How to Optimize Meta & TikTok Ad Spend and ROI + Examples

Want to know how to send Meta and TikTok signals based on real customer conversions, not just engagement? Do it with Meta Conversions API (CAPI) and TikTok Lower Funnel Events. With respond.io, use AI Agents to respond and qualify customers instantly, then trigger Workflows that automatically notify Meta and TikTok as leads move forward, so your budget optimizes toward audiences that actually generate revenue, not noise.

Without this clarity, your ads often look like they’re working as your inbox is full. The problem is, revenue isn’t coming in. People click a Meta or TikTok ad, start a conversation, ask a question and then disappear. This happens because by default, ad platforms only track clicks and messages.

We’ll show you how change that to track what matters: who gets qualified, who books and who actually pays.

Why do Meta and TikTok ads underperform?

Clicks and conversations are not the same as sales. But if those are the only signals you send back to Meta and TikTok, that’s what they’ll prioritize. The result is predictable: more low-quality inquiries, more time spent chasing leads and less budget going to the people who are actually ready to buy.

This is very common for any business getting started with Meta and TikTok ads, but as soon as you understand why they’re underperforming, you can start improving them.

Spam engagement still counts as engagement

If the strongest signal you send back to Meta and TikTok is “lead” or “message started,” the platforms will do exactly what they’re designed to do: find more people who start messages.

And unfortunately, people who start messages are often spammers, flooding your inboxes with “hi,” “hello” and even offensive content.

Leads who show casual interest often aren’t qualified

For travel, education, beauty, automotive and many retail businesses, the purchase isn’t immediate. It often takes a few conversations where your team:

• Qualifies fit

• Answers objections

• Recommends the right option

• Schedules appointments

• Collects deposits or payments

If those steps aren’t captured as conversion milestones and sent back to the ad platforms, Meta and TikTok can’t learn what a good lead looks like. They keep chasing volume.

Response time quietly kills performance

Qualifying leads and filtering out spam takes time, often time that your team doesn’t have. And while sales agents are spending time dealing with spam, customers who are truly interested are kept waiting. When replies are too slow, they simply drop off.

Slow response creates a double hit:

1. You lose the sale

2. Your optimization feedback loop gets weaker

That’s why automation with chatbots or AI agents is essential; it helps filter through the noise to find leads that are ready to buy.

What counts as a conversion signal in a conversation funnel?

A conversion signal is a step in your conversation journey that strongly predicts revenue. You don’t need to track everything; you need to track what matters.

Here are the signals that usually make the biggest difference:

• Qualified lead

  The person meets your minimum criteria (budget, location, timeline, eligibility, etc.).

• High intent

  They ask about price/availability, choose a product/service option, confirm eligibility, or request next steps.

• Booked

  An appointment/test drive/consultation/reservation is confirmed.

• Paid / Deposit

  A payment or deposit is captured.

• Revenue confirmed(optional)

  Useful if you can reliably include value (e.g., order amount, deposit amount).

How do you send conversion signals back to Meta and TikTok?

So, now that you know what signals to send back to Meta and TikTok from your click to message ads, we’ll show you how to send them. For Meta ads on Instagram and Facebook Messenger, use CAPI, which needs to be set up in your Meta Business Manager and also connected to a platform like respond.io. TikTok integrates with respond.io in a similar way.

What is Meta CAPI and how does it improve return on ad spend?

Meta’s Conversions API (CAPI) lets you send conversion events directly to Meta from your systems, so Meta can learn from what happens after someone clicks your ad and starts a conversation.

That matters because with high-value purchases, the actions that predict revenue often happen inside chat: qualification, booking and payment. When those milestones are sent back to Meta as conversion events, Meta can optimize for the conversations that are more likely to turn into revenue, not just the ones that generate replies.

What this changes in practice:

• You stop optimizing for “message started” as the end goal.

• You give Meta clearer feedback on which conversations lead to revenue.

• Your reporting gets closer to the actual funnel your team runs every day.

What are TikTok Lower Funnel Events and how do they work?

TikTok Lower Funnel Events are very similar to CAPI. They’re conversion events you send back to TikTok when someone reaches meaningful milestones after engaging with your ads, especially when those milestones happen in messaging.

This helps TikTok learn what a strong outcome looks like in your funnel. Instead of optimizing around surface-level activity like clicks or replies, TikTok can use your lower-funnel milestones to improve targeting and delivery toward the audiences most likely to progress.

How to set up conversion tracking in respond.io

For effective conversion tracking, you need to connect to a conversation management platform like respond.io. This helps you capture conversion signals, send them to Meta and TikTok and then track your results and measure ROI. Here’s how to do it.

Capture ad replies in one workspace

If your ad replies are scattered across channels and inboxes, your conversion tracking becomes guesswork. For example, Meta Ads alone can go to three channels, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs, depending on your setup. Centralizing conversations helps you apply consistent milestones and makes it possible to trigger conversion events based on what actually happens in chat.

