3 ways to send conversions to Meta Ads from HubSpot

Are you using Meta Ads to generate new leads and customers for your business?

If so, setting up conversion tracking so you can see how many leads and customers came from your campaigns helps you understand which ones are working and which ones aren't.

And even more importantly, it gives Meta the data it needs to understand who is converting and who isn't, so it can serve your ads to the right people moving forward (and hopefully get you more leads at a lower cost).

In this article, we'll walk through 3 different ways to send conversions to Meta Ads from HubSpot. We'll also cover the scenarios where each one works best, so you can pick the right path for your business.

There are a few different ways to send conversions to Meta Ads from HubSpot, and the best one for you depends on how you actually get leads from Meta and when you want to send the conversion back.

Converly is a dedicated conversion tracking tool that makes it easy to send a conversion to Meta when a lead submits a form, books a meeting or starts a chat on your site.

As you can see from the screenshot above, it's really easy to use. You pick a trigger (like when a lead submits a form on your site) and then pick an action (like sending a conversion to Meta Ads, sending a conversion to Google Ads, and so on).

Converly works with HubSpot Forms, HubSpot Meetings and HubSpot Chat, as well as a heap of third-party form and booking tools like Typeform, Jotform and Calendly. Regardless of which one you use, it works in roughly the same way. It listens for the form submission/meeting booking, grabs the lead's name, email and phone, grabs all the Facebook identifiers (the FBCLID, the _fbc and the _fbp), and sends them over to Meta's Conversions API as a server-side conversion.

Because it sends the data server-side, includes the lead's name, email and phone, and passes those Facebook identifiers, you should end up with an Event Match Score of 9 or 10. That is Meta's rating for how good your conversion tracking setup is (If you track something basic like thank you page visits, you would be lucky to score a 3).

Converly also gives you a full conversion log that shows every conversion it captured, what data was sent to Meta, whether it was received successfully, and more.

• When you get a low volume of new customers each month. Meta ideally wants 50+ conversions per ad set per week. If you're not closing 50 new deals a week, your best bet is to send the conversion when the lead first submits the form, because that's where you have the most volume.
• When your sales cycle is longer than 7 days. Meta has a 7-day click attribution window, so it only counts conversions that happen within 7 days of the ad being clicked. If it takes longer than 7 days to go from ad click to closed deal, you're better off sending the conversion when the lead first submits the form (because if you wait for the deal to close before sending the conversion, then you'll miss the window).
• When you just want a simple setup. This is by far the easiest option to set up. It's a couple of clicks and takes about 5 minutes, so if you're just getting started with Meta Ads this is probably the best place to start.

If you'd rather send a conversion to Meta at a later stage in the sales cycle (like when a Deal is first created against the contact, or when the Deal closes), you can do that using Attributer and Zapier.

Here's how it works.

• When lead quality is your problem, not lead volume. If your Meta campaigns generate plenty of contacts but your sales team says they're mostly junk, then sending the conversion only when a contact is qualified or a Deal is created lets Meta's algorithms learn what a good, qualified lead looks like for your business. They'll then do a better job of serving your ads to qualified buyers in the future.
• When your contacts get qualified quickly. Meta's 7-day click attribution window applies here too. If your sales team reviews and qualifies contacts within a day or two, that's comfortably inside the window, so you can use the contact's lifecycle stage becoming Sales Qualified Lead (or a Deal being created against it) as the moment you send the conversion back to Meta.
• When you have decent volume at that later stage. Meta's algorithm needs around 50 conversions per ad set per week to optimize properly. If your sales team is moving 50+ contacts to Sales Qualified Lead, or you're creating that many Deals per week, then the Attributer plus Zapier approach works nicely.

When you advertise on Facebook or Instagram, you can either send people to your site or have them fill out a form inside the ad itself. This ad format is known as Lead Ads.

Meta prefills the form with details from the user's Facebook or Instagram account, and when they submit it, the leads can be sent straight to your CRM.

It's very well documented that Lead Ads significantly increase the volume of leads you get from Meta, but they tend to be poor quality. There are a couple of reasons for this:

• It's easy to submit the form by accident, so you'll often get leads who have no idea they even gave you their details.
• Their contact details are often unusable. The form is prefilled with the email from their Facebook account, which is frequently an old email address they no longer check.
• The person has never visited your website or researched your product. So even if they did mean to contact you, and you did get usable details, they're often not a great fit for your business because they're not that familiar with your product or service.

To address this, Meta introduced a way to pass back information on which of these leads were actually good and which weren't. Meta then uses that to learn who is a good fit for your business and serve your ads to more people like them.

To set this up, store the Meta Lead ID on the contact record in HubSpot as each new lead comes in. Then, when a contact reaches a point in your sales process that signals it was actually a good one (like its lifecycle stage becoming Sales Qualified Lead, or a Deal being opened), you can use Zapier to send that signal back to Meta.

Start by creating a Zap that is triggered by whatever action in HubSpot shows the contact is high quality (like the lifecycle stage changing to 'Sales Qualified Lead').

Then create a new action in your Zap, select Facebook Conversions as the tool, and select Send a Funnel Event as the action. Configure it by mapping the Meta Lead ID, Contact Email and Contact Phone from HubSpot.

Once your Zaps are live, real contacts need to move through your sales process for a week or so before you can finish the setup. Meta wants to see around 50 stage updates within a 7-day period.

Once Meta has seen enough data, head back to Events Manager, open your dataset and go to the Settings tab. You'll find a section for the conversion leads integration that shows your progress and, when you're ready, lets you configure your sales funnel. This is where you tell Meta the stages of your sales process, what order they happen in, and which stage means "this was a good lead" (the stage you want Meta to optimize for).

• When you're running Lead Ads (Instant Forms). This method is built specifically for Lead Ads. It's built around the Meta Lead ID, which only exists for leads that filled out a form inside Facebook or Instagram. If you're sending leads to your website and they complete forms there, this isn't for you. Use Method 1 or 2 instead.
• When you're getting plenty of leads but your sales team says they're junk. By telling Meta which contacts went on to be qualified, you teach the algorithm the difference between a qualified lead and someone who submitted the form by accident, and it uses that to better target your ads. Meta's own numbers claim advertisers see around 21% lower cost per quality lead once this feedback loop is running.
• When your contacts get qualified within a few weeks (even if deals take months to close). Meta wants the stage you optimize for (like the lifecycle stage becoming Sales Qualified Lead) to happen within 28 days of the lead coming in, and it stops accepting updates on leads older than 90 days. So as long as your sales team triages new contacts within days, you're fine, regardless of how long your actual sales cycle is.
• When you have enough lead volume to feed it. Meta won't activate the sales funnel until it has seen around 50 CRM events across 7 days, spread over at least 2 stages, sent consistently. In practice that suits businesses generating a few hundred Lead Ad leads a month with a sales team that actually keeps HubSpot up to date. If your volume is lower, the funnel configuration will simply never unlock.

Choosing between these methods isn't really a matter of preference. It comes down to 2 questions. Where do your leads come from (your website or Lead Ads inside Facebook), and how much volume do you have at each stage of your sales process. Here's the cheat sheet:

The simplest way to think about it is this. Send conversions from the point in your funnel that has enough volume for Meta to learn from, using the method that matches where your leads come from.

Sending conversions to Meta Ads from HubSpot is a great way to tell Meta which clicks turned into leads and customers, so it can learn what your ideal customer looks like and serve your ads to more people like them.

But as you can see, the approach differs a lot depending on how you get leads from Meta and the volume you're working with. So make sure to pick the right one for your circumstances.