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If you want more high-intent phone leads from social media, Meta Call Ads make it a one-tap affair to connect with your business directly from Facebook or Instagram. In Ads Manager, you can create Call Ads with traffic, engagement, leads, or sales objectives to best suit your goals. There are some shortcomings to the conversion signals that Facebook’s native tracking provides, though, which can make attribution dodgy. We’ll show you how to solve that, though!
Here’s everything you need to know about Facebook call ads and how to get more accurate call attribution to get the most out of your marketing dollars.
What Are Facebook Call Ads?
Facebook call ads are an ad format that allows customers to call a business directly from their mobile device after seeing an ad on the Facebook platform.
What Are the Benefits of Facebook Call Ads?
Facebook's call ads make the user experience easier because your potential customers don’t have to go searching your website or the internet to find your phone number (just be sure to include a call to action like “Click here to call us now!” so that viewers know it’s an option!) In addition, phone leads are often your most valuable conversions, and click-to-call ads help you drive more of them. According to research, callers convert faster, spend more, and remain loyal.
How to Set up Facebook Call Ads
It’s easy as 1-2-3:
- In Ads Manager, create a new campaign and choose an objective that supports Call Ads: sales, leads, or traffic.
- At the ad set level, set the conversion location to 'calls'.
- Finish building the ad, add your business phone number, and publish. Optional: enable request a callback so people can ask you to call them back via Messenger.
Since Call Ads are designed for mobile placements, you also need to ensure that mobile inventory is included in your targeting. Learn more about setting up your call ads here.
Facebook Call Ads Aren’t Just for Local Businesses
Call Ads aren’t just for local, single-location businesses. With sales, leads, or traffic objectives, you can target multi-location audiences and service areas, then use the Call Now CTA to connect them directly with the right team.
Though Facebook call ads are intended to reach local audiences, that does not mean they are just for mom-and-pop shops. Call Ads allow you to connect with people at multiple business locations, enabling you to precisely target consumers who are near locations or localities that you service. This is ideal for home services companies with branches set up to serve specific cities, distributed insurance agencies serving a single state, and businesses like hotels with multiple locations that receive numerous calls for information before booking a room.
Call Ads Aren't the Only Way to Drive Calls from Facebook
While click-to-call ads are great for many applications, if you’re in a considered purchase industry like financial services, a customer who finds you on Facebook may not be ready to call you right then and there.
You can also use Facebook ads and promoted posts with a different CTA button like “Get info.” From there, they can click to visit your website to obtain more information, such as interest rates or product offerings, and then call your business from the number provided on your website. If you expect this type of traffic, ensure that your phone number is prominently displayed on every page and that it’s clickable from mobile devices.
However, when you direct your customers from Facebook to your website and expect them to call, you may be unintentionally creating a gap in your marketing data. Once the customer picks up the phone, you can’t tell that they engaged with your ad on Facebook and therefore won’t know if your spending there is effective.
Which Meta Objectives Support Call Ads, And When Should B2C Brands Use Each?
Meta supports Call Ads under three objectives: leads, sales, and traffic. Let’s break down which objective is the best to use to reach your specific marketing goals.
Leads objective
Best for: Driving appointment requests, quotes, and service inquiries.
How it works: Optimizes to find people likely to initiate a call or request a callback. It can also provide a pre-call website link for setting the warm-up context.
Benefits: Strong fit for lead-gen KPIs and aligns to CRMs and downstream nurturing. Often the best starting point for service-driven categories.
Pitfalls: Lead volume can over-index on callers seeking quick information. Meta’s call and duration metrics don’t confirm true qualification without additional call analytics.
Sales objective
Best for: Phone-assisted purchases or commitments taken over the phone.
How it works: Targets lower-funnel behavior; in many accounts, you can optimize for longer calls (for example, 60-second calls) as a higher-intent proxy.
Benefits: Tighter alignment with revenue outcomes when phone sales are common.
Pitfalls: 60-second calls are a proxy, not a closed sale. Performance can look volatile without post-call outcome data.
Traffic objective
Best for: Upper- and mid-funnel audiences who prefer to research first and then call.
How it works: Sends people to your site and can include a call extension; you can still count calls and callback requests.
Benefits: Useful for warming up shoppers with FAQs, pricing, or service information before they call.
Pitfalls: For brands prioritizing leads or sales, Traffic is usually a supporting tactic, not the core objective. It tends to drive more research behavior than revenue events.
