3 ways to send conversions to Meta Ads from Pipedrive

Are you running Meta Ads to bring in new leads and customers for your business?

If so, setting up conversion tracking lets you see exactly how many leads and customers each campaign is producing, so you know what's working and what isn't.

It also gives Meta the data it needs to recognize who converts and who doesn't, which helps it know who your ideal customers are so it can put your ads in front of more people like them.

In this article, we'll walk through 3 different ways to send conversions to Meta Ads from Pipedrive, along with the situations each one suits best, so you can work out which path fits your business.

There are a few ways to get conversions from Pipedrive back to Meta Ads, and which one suits you depends on how your leads actually arrive from Meta and how far along the sales process you want to be before sending the conversion.

Converly is a dedicated conversion tracking tool that sends conversions to Meta when someone submits a form, books a meeting, or starts a chat on your site.

It's straightforward to set up, as you can see from the screenshot above. You simply choose a trigger (like a lead submitting a form on your site) then choose an action (like sending a conversion to Meta Ads, Google Ads, and so on).

Converly works with Pipedrive's own Web Forms, along with third-party tools like Gravity Forms, Typeform, Jotform and Calendly. Once you've set up your Conversion Flow, Converly then listens for the form submission, grabs the lead's name, email and phone from the form, picks up the Facebook identifiers (the FBCLID, the _fbc and the _fbp), and sends them to Meta's Conversions API as a server-side conversion.

Sending the data server-side, including the lead's name, email and phone, and passing those Facebook identifiers, is what gets you an Event Match Score of 9 or 10 (Meta's rating of how good your conversion tracking setup is). Track something basic like thank you page visits instead and you'd be lucky to land a 3.

Converly also keeps a full conversion log showing every conversion it captured, what data went to Meta, whether it was received, and more.

• When you're bringing in fewer than 50 new customers each week. Meta ideally wants 50+ conversions per ad set per week. So if you're not closing 50 deals a week, sending the conversion at the point the lead submits the form is probably the better call, as it will give Meta more conversions to work with.
• When your sales cycle runs longer than 7 days. Meta's click attribution window is 7 days, so it only counts conversions that land within 7 days of the ad being clicked. If it takes longer than that to go from ad click to closed deal, sending the conversion when the lead first submits the form is the better bet. Wait for the deal to close and you'll miss the window.
• When you want the simplest setup available. This is the easiest of the 3 to get running. It's literally a couple of clicks and usually takes about 5 minutes, so if you're just getting started with Meta Ads, this is the place to begin.

If you'd prefer to send the conversion to Meta at a later point in the sales process, like when a Lead is converted into a Deal, or when that Deal closes, Attributer and Zapier can do that for you.

Here's how it works.

• When lead quality is the issue, not lead volume. If your Meta campaigns are generating plenty of leads but your sales team says most of them are junk, sending the conversion only once a Lead is converted into a Deal lets Meta's algorithms learn what a genuinely good lead looks like for your business (so it can find you more of them).
• When your leads get converted into Deals quickly. Meta's 7-day click attribution window still applies here. If your sales team reviews and converts Leads within a day or two, you're well inside the window, so using the Lead being converted into a Deal as your trigger point works well.
• When you've got decent volume at that later stage. As we mentioned before, Meta's algorithm needs roughly 50 conversions per ad set per week to optimize properly. If your team is converting 50+ Leads into Deals a week, the Attributer plus Zapier approach is a solid fit, which should help you generate more qualified leads for your sales team.

When you advertise on Facebook or Instagram, you can send people to your site, or have them complete a form right inside the ad (a format known as Lead Ads).

Meta prefills the form using details from the person's Facebook or Instagram account, and once they submit it, the lead can be sent straight into your CRM.

If you've ever done this before, you'll know that Lead Ads drive up the volume of leads you get from Meta, but the quality tends to be weaker. This is because:

• It's easy to submit the form by accident, so plenty of the leads you get won't even realize they handed over their details.
• Their contact details are often stale. The form pulls the email from their Facebook account, which is frequently an old address they no longer check (mine is my high school email address from 20 years ago).
• The person hasn't visited your website or looked into your product. So even if they did mean to reach out and their details are usable, they're usually not very educated about your product/service and often aren't the right fit.

To help with this, Meta built a way to report back which of the leads you're getting through Lead Ads turned out to be good and which didn't. It then uses that to learn who's a genuine fit for your business and put your ads in front of more people like them.

To set it up, store the Meta Lead ID against the record in Pipedrive as each new lead comes in. Then, once that lead hits a chosen point in your sales process (like being converted into a Deal), use Zapier to send that signal back to Meta.

To do this, build a Zap triggered by whatever action in Pipedrive shows the lead is high quality (like the Lead being converted into a Deal).

Then add a new action to your Zap, choose Facebook Conversions as the tool, and select 'Send a Funnel Event' as the action. Configure it by mapping across the Meta Lead ID, Contact Email and Contact Phone from Pipedrive.

Once your Zaps are live, real leads need to flow through your sales process for about a week before you can finish setting it up. Meta wants to see around 50 leads come in within a 7-day period.

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

• When you're running Lead Ads (Instant Forms). This method is purpose-built for Lead Ads. It only works if you send the Meta Lead ID back, and that only exists for leads who filled out a form inside Facebook or Instagram. If your leads land on your website and fill out a form there instead, 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 low quality. By reporting back which leads went on to become Deals, you teach the algorithm the difference between a genuinely qualified lead and a junk submission, and Meta will then use that data to better target your ads in the future. Meta's own data says this can result in a 21% lower cost per quality lead.
• When your leads get converted within a few weeks (even if deals themselves take months to close). Meta wants the stage you're optimizing for (like a Lead being converted into a Deal) to happen within 28 days of the lead arriving, and it stops accepting updates on leads older than 90 days. So as long as your sales team triages new leads within a matter of days, then this will work (no matter how long your actual sales cycle runs).
• When you've got enough lead volume to feed it. Meta won't activate the sales funnel until it's seen around 50 CRM events across 7 days. So in reality, this only works for businesses bringing in a few hundred new leads through Lead Ads per month (and who have a sales team that keeps Pipedrive up to date). If you have fewer than that, you are better off sending people to your website and using Method 1 to send a conversion to Meta when leads initially submit a form on your site.

Picking between these isn't really down to preference. It comes down to lead volume and campaign setup. Here's a 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 Pipedrive is a great way to show Meta which clicks turned into leads and customers, so it can learn what your ideal customer looks like and put your ads in front of more people like them.

But as you've seen, how you do it depends a lot on how your leads arrive from Meta and what volume you're working with. So make sure to pick the one that actually fits your situation.