How to Get Qualified Leads with Facebook & Instagram Ads in 2026

Right, team, if your Facebook ads are bringing in broke leads, people who are never going to buy, who waste your time on sales calls or even ghost you, you're probably making the same mistake that's costing most coaches thousands of dollars in wasted ad spend. So stick around because in this video I'm going to show you the exact system that the top 1% of coaches are using to consistently get qualified leads, calls, and clients like clockwork. But before we dive into that, you need to understand what's changed and what broke. Now, several months ago, Meta started rolling out their Andromeda update and it broke every campaign structure and strategy that used to work. I know because it hit me and loads of my clients too, but we figured it out and we found the fix and now we're getting way better results than ever before. Now, the critical thing is that post-Andromeda, whoever hits your results column, that's who you're going to get more of. And most coaches are polluting the data that they send back to Meta with unqualified leads, unqualified calls, and so Meta's learning from that data and wasting more and more of your ad spend finding more and more unqualified people. In this video, I'm gonna show you exactly how to set up your ads to train Meta to find you qualified leads, calls, and clients consistently so you can stop wasting your time and your ad budget on people who are never gonna buy. Right, let's dive in. Now, just before I show you the system, let me show you the one number that changed everything about the way I run ads post-Andromeda, and it's this number here, 40% qualified leads. Now, before I made the changes I'm gonna share with you in this video, I thought my ads were crushing it, but I couldn't understand why that wasn't translating into clients and revenue. I was getting cheap leads, I was getting calls being booked, but what I was finding was that almost none of my leads were qualified. I did a deep dive, I went through every single lead that came in, over about a month-long period. And I realized whilst I was getting lots of leads, the number of those leads that were a good fit, that were my ideal client profile, my ICP, was way lower than I expected. So it meant that my ads were optimized for cheap leads, not qualified leads. And I thought because my cost per lead was low, because my conversion rate was good on my landing page, that everything was fine. And I was missing the one thing that actually made my business work. So for months after Andromeda, I was optimizing for cheap leads. I was getting leads at $6, $8 a lead, and I thought I was absolutely smashing it. My conversion rate on my landing page was anything up to 40% at one point, and I was kind of going, why isn't this working? But what was happening when I was reviewing the sales calls was that the people that were turning up were never gonna buy. They were the definition of browsers and tire kickers and time wasters. They wanted free advice. They weren't looking to invest in help that I was offering. And so all I was doing was spending my time on people who frankly wanted to waste my time. Okay, so here's the 2 things that you absolutely must get right with your ads post-Andromeda if you want to stop attracting broke leads and instead get high-intent people who are qualified and ready to buy. So the first pillar, the first part of the system is you must only send back qualified data to Meta. The way the algorithm now works is you tell it who you want through your creative. That is the first signal that you give it, and then you basically feed back the results that you want it to get more of. So if you are feeding back qualified people, you're literally sending a message back to Meta through that conversion event to say, these are the people I want more of. So it is absolutely crucial that you only send back qualified people and you filter out from that feed, from that signal going back to Meta, anyone who's unqualified. If they go into your signal, you are literally saying to Meta, go and get me more of them. And the mistake I see so many coaches making right now is they're sending everything back to Meta with no filtering. And so they're using polluted, bad data to train the algorithm and then wondering why their results suck and why they're getting all of these browsers and tire kickers. And it's actually worse than that because the way the algorithm now works is it has a very strong recency bias. What that means is who you've got as results more recently, that is going to— it's going to double down on getting you more people like that. So it overindexes, overweights recent results over historical results. So if you've started to see a downturn in your— in the quality of your leads, that is going to compound and get worse because of that recency bias. Now, that's both the bad news and the good news, because when you put the right things in place, you can actually turn it around very quickly when you start sending back the right data You can turn ad accounts really fast, and it's why we're able to switch our ad accounts for our clients around so quickly. But you've got to get the signal right. It's got to be clean. So if someone is unqualified, it should be absolutely invisible to Meta. You don't want it anywhere near your results column. You don't want Meta to see it at all. You want it to be invisible. And that means you've got to set up your conversion API so that it filters out the wrong people and only fires with qualified people. And then the second part is, as I said, your first conversion signal, your first targeting signal is you need to explicitly call out your ideal client in your ad. So Facebook transcribes your creative, your video, your copy, your landing page, your primary text to understand who should I be sending the signal to. The days of using interest targeting and lookalike audiences as the primary driver you're targeting, that now works against Andromeda and the way that it uses, the way that it's designed to target. Okay, so it's gonna look at all those things and it's gonna look at that as signal. Who should