The short answer
With digital leads, your customer has three ways to reach you: fill out a form (on your website, or a Facebook or Google lead form), call, or send a WhatsApp message. Whichever one you choose shapes your campaign results, and eventually your sales.
The answer is different for Meta and Google, so let’s take them one at a time.
Meta: Facebook and Instagram
When you pick the leads objective in Ads Manager, Meta asks where the lead should go. There are three main options, each with its own pros and cons.
Pros:
- Easiest for the user. One tap, and the conversation is open.
- A great fit for services up to 500–1,000 ₪, where customers want a quick answer, a price and a time slot.
- Also works well later in the process: inside the landing page, or in the funnel after the lead comes in.
Cons:
- It’s too easy to ask a shallow question and disappear. Every conversation started counts as a result, even when there’s nobody on the other end.
- People who respond easily on WhatsApp tend to avoid landing pages.
- A customer planning a big purchase wants to talk to someone who represents the business, not text back and forth.
- In the US, it just isn’t common enough. According to Pew Research, only 33% of American adults use it, and many prefer Apple’s iMessage.
Facebook lead form
Pros:
- Users never leave Facebook, and their details are already filled in. Lots of leads at a low cost.
- Reaches a slightly higher-quality audience than WhatsApp. But only slightly.
Cons:
- Easy leads are exactly what Meta is after. Meta cares about lead volume. Your business cares about closed deals.
- Even a detailed form with lots of questions only slows people down by 15 seconds. It doesn’t make them think.
- Once again, you skip the landing page, which is the best filter you’ve got.
Website lead form (landing page)
Pros:
- The landing page filters. If someone doesn’t want to read a landing page, let them not click. They’re probably not a fit.
- The ad sells the click, and the landing page sells the lead. People who fill out the form arrive at the call curious and ready to hear more.
- You control the content and the tracking, not Meta.
Cons:
- Fewer leads, and each one costs more. It looks worse in the report, until you check how much money came in.
- You need a well-written landing page, plus tracking that sends the leads back to Meta.
For an expensive product or service, this is almost always my pick.
Google keeps pushing lead forms and WhatsApp buttons into its ads. But in practice, most conversions happen on the landing page, or on the dialer, as a phone call from the Search Network.
So on Google, the question is less about choosing an objective and more about three things:
- A well-written landing page that leads users to convert. I’ll cover this in a separate post on landing pages.
- Phone call tracking. Counting who tapped the number isn’t enough. Send the calls that actually happened back to Google Ads, so the campaign can learn from them.
- WhatsApp message tracking, the same way. There, I also make a point of adding automation with a few questions for the user. It boosts engagement and leaves fewer conversations that stop after “Hi”.
Just like on Meta, the campaign learns from what you count. A real, tracked call is worth far more than a tap on a phone number.
Questions that usually come up
What’s the difference between the traffic objective and the leads objective on Meta?
The traffic objective suits sites that make money from the traffic itself: content and news sites that earn from ads, blogs and comparison sites that earn affiliate commissions, or sites that just want to build an audience for retargeting. If you need leads, you almost never choose traffic. The algorithm learns to bring people who click on ads, and learns nothing about who fills out a form.
What about emergency services?
There, Meta probably isn’t the place at all. Someone who needs a locksmith right now searches on Google, or even asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, and would rather call directly.
