I’ve always struggled to understand the difference between standard and custom events in Meta. Knowing the difference between these two tracking events is crucial to the success of your paid Meta advertising efforts, so I wanted to explain it in layman’s terms.
Using Park Perfection, our marketing agency’s in-house eCommerce brand, as an example, you’ll understand the difference between standard and custom conversions. This article should provide clear guidance on what sort of tracking your business should move forward with.
Table of Contents
Understanding the Difference
Standard Events
Standard events are automatically created when you install the Meta pixel on your website. They are predefined actions that users take on a website, and you cannot change the core definition or name of a standard event [source].
These include actions like page views, leads, and, if your business is eCommerce, add to cart, initiate checkout, and purchases.
These events are tracked automatically, but they tend to be more generalized, which can pose issues. A standard event might lump together all contact form submissions, making it hard to distinguish between different conversions. The naming convention also can’t be customized.
When Standard Events Work
- Standard events will suffice if you’re an eCommerce brand and your objective is to track purchases or add to cart.
- Standard events are perfectly fine if you only have one contact form on your website.
Example of Standard Events for Park Perfection
In the example below, you can see the standard events for Park Perfection. These were automatically created when the Meta pixel was installed. Despite our site being eCommerce, contact form submissions are still necessary to track. No standard event was automatically created.

Custom Events
Custom events allow you to track specific actions on your website more accurately. Using Park Perfection as an example, let me give you some examples:
- Wholesale partner sign-ups
- If an esthetician, dermatologist, or spa is interested in selling our products at their physical locations, they will sign up via a contact form.
- eCommerce purchases
- Someone purchases products directly from our site.
- General contact form submissions
- If someone has a general inquiry, this is still valuable for us to track.
Each of these custom events has different goals and target audiences so we want to track them separately for different campaigns we create. Custom events allow for this more accurate tracking while helping Meta optimize for your specific goals.
When Park Perfection runs campaigns to attract wholesale partners like estheticians, Meta performs better when we’re specific about what we want. By setting up a custom conversion for wholesale partner sign-ups instead of using a general contact form submission, we’re telling Meta exactly who to target and what action we want them to take. This helps Meta’s algorithm optimize more effectively, finding similar audiences who are likely to become wholesale partners rather than just general website visitors. Getting as granular as you can will help your ads because you’re giving Meta additional information about what to do and who to target.
eCommerce Purchases: Standard Events
We alluded to this earlier, but eCommerce conversions are bucketed within standard events. You don’t need to create these from scratch if your Meta pixel is properly set up. As you can see below, the purchases are pulled into the standard events. When your campaign objective is purchases, you can use standard events.

Another Client Example
We wanted to show you how a custom conversion pulls in within the main campaign view using another client as an example.
- Below is an example of a client, Richard Wolfe Trucking.
- We are using custom events based on the client’s campaign objectives.
- This trucking company wants to track job applicants to a specific thank you confirmation page on their site.
- Since we set this up as a custom event, the data (5 applicants) and the customized name (Website Submit Applications) pull into our reporting view exactly how we wanted it to.
- If you set up a standard event, it would just say, “lead” and you wouldn’t know if it were a general contact from a lead or a job application lead. For purposes of this campaign, it’s important to know what contact form the lead is coming from to gauge success.

Implementing Custom Conversions in Campaigns
Many advertisers don’t realize that Meta campaigns can only optimize for one conversion at a time. When creating a campaign, you must specifically select which conversion you want Meta to track and optimize for – this will be the only conversion that appears in your main campaign view. You also have to choose this when you set up the campaign and it can’t be changed after the fact.
For example, if Park Perfection wants to run a campaign targeting wholesale partners, here are the steps:
Campaign Setup:
- Choose “Leads” as your campaign objective
- Select the “Website” conversion location at the ad set level
- Under “Conversion Event,” make your selection:
This selection determines not only what Meta optimizes for but also what data appears in your reporting. If you want to track different types of conversions, you’ll need separate campaigns for each.
Best Practices and Recommendations
- Use Custom Events When:
- You need to track specific form submissions
- Different conversions have different value and meaning to your business
- You want to optimize campaigns for specific goals
- Keep Standard Events For:
- Basic website activity tracking
- eCommerce purchase tracking (automatically set up)
- General traffic campaigns
- Always Create Unique Thank You Pages
- Each form should have its own thank you page
- This ensures accurate tracking of different conversion types
- It helps prevent confusion in conversion attribution
Now that you understand the difference between custom and standard events, you can better track your Meta campaign performance. Whether you need standard events for straightforward e-commerce tracking, or custom events for specific conversion goals like Park Perfection, you’re equipped to make the right choice for your business.