I be showing this ad to? So the more options, the more data points you give it about who you want your ad to be shown to, the better it's gonna get at finding those people without raising your cost per lead. So you've gotta target through your creative and then you've gotta send back the right training data through your conversion API with qualified leads. So remember, post-Andromeda, whoever hits your results column matters more than anything. Andromeda will automatically give more budget to ads that are generating the most events. It won't look at the quality, it'll just look at the highest number of conversions. So if your tracking isn't filtering for that quality, here's kind of what happens. Your ads are tracked tire kickers who fill out forms and they reschedule multiple times and they never show up and that fires loads of events. So Meta gets all of that data and the signal and goes, this ad is crushing it, I'm gonna get more people coming through like that. And so it actually assigns automatically more budget to that ad because it's the one that's generating the most conversion events. Meanwhile, you might have another ad that's attracting qualified people who, because they're higher intent, higher quality, more expensive, they might be happening less frequently, but that ad is gonna get starved of budget because it's not generating the same volume of conversion events as the ad that's attracting low quality tire kickers and time wasters. So what that means is you end up actually training Facebook backwards because of that lack of filtering. It thinks this is the ad that's performing when it's not giving you actually anything you ultimately need. It's effectively a set of vanity metrics, not that business metrics. So you want to show it that actually that quality— that ad— so you want to show it that the ad that's attracting qualified people is the one to double down on and focus on by making sure that that signal back is clean. Now, what matters next is when you set up your campaigns, it's about choosing the right optimization event. Now, this is going to be dependent on your budget and your niche, but I want you to understand the principle so you can make the best decisions with your own ads. So think of the optimization events as each having a different level of intent. So someone who is just literally a page viewer, they've probably got the lowest level of intent. Someone who opts in as a lead, they've got a higher level of intent again. Someone who actually has a history of booking calls, they've got a higher level of intent again. And someone that has a history of purchasing programs or products like yours, they've got a higher intent level again. Now Meta has that database of signal from all of its user base, and so it knows which people have a behavioral history that aligns with each of those different events. So you've gotta be careful in your selection of your event to optimize for the best signal, the highest intent signal that your budget supports. Now, we do this very successfully with clients when they can afford a budget that aligns with leads. Our preferred option is to go with schedules, but if you set things up right, leads works really well as well. But the more you can go higher up the chain, the better. We found that the sweet spot, if your budget supports it, is definitely schedule. That's where we're seeing the best results. Now, one of the things that's often misunderstood is people think that Meta needs 50 conversion events per week. Now, That is partly true, but it's also misunderstood. Now, the 50 conversion events element is truthful. Meta does need that in order to optimize. So think of it as almost like an airplane trying to take off. The takeoff speed where the ads truly hit the optimization window is when you get 50 conversion events in a week, and that's a rolling number, right? So every week you need to be generating 50 conversion events, but that doesn't mean it's the conversion events that you're optimizing for. So If, for example, you're optimizing for schedules, that doesn't mean that you need to get 50 schedules in order to optimize. It will look at all of those higher intent events, so leads, calls, and purchases. And if there's an aggregate of 50 across those, that gives it enough data to reach that takeoff speed. So that's why it works fine with leads. But obviously, if you are targeting a schedule, it knows you want those higher intent people again. But that can become more expensive and you've got to have the right budget to do it. Now, as a general rule of thumb, we find that the split from when you should use leads to when you should use schedules is if you're able to spend roughly $500 a day or more on ads. So if you do it at $500 a day or more, then you actually are better off optimizing for schedule. If your budget is less than $500 a day, then we would highly recommend using leads. That tends to work best. Now, as I said, it's way better to get a fewer number of higher intent signals than to get a larger number of lower intent signals. So make sure you choose your budget appropriately because the more you can get that good qualified data going back to Meta, the better your ads are going to perform. Okay, so leads, whilst they are a lower intent than schedules, they're still a really good signal. It still works really well. And what you can do is add a qualification question to your landing page, to your opt-in form, so you can identify who that qualified lead is and who it's not. So what you can see here, to give you an example of this, this is our landing page for our current offer. When someone clicks on the opt-in form, you see they've got their name, their email, their phone number. And here is the qualifying question: Are you an online coach with 5 to 10+ clients and $1,000 a month to spend in ads? So we know generally if people are answering yes to that question, then we know that they are generally a good fit for our offer and our program and they come with the right level of intent. If they answer no, we know generally they're not. So we have an automation set up. We use GoHighLevel that says when someone