Launch an ad that opens a WhatsApp conversation

The money is yours, on your ad account. We never carry your spend: Meta bills you, on the account you connected.

Before you can create

Connect your ad account and the Facebook Page that will carry your ads, at the top of the screen. The “Create an ad” button only appears afterwards, and if it is missing, the screen tells you which of three points is blocking:

the account or the Page are not chosen yet;
Meta refused our access (reconnect);
the account has no payment method. This one is the most treacherous: the ad would be created, you would publish it, and it would never go out.

Your Page must also be linked to your WhatsApp number. This link is made at Meta, by hand, and Meta does not let us check it: the screen takes you to where it shows.

Create

The form is short, on purpose: a visual, a text, a headline, the button, the message the person will send, a total budget, dates, a country, a minimum age and, if you wish, audiences. The rest is set in Meta’s Ads Manager.

The button is chosen from a list: “Send WhatsApp message” (offered by default), “Learn more”, “Get quote”, “Book now”, “Contact us”, “Shop now”, “Order now”, “Sign up”, “Subscribe” or “Apply now”. Whatever the label, a tap opens the WhatsApp conversation with you, and the preview shows you the chosen label. ⚠️ Meta only guarantees the first one for this type of ad: if it refuses another button, its message shows when you create, and you just go back to the WhatsApp button.

If Meta refuses the creation, its message shows as is under the form: it is the one that says what to change.

Everything is created PAUSED. Clicking “Create” spends nothing: the campaign exists at Meta, stopped. The Publish button is what puts it live, and it first reminds you how much it can spend at most, and between which dates.

The total budget and the end date are required: they are what caps the spend.

A box asks you to confirm that the ad does not fall into any special category (housing, employment, credit, politics). These categories carry obligations this screen cannot handle: go through Meta’s Ads Manager.

An image or a video

The visual is one OR the other:

an image: JPEG or PNG, 5 MB at most;
a video: MP4 or MOV, 100 MB and 60 seconds at most. It is checked before sending, then uploaded to Meta right away (this costs nothing), with a progress bar. Meta then prepares it, usually in a few minutes: the screen shows you this wait, and you can keep filling in the form. The ad is only created once the video is ready.

For framing, vertical 9:16 suits stories, Reels and WhatsApp status, and 4:5 the feed. Other formats are accepted: Meta chooses the placements itself, and crops if needed. The video thumbnail is chosen by Meta among its frames.

The duration is read from the file itself: an iPhone video (MOV) goes through, even if your browser cannot play it. In the rare case where the duration is not in it, the video is refused: export it as MP4 (H.264).

To change the visual, image or video, use “Change” (you choose another file) or “Remove” (the form goes back to no visual, and so does the draft when you save it). A video upload in progress is cancelled the same way. A removed video stays in your ad account’s library at Meta, where it costs nothing.

Choose who sees the ad

On top of the country and the age, you can choose audiences already created in your ad account, to include or to exclude. The screen shows their approximate size. Only audiences ready at Meta can be chosen; the others show with the reason Meta gives (too small, being prepared).

⚠️ Meta applies Advantage+ audience, and this changes what an inclusion means: included audiences serve it as a suggestion, it can show the ad beyond them if it thinks it will find prospects there. Exclusions, the country and the minimum age, on the other hand, are always respected. If you want a customer base not to see the ad, exclude it.

With Advantage+, Meta only accepts a minimum age between 18 and 25 and sets the maximum age at 65: that is why the form offers nothing else.

Audiences are created in Meta’s Ads Manager; only those shared with your ad account show here.

Who answers the people who write

Each ad chooses it, and it is one or the other:

a scenario: it speaks, alone. If the automatic responder usually answers on this number, it will be kept away from the people who came from this ad. Only exception: if someone on your team is already talking to this person, the person stays with them, their message lands in their Inbox and the scenario does not start;
the automatic responder: the one you chose on the Home screen, in “Who answers the customer” (Meta’s agent, an AI agent or a scenario). Offered only if it is not your team. A prospect’s conversation is handed to it from their first message, and it answers. Its replies are still billed, even during the 72 free hours that follow a click: per token for Meta’s agent, on your AI credit for an AI agent.

⚠️ If it is not offered, the screen says why, and the two reasons are not confused: either your workspace has no automatic responder (your team answers), or we could not read it (in that case, reload the page). We would rather not offer it when we do not know than let you create an ad whose prospects nobody would answer.

⚠️ For people who came from an ad you run here, no other automation starts, neither “anyone arriving from an ad” nor “a new contact writes for the first time”. That is what guarantees that a paid click gets the answer you planned, and only one.

Follow the results

Each ad shows its status at Meta (in review, running, rejected, with the reason), read every fifteen minutes, and its start and end dates. A published ad whose start is still to come is filed under Scheduled and shown as “Scheduled”: it spends nothing before its start date. Its “Prevent the start” button pauses it at Meta; “Relaunch” schedules it again. The screen tells you the time of the last reading: if a figure surprises you, look at it before looking for a problem.

The funnel shows, step by step: the spend, the impressions (and their cost per 1,000), the people reached, the clicks (and their click-through rate, against impressions), the people who wrote, and those you qualified. For each step, what it costs and the share of the previous step that reaches it.

When a figure is not known, it is written “not available”, never “0”. Zero people does not give a cost of zero per person: it gives no cost. A “€0” would look like the best possible result, on the very screen used to decide whether to stop or add budget.

People not taken care of are counted separately: those we could not take back from Meta’s agent, those who had unsubscribed, those you blocked, and those who arrived on an ad whose scenario is not plugged in. These are clicks you paid for that produced no conversation: mixing them with the rest would make them invisible.

👉 Of the four, the last is the only one you can fix, and it shows right away: the ad stayed “ready, not yet published”, or its scenario has been deleted since. The three others are refusals that do not depend on you.

As soon as your ad account is chosen, each ad carries an Open in Meta’s Ads Manager link, on its campaign. We only show one reason when Meta gives several: that link is where you see the full list, and everything this screen does not show (whom Meta really targeted with Advantage+, placements, delivery history).

⚠️ If you had chosen “the automatic responder” and your workspace no longer has one (your team answers), the ad tells you. These prospects are not counted among those not taken care of, because the funnel assumes an agent answers them: without this message, the screen would show you an ad that works while nobody is on the other side. Choose who answers on the Home screen, or change the ad’s destination.

Mark a person as qualified

Choose a tag when you create the ad. As soon as this tag is set on a person, within the 28 days after they arrive, they count as qualified, and the funnel moves forward.

⚠️ Only tags set one by one count: by a scenario, from the Inbox, or by an AI agent. Setting the tag on a selection of contacts, or importing it, qualifies nobody.

Pause, relaunch

Both buttons act at Meta, on the campaign. The scenario, on the other hand, stays plugged in: someone who clicked just before the pause can write a few minutes later, and their click was paid for.

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