width="1"  style="display:none"  src="[https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=[This is Pixel id]&ev=PageView&noscript=1](https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=[this is pixel id]&ev=PageView&noscript=1)"  /></noscript>  <!-- End Meta Pixel Code -->

To get started, you need to register a pixel for yourself on Facebook’s Events Manager website. Once added, you can view the source code and see graphs of user activities based on the custom event triggers you’ve set, which we’ll discuss later.

After registering your web/app/iOS application, you’ll receive a unique Meta Pixel ID. This ID helps connect that pixel to your Events Manager database.

However, like many things in life, nothing lasts forever. The U.S. Department of State raised concerns with Facebook regarding user privacy, and the folks at Apple are very conscious about this—likely due to marketing. Since 2021, a lot has changed regarding tracking, especially on newer devices.

To handle this, there’s something called the Conversion API, which works similarly to Mixpanel for devices affected by these changes.

Things to keep in mind:

  1. Register your Android/iOS app with Meta Developers and use their SDK to track events.
  2. For the web, there’s a browser extension that lets you monitor the status of the Meta Pixel.

F Pixel in NextJs

There is an example repository by the official Vercel team that I highly recommend checking out if you want to use Facebook Pixel with modern web frameworks: Repo Link

After setting up the boilerplate HTML scripts in your Next.js app, create a file, let’s say named Fpixel.ts, with the following contents:

export  const FB_PIXEL_ID = process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_FACEBOOK_PIXEL_ID;

export  const  pageview  = () => { // this is to init tracking
window.fbq("track", "PageView");
};

export  const  event  = (name:  any, options  = {}) => { //. This is to trigger an event to facebook servers
window.fbq("track", name, options);
};

After setting up these two functions, you’re mostly good to go. Now, you just need to call the pageview function when a page is mounted. As you guessed, the best place to do this is within the useEffect hook with an empty dependency array in app.tsx.

If you want to trigger an event on a checkout button in your app, you can do so as follows:

useEffect(() => {
fbq.pageview();
const  handleRouteChange  = () => {
fbq.pageview();
};
router.events.on("routeChangeComplete", handleRouteChange); // Trigger an event to pixel on route change
return () => {
router.events.off("routeChangeComplete", handleRouteChange);
};
}, [router.events]);

Facebook Pixel by Meta

Similarly you can trigger an event let say on payment button to know how many users clicked on pay button coming from your adds run using facebook

import React, { useEffect } from 'react';
// Facebook Pixel configuration export const FB_PIXEL_ID = process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_FACEBOOK_PIXEL_ID;

 const pageview = () => {
 window.fbq('track', 'PageView');
 };
 const event = (name: string, options = {}) => {
  window.fbq('track', name, options);
  };

 // Main Component
  const FacebookPixelExample: React.FC = () => {
   useEffect(() => {
    // Track PageView on component load pageview();
    }, []);

  // Custom event handler for button click

  const handleButtonClick = () => {
   event('ButtonClick', { customParam: 'customValue' });
   console.log('Facebook Pixel event tracked: ButtonClick'); };

   return (
   <div> <h1>Facebook Pixel Integration</h1>
   <p>Click the button to trigger a custom Facebook Pixel event.</p>
   <button onClick={handleButtonClick}> Payment </button> </div>);
   };

    export default FacebookPixelExample;

So there you have it—Facebook or Meta Pixel implementation in Next.js or any other modern framework. Additionally, during my testing with Meta Pixel, I noticed that it does not work with any type of ad blocker installed in the user’s browser.