answers yes to this question, the conversion API back to Meta fires and sends that event back to Meta. If they answer no, no event fires. So this simple question is the critical way that we can filter out the low intent leads from the ones that truly work. We've seen leads work really well from $50 a day, even better at $100 a day. That's really when you can start to hit the sweet spot on leads, and it works well when you've got VSL or webinars, anything like that. It's a little bit slower to exit learning phase, but as I said, we get— still get great results with clients using leads as the opt-in, as the optimization event. $500 a day, you've got that higher intent budget, you've got the budget that allows you to bid effectively on those higher intent people where Facebook can see in their user database these people are more likely to schedule or purchase. So the higher budget allows you to bid on those people effectively. It's a higher intent signal. So Meta is able to find people who are ready to book calls, but the same process exists, right? So we can still see unqualified people come through into the call. So when they answer the questions on our application form, We manually review that, and again, we have an automation set up that we share with our clients inside our program where you can actually filter those and trigger to only send qualified people back across. So we know that we're gatekeeping and only sending back qualified people. Okay, when we can do this, we're really focusing on can we generate at least 1 to 2 book calls per day. That gives us faster learning and optimization because we've got that higher intent signal. And it's the sweet spot for high-ticket coaching programs. But we do recommend you have that manual layer review going in. Okay, now as I mentioned earlier, just to reiterate because this is really important, when you implement these changes, you are going to see your nominal cost per lead increase. But all that's doing is showing you the true cost of getting qualified people that was masked by the bulk of unqualified people that were coming through before. Effectively Before you were filtering, you had an artificially low cost per lead. Now you're just actually seeing the true cost of getting the people that you care about into your funnel and into your ecosystem. Now, just to give you a quick sense of how that review process works. So we set up a call pipeline in GoHighLevel against the system that we use and works really well. So when a new call booking comes in, it goes into a new call pipeline stage. We then review that, and if we see that someone's qualified, we then manually move that over to the qualified call stage. And that fires the Conversion API. We have a 3rd stage which is unqualified or duplicate. And if someone is an unqualified call, then we move into there and again, nothing goes across. So obviously you've got the application form, you've got your call booking, you do that manual review and then you make that decision. Okay. So the qualified call, we send pixel, we drag it to that relevant stage in GoHighLevel. The CAPI fires the pixel immediately via the workflow. And we tag that as a qualified call so we can then have that audience of qualified leads if we want to use that in any targeting or retargeting in our ads later on. Okay, we also make sure that reschedules don't fire that because we don't want those duplicate events polluting that signal back to Meta. If it's not qualified, they don't get— the pixel doesn't fire, the algorithm stays clean and uncontaminated. And by doing this, by using the Conversion API, rather than the pixel, you maintain full control over your signal quality. Super important post-Andromeda. Now, just to double down on how you use your creative to target effectively, remember, it's way better results now when you leave your targeting at the ad level much more open. So you literally just set your country and maybe if it's appropriate age range, but we found that actually the more open you can leave it, the better the targeting actually works. So you wanna be calling out your ICP, your ideal client profile, in multiple places. So you're giving Meta multiple ways of reading who your ad needs to go to. And I always try to think about this like if I'm showing this to a 10-year-old, could they share, could they understand who I'm really trying to show my ads to? So I might do that first of all in my creative, in the image or the video, visually signaling who it's for, in the ad copy or in the video script. And again on the landing page. Right now, again, I'm deliberately calling out higher intent premium clients. So for me, are you a coach making $5K to $10K plus a month with $1,000 a month to spend on ads? I don't want people who are not like that because again, they're not going to turn into buyers. Okay. So I will see again as a result of that, my cost per lead going up. But that's fine. That means that the system is working. Now, if you'd like to install this system in your business, if you'd like help getting your lead quality back to where it should be so you can stop wasting your ad budget and wasting your time on people who are never going to buy. We work with a small group of people every month. We are a high-touch business. We work alongside you to make sure this is set up right and to make sure you get the results. If that's something you think you'd like to do, click on the link in the description below. We'd love to jump on a call. We'll take a look at your ad account, see what's really going on, show you what you need to put right, and then if it's a fit, we can talk about what that looks like. If not, no worries. You'll still get all the help that we can give you on that call. Right, that's it for today. If you found this video helpful, please click on the like and subscribe button below. It really helps us out and helps us get this learning and these messages out to more people. We do videos every week on how to scale your ads and how to grow your business with the best paid ad traffic that brings you in qualified leads, calls, and clients like clockwork. I'll see you in the next video.