Should you optimize for leads or calls?

23 Oct 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:10

In this concise video, Eric Deeran explains how to decide whether to optimize paid‑social ad campaigns for lead submissions or for booked calls. He frames the decision around two practical criteria: (1) the daily ad budget and (2) the ability to generate at least one conversion event per ad set each day. For low‑budget campaigns ($50‑$200 per day) he recommends optimizing for qualified leads, using conditional logic to filter out unqualified respondents. As spend scales and the advertiser can reliably secure one scheduled call per ad set per day, he advises shifting the optimization target to booked calls, noting that insufficient daily events cause ad‑set instability. Throughout, he stresses the value of moving further down the funnel whenever possible to improve lead quality.

Chapters

If you're running ads, should you optimize for leads or should you optimize for booked calls? It really depends. It depends on what your budget is, A. It depends on can you get at least one event per ad set per day, and those are kind of the two main things I look at. So when you're looking at leads, if you are running a super low budget like $50, $100, maybe even $200 a day, I would say optimize for leads and optimize for qualified leads, and so make sure you have conditional logic that takes out people who are bad. And you're only optimizing for qualified leads. Now as you continue to scale your ad spend, if you're spending more money, at that point then you should start optimizing for scheduled calls, and that is assuming that you can afford to get 1 scheduled call per day. If you do not get 1 event per day per ad set, your ad sets start to jump around and then they just get really inconsistent performance from what we've seen, and so it really is looking at what is your budget, can you afford to get 1 of those things per day, And if so, then you can optimize for it. And obviously you always want to optimize further down the funnel when you can, simply because you're going to get better quality the more that you do that.