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You're Teaching Facebook to Find Broke People

1 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, Eric Deeran explains how marketers often collect leads without any friction on their forms, resulting in a flood of unqualified or low‑quality data being sent back to Facebook's ad platform. Because Facebook optimizes for the campaign objective—delivering the most leads or calls at the lowest cost—it interprets every returned lead as a signal of the type of user the advertiser wants. When the returned leads are unqualified, Facebook learns to target more of those low‑quality, often "broke" users. This creates a feedback loop that degrades campaign performance, a phenomenon Deeran calls the "death spiral," where the platform continuously optimizes for the wrong audience and results tank. He highlights the need for proper lead qualification and data hygiene to break this loop and keep the ad platform focused on high‑value prospects.

Chapters

Most people have absolutely no friction on their form whatsoever. And so they're sending back bad data to the ad platform and then expecting to get better quality. And what you're really teaching Facebook is that you want more broke people. Every time you send back an unqualified lead back to the platform, you tell Facebook that you want more of those people. And Facebook is designed to get you as many of what you want, your campaign objective, leads or calls, at the cheapest price possible. And when you tell it and you send back any data that's coming through, whether it's qualified or not qualified, you run into an issue where you're constantly sending back bad data and then Facebook continues to optimize for that bad person. This causes most of your results to tank, and then it gets into what we call the death spiral, where it's constantly optimizing for these bad pockets of people, and it's very difficult to get out of that once you get into that.