One of the most common challenges that advertisers face is lead quality. In a recent blog post, I outlined 16 potential solutions. One of them is related to your conversion event, which is something that I’m experimenting with now.

Here’s how it works…

The Standard Setup

When you run ads to increase website leads, you need to choose a conversion event. In most cases, you’ll use the Lead or Complete Registration standard event. Meta will then focus on getting you as many of that action as possible.

The problem is that you want more than just that action. A quality lead will perform other important actions after subscribing. Meta doesn’t know that, which results in low-quality leads.

This is a fundamental weakness of Meta ads optimization for delivery. The algorithm is literal and is focused only on getting the action you want, as defined by the performance goal. Quality is rarely a consideration.

A Solution

One solution is to change your optimization event to something that better reflects a quality lead. How you define it will depend on your business as well as other factors (I’ll get to that in a minute).

I tag subscribers in my CRM when they perform important actions. The easiest way to isolate good leads from bad leads while retaining volume is to focus on those who open my emails and click links. I created a custom event for those actions and pass it using the Conversions API.

And then, you guessed it, I optimize for that event — instead of Lead or Complete Registration.

Requirements

I use 7-Day Click as my attribution setting in the ad set. I don’t want any view-through conversions and I’ll need more than one day post-click for the action to happen.

For this to work, there are a couple of requirements of the event that you use. First, that event needs to happen within seven days of subscribing so that it falls within the 7-day click window (the sooner the better). Second, be sure you get enough volume to properly optimize (ideally 50 or more per week to exit the learning phase).

If you can properly define a quality action that happens post-subscription that results in sufficient volume in fewer than seven days to properly optimize, this can be a great option to test out. Otherwise, it may just create a bottleneck with very few leads.

Have you ever tried this?