Standard Events are event names that an ad platform has predefined, for example Lead, Purchase or AddToCart. When you report conversions under these names, the platform immediately understands what happened and can optimize campaigns toward it.
How do standard events work?
With the Meta Pixel, instead of inventing your own name you call a predefined event, such as Lead after a form submission or Purchase after an order. You can optionally pass parameters like value and currency. The same names work through the Conversions API. TikTok and LinkedIn follow a similar approach with their own lists of predefined events or conversion types.
Besides standard events there are custom events with names you choose. These usually have to be set up as a custom conversion before you can optimize for them.
Why do standard events matter?
Standard events are the language the algorithm speaks. They give you:
- direct selection as an optimization goal in campaigns
- consistent reporting in Ads Manager
- a clean basis for audiences like retargeting or lookalikes
Wrong or inconsistent event names are a common reason why conversions get measured but not used properly. Our article on why the Meta Pixel is not tracking conversions covers typical mistakes.
Example
A store sends ViewContent on product pages, AddToCart when the cart button is clicked, InitiateCheckout when checkout starts and Purchase with value and currency on the thank-you page. Meta sees the full funnel and can optimize for purchases rather than clicks.
Standard events with LeadSignal
In LeadSignal you define an event once, by clicking an element with the visual event tool or with a URL rule, and map it to a standard event per platform, for example Lead, Purchase, InitiateCheckout or ViewContent on Meta, or the matching TikTok standard event. Value and currency are set right on the event. No code, no Google Tag Manager.