Bypass Zapier: How to Use Facebook Conversions API for Offline Shopify Sales

Accuracy of tracking offline events Via Shopiy -> Zapier integration 

Had a company setup Zapier to track offline conversions and I wanted to see if anyone else had experience using this setup. I’m assuming it matches click ID with ads served but it there is a black box between FB and Shopify so I was just curious if anyone else had any experience with this.

The short answer is:

The long answer is:

The “black box” you’re referring to is the gap between the user’s click on an ad and the final conversion data that Zapier sends from Shopify

When a user clicks a Facebook ad, Facebook adds a unique fbclid parameter to the URL or stores a first-party _fbc cookie in their browser.

This is the most reliable way to attribute a conversion back to a specific ad click.

The problem with a standard Zapier setup is that it typically triggers when an order is created in Shopify’s backend.

At this point, the original browser session data – including that all-important click ID – is usually lost.

Zapier then sends customer details like email, name, and phone number to Facebook’s Offline Conversions endpoint.

While Facebook tries to match this information to a user profile, it’s a lower-quality signal and can easily miss matches or attribute them incorrectly, especially with Apple’s privacy changes.

An excellent and cost-effective solution is to use server-side tracking.

This involves setting up a client-side Google Tag Manager container on your Shopify store to capture events and user identifiers directly from the browser – including the _fbc cookie.

This data is then sent not to Facebook directly, but to your own server-side GTM container.

This server container can be hosted very cheaply on a platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.

From this server environment, you can then send clean, enriched data directly to the Facebook Conversions API.

For a Purchase event, you should configure a Shopify webhook (e.g., orders/create) to instantly send the order data to your server, which ensures you have the complete, reliable purchase details before sending the event to Facebook

This server-to-server connection is not affected by ad blockers or browser tracking restrictions.

This method gives you near-perfect data accuracy for events like AddToCart, InitiateCheckout, and Purchase, improves event match quality significantly, and gives you full control over the data pipeline, all for what is often a much lower cost than a high-volume Zapier plan.

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