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Picture this: for a month, your TikTok campaign has been bringing in cheap purchases, and you're tempted to raise the budget. The only problem is that there's no payment on the website: a person submitted an installment plan request and is waiting for a call from a manager, while the pixel recorded it as a purchase. This is one of the most insidious pixel setup errors: the event is named differently from what actually happened, and every budget decision relies on false numbers.
In the first article of the series, we showed that in 94% of TikTok ad accounts the pixel doesn't see every action on the website. Now we're looking at the gaps hidden inside an event setup that seems to work. We found them in an anonymized sample of 500+ TikTok ad accounts running through the Evido by Aitarget platform. Campaigns in these accounts are managed by the advertisers themselves or their agencies. These gaps happen to everyone: the event setup is configured at launch, and then the website, templates and TikTok's list of events change. Below are the three most common ones and how to fix them.
Data: TikTok ad accounts with spend in September and early October 2026. Company names and budgets are not part of the research.
Trap 1. A lead comes in as a purchase
In 15% of accounts advertising a website, TikTok receives Purchase from a page where nothing can be paid for. Most often, it's the form submission that's tagged this way: a person left their phone number, and the pixel reported a purchase.
In 78% of these accounts, campaigns optimize for exactly this "purchase". It takes 71% of their spend.
This kind of setup almost always appears on simple pages:
- landing pages with a lead form: 57% of cases;
- one-pagers with an order form: 26%;
- quizzes: 14%.
A typical example: an ATV or furniture sold in installments. The product is sold, but not on the website. The page shows a monthly payment and a "Submit a request" form, and the actual purchase happens after that. Yet the form submission is sent to TikTok as Purchase.
This distorts the report: the cost of a "purchase" is actually the cost of a lead, and the "buyers" audience is built from people who left their phone number. According to TikTok Help Center, Purchase has replaced the former CompletePayment event, meaning a payment, and value-based optimization requires the order value and currency for it. It won't work with leads disguised as purchases.
The fix is simple. If a person leaves their contact details and doesn't pay on the website, it's a Lead: rename the event and switch optimization to it.
Trap 2. Deprecated events keep running
In 21% of accounts advertising a website, the pixel receives at least one deprecated event: ClickButton or PlaceAnOrder. In 11% of accounts, campaigns optimize for them. TikTok has deprecated these events and will stop supporting them in 2027 (TikTok Help Center).
The event setup keeps working in the meantime, so the gap is easy to miss.
Deprecated events are most common among accounts with the highest spend: 36% of those with a pixel installed.
Deprecated events show up even in e-commerce, where sales depend on every step of the funnel. There, 31% of accounts with a pixel send them, almost the same as education at 29%.
ClickButton only reports that a button was clicked, without telling you whether the person made a call, opened a menu or closed a banner. A campaign optimizing for this event learns from clicks. PlaceAnOrder, in turn, doesn't tell you whether the order was paid.
Replace each deprecated event with one that describes the action:
- call or messenger button: Contact;
- paid order: Purchase;
- order without payment on the website: Lead.
After the replacement, switch campaign optimization to the new event. Data accumulated on the old events doesn't carry over to the new ones (TikTok Help Center).
Trap 3. A template error is copied to every page
If landing pages are built from a template, an error in its event setup goes to every new page. In the data, we saw dozens of pages with the same error from a shared template. Check the event setup in the template before the first copy. If pages are already live, fix the template and check the events from a couple of live pages in Events Manager.
Check what your campaign is learning from
- Which event is set as the ad group's optimization goal? Write it down for each active campaign.
- Where does this event fire on the website? Find the button or form and compare the action with the event name.
- Does the website have online payment? If not, there should be no Purchase in the event setup.
- Are ClickButton or PlaceAnOrder still in Events Manager? Replace them with events that describe the action.
- Do you build pages from a template? Check the event setup in the template itself before the next launch.
It's easier to launch a campaign on a new event as a new ad group. It will go through the learning phase: according to TikTok Help Center, fluctuations usually start to decrease after about 25 results or 7 days. Plan time and budget for this.
Where to start
Start with the campaign with the highest spend. Compare the optimization event with what actually happens on the website. If the names don't match, that's the first thing to fix.
We noticed that the same gaps keep recurring across very different advertisers, so we built a TikTok event audit into the Evido by Aitarget platform. It finds these gaps automatically and shows, for each account, which events are coming in, what's missing, and what's being sent under a different name. Until November 30, 2026, we're running the audit and setting up the pixel for clients free of charge.
If you run TikTok through Evido by Aitarget ad accounts, launch the audit and get a report on your account ➡️ TikTok event audit on the platform.
In the next article of the series, we'll show how to turn website visitors into retargeting audiences.
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