A guide to using the Facebook Pixel
I have found the FB pixel to be both awesome and not fully baked in terms of reporting.<p>The general concept of allowing custom events is awesome. It means it plays really nicely with situations that don&#x27;t fit nicely into their standard events. By the same token, custom events feel like second class citizens in FB ad reporting.<p>Here is a scenario and I&#x27;d love any suggestions if people have them because there is no documentation on this and FB has basically done away with access to a live person for ads (while interestingly enough Google now goes out of its way to connect you with a live person, even if only via chat).<p>I work on a product with a free trial with subscriptions of multiple plan levels and terms. I can track a custom event on subscription and pass plan and term params along with the revenue data, but there is no easy way to drill into those dimensions keyed off of custom params with their reporting. The only manual hack I&#x27;ve found is to create an aggregate custom event for all subscriptions for top level reporting, and then individual custom events for each plan&#x2F;term permutation (plan1&#x2F;annual, plan1&#x2F;monthly, plan2&#x2F;annual, plan2&#x2F;monthly, etc.).<p>This is manageable for now as there are only 8 events plus the aggregate one, but I then have to add each of those as custom columns to reports which gets super messy.<p>The not fully baked part is that as an advertiser, my ideal reporting dashboard in FB would let me drill in at multiple levels and segment reporting by these custom dimensions just by using a single custom event&#x27;s params. So I&#x27;d have a report segment option for plan and term that then broke those out in the table and then the chart (and their charting capabilities are also sorely lacking right now for serious advertisers).<p>Instead, I need to dump this to a spreadsheet and pivot it if I want to do any serious analysis.<p>Has the author or anyone else solved for this differently outside of using a PMD with better reporting? We&#x27;ll end up switching to one soon enough, but I feel like FB has really failed to go the final steps with this. Adding custom parameters but then not allowing advertisers to report and segment by them is a huge opportunity for them. And they clearly have the data parsed already because offer it in the custom conversion and audience builder tools.<p>Also, and this applies to most ad platforms...I wish there were better support for recurring up and LTV tracking and reporting. Helping me easily report on the full deferred value the ads are driving makes it easier for me to build the case for more spend. I can do that in other analytics tools, but I feel like this is data FB would want to have in a structured format. Maybe that&#x27;s just me though.