It’s also important to note that Meta’s call reporting uses estimated “calls placed” and duration-based metrics, such as 20-second and 60-second calls to attribute call outcomes. These are helpful signals, but they do not confirm whether a conversion actually happened.
Mind the Data Gap
So, when you send customers from your Facebook ad (or any digital campaign) to your website and then to the phone, it’s easy to see how you lose track of attribution for the call. However, with call ads, Facebook provides its own analytics that show you ad impressions, total spend, and the number of people who clicked the “call now” button. Problem solved, right? Not quite.
While you could potentially correlate those clicks to call volume, there is no 1-to-1 connection between any caller and the ad when using Facebook’s analytics on its own. This is not to mention that clicks don’t necessarily mean calls. Whenever someone clicks the "call now" CTA, Facebook records it as a call. However, it is not a direct dial — it simply brings up the dialer on the user’s phone, and they may not have actually made the call.
To bridge the data gap in both of these situations, you need to employ a robust call tracking and analytics solution.
Using Call Tracking with Facebook Click-to-Call
With an AI-powered call tracking solution like Invoca, you can get full attribution for all of your click-to-call campaigns on Facebook (as well as Google and Bing call extensions) and maintain a 1-to-1 relationship between your customer, their digital journey, and your advertising spend.
With Invoca, you can determine if the click of the "call now" button on Facebook resulted in a call and whether it drove a sale. Our Signal AI call analytics can detect the disposition of a call, allowing you to take the next best marketing action automatically in real-time following the call. That means if a caller makes a purchase, for instance, Signal AI detects it and sends the data to your marketing stack, allowing you to automate ad suppression for every customer. This saves you money because you’re not paying for their attention after they've made a purchase. Not to mention that people find it annoying getting bombarded with ads after making a purchase, so you’re also improving the customer experience.
Invoca also bridges the data gap when it comes to sending people from Facebook to your website for more information. If the customer calls after clicking on a Facebook ad and arriving on your website, our Facebook integration allows you to see every step of that journey and attribute the call and its outcome to the ad.
5 Tips to Optimize Facebook Call Ads
Like any form of digital marketing, Facebook call ads require careful optimization to get the right people to call your business. Here are a few ways to make sure your call ads are more effective:
1. Facebook best practices apply
Keep your text under 90 characters, link titles under 25, and do not use text overlays in images.
2. Target the right prospects
Time is money, and budget is…well…money, and you want to make sure you’re optimizing both! If you’re new to the game, you might go through some growing pains, but give it time (and again, money) to collect enough data to steer you in the proper direction. Location is an easy parameter to manage if you’re a small business and just starting out. Drawing local attention and getting shout-outs or tags on social media will create a ripple effect and help grow your audience, who can then be targeted further!
3. Use call tracking data to optimize ads
When you use a call tracking solution like Invoca, you can understand how many phone calls each of your Facebook ads drives, in addition to online conversions. You can also get visibility into the quality of those calls and how many are true leads. If you're receiving a high volume of calls from your ads that are not converting or are driving service calls, you may need to adjust your ad copy or target audiences.
4. Display ads at the right time
Ensure that you display your call ads during business hours and during peak call times. Use call tracking data to determine the best times.
5. Test, test, test
Like all your marketing efforts, you have to throw a few things out there to see what works. The good thing is, when you’re using Invoca, you actually KNOW what works and what doesn’t, so there’s no guessing and your trial-and-error ends in results instead of more head scratching.
Drive More ROI from Your Social Advertising with Invoca
Invoca has a suite of no-code Social Advertising integrations for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Snapchat. These easy-to-install integrations work seamlessly with your existing workflows and allow you to:
- Accurately measure campaigns: Track the phone leads and conversions driven by your social advertising to understand their true performance and impact on business results.
- Optimize marketing spend: Make more informed social ad spend decisions that optimize for better engagement, higher conversion rates, more revenue for the business, and less wasted ad spend.
- Improve retargeting and suppression: Stop wasting your budget on costly retargeting to converted customers. Focus your ad spend on highly engaged prospects that are known leads to convert them and keep them from going to the competition.
- Build higher-performing lookalike audiences: Create lookalike audiences based on your most valuable social media phone leads for more effective advertising and higher ROAS.
To learn how Invoca’s social advertising integrations can help you drive more ROI, request your personalized demo today.
