I've personally managed Meta Ads for hundreds of brands big and small
Meta will happily give you volume. Getting leads your sales team actually wants takes feeding real outcomes back into it.
Work withLead gen accounts almost always fail in the same direction, and it is rarely the fault of the media buying.
Cost per lead is down and revenue has not moved, because you have optimised toward the cheapest form fill rather than the most likely customer.
Sales say the leads are rubbish, marketing say sales are not working them, and nobody is feeding any of that back into the platform.
Meta only ever learns that someone submitted a form. It has no idea which submissions turned into money, so it keeps finding more of the wrong ones.
The form is deliberately frictionless, which is exactly why it fills up with people who were never going to buy.
This is the discipline where the gap between platform metrics and business results is widest, so most of the work is closing it.
If the algorithm only sees form fills, it will optimise for people who fill in forms. Sending qualified leads, opportunities and closed deals back through the conversions API changes what it goes looking for. This is the single highest leverage thing in most lead gen accounts and it is skipped constantly because it requires talking to whoever owns the CRM.
The easiest possible form produces the largest possible pile of unqualified leads. Adding a question that only a real prospect will answer costs you volume and improves everything downstream. How much friction is right depends on your sales capacity, which is a commercial decision rather than a marketing one.
An ad that appeals to everyone brings in everyone. Naming the price bracket, the type of business you work with or the problem you solve filters at the top of the funnel, where filtering is free. Broad appeal is expensive when your sales team is the bottleneck.
Cost per lead is a vanity metric if the leads do not convert. What matters is cost per qualified opportunity and eventually cost per customer, which means marketing and sales have to look at the same numbers. That is usually an organisational fix as much as a technical one.
I've personally managed Meta Ads for hundreds of brands big and small
Campaigns, forms, tracking and creative, plus an honest look at what happens to a lead after it arrives.
Get outcome data flowing from your CRM back to Meta so the platform optimises toward revenue rather than form submissions.
Rework forms and creative so the filtering happens before your sales team spends time on it.
Budget decisions tied to qualified opportunities and closed business, not to whichever campaign produced the cheapest enquiry.
What founders say about working with John on Meta campaigns
What I value most is the honesty. John tells me when an idea won't work and why, rather than nodding along and billing me for it. He's genuinely part of the business now, not a supplier I chase for updates.
Sandra Roycroft-DavisFounder, Slimpod
We'd been told our category was too niche for Meta to work properly. John rebuilt our creative approach around who actually buys from us, and the difference was obvious within weeks. No jargon, no endless meetings, just work.
Jason GrimaFounder, Swallow Co.
Instant forms convert better and qualify worse. Landing pages do the opposite. If your sales team has spare capacity, take the volume. If they are already stretched, the extra friction of a page usually pays for itself. It is a capacity decision before it is a marketing one.
Yes, but getting outcome data back to Meta should be near the top of the list. Without it you are asking the algorithm to find customers while only ever telling it about form fills. It can be done with something fairly simple to start with, so this is rarely as big a project as people fear.
It works, but not on the final sale. You optimise toward the strongest signal that occurs quickly enough for the platform to learn from, usually a qualified lead or a booked call, and use the longer term data to judge whether that signal is actually predicting revenue.
Often all three, doing different jobs. Meta is usually cheaper and better at creating demand rather than capturing it. If I do not think it suits your situation, I will say so at the enquiry stage rather than take the work.
Tell me what you're spending, what a good lead is worth to you and what happens after one arrives. I'll come back with an honest view on whether I can help.