Guides

Telling Meta and Google which leads were real

Last updated 2026-09-14

Ad platforms optimise for whatever you tell them counts. Report every enquiry as a success and Meta will dutifully find you more enquiries — including from people who will never buy, because those are the cheapest ones to find.

The fix is to report back which enquiries turned out to be real, with a value attached. Almost nobody does it, which is precisely why it works.

Why your ads find you time-wasters

A click-to-WhatsApp campaign optimising for conversations is being scored on people who opened a chat. The algorithm is extremely good at finding more of those, so it finds the people most likely to send one message and disappear.

Nothing about this is a failure of the platform. It is doing exactly what it was asked. The information it has never been given is which of those conversations was worth having.

What the outcome loop reports

When a lead that came from an ad turns out to be qualified — a real budget, a real requirement — Vesma reports that back to the platform the click came from, as an event with a value attached rather than a bare count.

The value is what does the work. It is the difference between telling Meta “this one counted” and telling it “this one was worth twenty times that one”, which is what lets it bid towards buyers rather than towards repliers.

The mechanics of the Meta side — what the event must contain, the click id, the seven-day window — are in the Conversions API for WhatsApp leads.

Switching it on

It is off unless your workspace has been switched on for it by name. That is deliberate: your qualified leads going to your Meta or Google dataset is your data leaving our system, so it is opt-in per workspace rather than a default someone discovers later.

Meta and Google are separate switches. Ask us to enable either, and connect the matching ad account under Marketing › Connections first.

What it needs to work at all

The click has to be traceable. A lead who found your number on a hoarding cannot be reported against an ad, because there is no click to report against. Only leads that arrived through a tracked ad click qualify.
The lead has to actually qualify. The loop fires on real qualification, not on arrival. If conversations are not capturing budget and requirement, there is nothing to report — see how leads are scored.
Your ad destinations have to carry the click ids. A campaign that sends people somewhere the click id is lost produces leads that can never be attributed. This is the most common reason a correctly configured loop reports nothing.

What to expect, and when

Not much, for a while. Ad platforms need a meaningful number of conversion events before their optimisation has anything to learn from, and qualified leads are by definition rarer than enquiries.

Judge this at week four or later, on cost per qualified lead rather than cost per lead. Cost per lead will often rise when this starts working, which is the correct direction: you are buying fewer, better conversations. Watching the wrong number here leads people to switch off the thing that is helping.

What it will not fix

A bad offer. Better targeting of the wrong proposition is still the wrong proposition.
A tiny budget. Optimisation needs volume to learn from. Below a real spend there is nothing to optimise.
Untracked destinations. No click id, no attribution, no loop — whatever else is configured.
Be straight about the ceiling

For click-to-WhatsApp specifically, how much a reported outcome changes delivery depends on what the campaign was set up to optimise for in the first place. Reporting qualified leads is strictly better information than reporting none, and it is the foundation everything else needs — but it is not a switch that halves your cost per sale on its own.

Teach your ads what a real buyer looks like

Qualified leads reported back with a value attached, so the platform optimises towards buyers instead of towards repliers.