“Pixelyousite Cost Me $40K in Fake Sales: A Cautionary Tale for Advertisers”

  • I used Pixelyousite for a while on my website, but recently I encountered a serious issue that significantly impacted my Facebook advertising campaigns. I received multiple notifications from Facebook indicating that the discrepancies between events sent via API and those from the browser were too large. After further investigation, I discovered that last month I spent over $40,000 on advertising for sales that never actually happened.

    The plugin was sending fake sales events, which severely disrupted the automation of my campaigns. I had set my campaigns to automatically increase the budget if they exceeded a ROAS of 10. However, the plugin started repeatedly sending events for old orders and fake sales, causing my campaign budgets to increase drastically without any valid reason.

    After a month, I found myself with an enormous advertising expense, but the real sales did not match what the pixel was reporting. This resulted in seemingly amazing ROAS figures of 24 or 30, but in reality, they dropped drastically because the plugin was sending fake sales data. This not only confused the pixel but also led to a real ROAS of -0.9.

    To make matters worse, I tried contacting the developer for assistance, but they didn’t even respond to my emails. The lack of support is unacceptable, especially when dealing with such a serious issue that directly affects the profitability of a business.

    As soon as I disabled the plugin and replaced it with Facebook’s native solution, the problems disappeared entirely. Since then, I haven’t had any issues with inflated or fake sales, leading me to conclude that this plugin was the root cause of the problem.

    Conclusion: If you value the accuracy and effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, I would strongly recommend avoiding this plugin and opting for more reliable alternatives. My experience with Pixelyousite has been costly and frustrating, and the developer’s lack of response only makes it worse. I would not recommend it for anyone looking for reliable results in their marketing campaigns.

    • This topic was modified 2 months, 4 weeks ago by juato4.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author PixelYourSite

    (@pixelyoursite)

    First of all, I am sorry for what happened. I searched all our inboxes and found nothing that resembles what you describe here.

    I am not sure what “fake sales” are suppose to be. We fire the purchase event when the order is placed by the customer, we have no way to tell if it’s a fake order.

    I tried to think of possible causes of such a mess. The usual suspect, an option Meta has inside Events Manager Settings called “fire automatic events without code” would lead to extra tag Purchase events, but would have no impact on API events. So that’s probably not the issue here. Anyway, it’s important to mention that this option should always be OFF.

    There is an interesting mention here: old orders were tracked as conversions.

    We have a feature called “Advanced Purchase Tracking” that you can control on the plugin’s WooCommerce page. With this option ON, we will send an API Purhcase event for orders that never triggered the default tag/API purchase event when the order was placed, when such orders’ status is changed to Completed. So there is a scenario when the plugin can send API purhcase events for older orders: when there are orders untracked in real time (maybe the plugin was not installed), and when such orders are modified to Completed.

    However, Meta should not and will not automatically see such orders as conversions. We send user data with these API purhcase events, and they can match them correctly. So even in such a scenario, where lots of old orders triggered the API Purhcase event, Meta has plenty of user data to do proper matching and attribution. So for what you describe to happen, another condition would be required: those old clients saw or clicked your recent ads.

    But what I explained here is a niche scenario that should not happened all the time. I guess you don’t have a bulk of old orders that are constantly modified to Completed.

    The thing is, the plugin will not fire purchase events out of the blue. WooCommerce Purhcase events are fired when orders are placed on the site. As explained, sometimes we fire API Purhcase events when the order status is changed to Completed. There is no other scenario we fire Purchases for WooCommerce.

    Automatic Events Without Code, Meta’s own option, can fire extra Purchase events and should be always OFF. Such events get fired when a visitor clicks on the place and order button. These are Tag only events.

    Other sources: Purchase events configured inside the plugin. You should know about them, not recommended when using WooCommerce.

    Events configured with Meta’s Events setup tool. Again, you should know about them.

    Events configured with something else, GTM, custom code, another plugin.


    I confirm. Record any event it catches. Set yours through google tag manager + stape.io, 99.9% accuracy and put utms on each ad, for every 100 orders you have one purchase event plus or minus.

    Thread Starter juato4

    (@juato4)

    @ciorgica : https://imgur.com/a/h7EkarK ….

    nothing to say…

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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