With a single inbox in respond.io, here’s what you get:

• One contact record per lead no matter how many channels they contact you on

• Clear visibility into the whole customer lifecycle

• Integration with a CRM and advanced reporting within the platform itself

Set up customer lifecycle management

Respond.io’s Lifecycle management feature enables businesses to track and manage the full customer journey, from first contact to purchase to loyalty. For example, the first stage in a Lifecycle is typically New Lead. When the lead shows interest and/or is qualified, they can be updated to Hot Lead so agents know this lead is a priority. Once a lead has made a booking or payment, the stage is again updated.

You can choose to use default Lifecycle stages or customize them to your business. Stages can be updated manually or with automation, and can also be used to trigger further automation, like sending a signal to Meta’s CAPI or TikTok.

Qualify leads automatically with AI Agents

In message-based funnels, speed and consistency win every time. The problem is, human agents often waste valuable time responding to junk leads while the quality ones are kept waiting. That’s where AI Agents come in.

AI Agents can:

• Respond instantly the moment a lead messages you

• Ask questions aligned to your qualification criteria

• Capture structured details (budget, timeline, preferences, eligibility)

• Label outcomes clearly (qualified / not qualified / needs follow-up)

• Automatically trigger workflows

  to send CAPI/TikTok Lower Funnel Events

• Route hot leads to a human when it’s time to close

The practical benefit isn’t just faster replies. It’s cleaner, more reliable signals—because qualification isn’t dependent on which team member answered or how busy they were.

Send conversion events with Workflows (Meta + TikTok)

It’s a similar process for both Meta and TikTok. Here’s how to set up conversion events for each one.

Meta CAPI

Once you’ve decided on which conversion events to track, set them up with respond.io Workflows and Meta Business Manager. In Meta business manager, you can select all channels where events will occur. Then, when you set up the Workflow, you can select which business account and channels as well as which events occurred; e.g., the lead made a purchase.

With CAPI, you can only select two types of events, lead or purchase. However, in respond.io, you can configure which types of actions in the conversation trigger the event, for example, a lead being qualified could be sent as a “lead” event and an appointment booking could be sent as a “purchase” event.

TikTok Lower Funnel Events

When TikTok is connected to respond.io, you can automatically log conversion events in respond.io and send them to TikTok without doing any additional set-up in TikTok.

TikTok supported events also include negative events, e.g., spam, disqualified conversation, cancelled order. This helps weed out the types of contacts you don’t want to see your ads faster. These events also fit with respond.io’s Lifecycle Lost Stages which track leads that dropped off or were disqualified.

With respond.io’s Workflows, you can trigger an event in CAPI or TikTok based on what a Lifecycle stage is updated to for clear tracking and reporting.

Tie outcomes to revenue for real ROI

If you want to prove ROI quickly, don’t start with perfect attribution. Start with a clean chain of evidence.

At minimum, connect:

• how leads became qualified

• how many leads booked

• how many leads paid (or paid a deposit)

If you can include value cleanly (deposit amount, order value), that’s even better; but it’s optional. The bigger win is getting your ad platforms to optimize around milestones that correlate with revenue.

3 Businesses boosting ROI with respond.io and Meta + TikTok Ads

Here are some real-life examples of how businesses are using respond.io to optimize their click to chat ad performance and increase revenue.

Diskat: E-commerce business slashes costs in half with CAPI and TikTok Lower Funnel Events

Diskat is a Guatemala-based e-commerce retailer offering affordable consumer products, from electronics and gadgets to household and lighting items, through its online store. The business runs successful social media ads and gets hundreds of orders daily via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and TikTok.

To optimize Meta and TikTok ad performance, Diskat connected Meta’s Conversion API (CAPI) to respond.io, enabling it to target audiences with similar traits as customers who made a purchase. Respond.io’s TikTok Lower Funnel Events Workflow serves a similar purpose, sending conversion data to TikTok.

The conversion APIs were connected with respond.io’s Lifecycle feature, so that changing a contact’s stage to “New Order” triggered conversion events for both Meta and TikTok. This setup gave the ad platforms real-time data about buyers who made purchases to improve audience targeting and reduce wasted ad spend on low-quality leads.

By improving conversion tracking through CAPI and TikTok Lower Funnel Events, Diskat cut marketing and operational costs in half without sacrificing performance.

ParcelDaily grows Facebook and TikTok leads 35% with campaign optimization

ParcelDaily is a courier service serving e-commerce businesses, offices and individuals across Malaysia. The business was also running Meta and TikTok ads, but struggled to keep up with replies and sort out high quality leads from spam.

For businesses like ParcelDaily that are getting started with Meta and TikTok ads, spam is inevitable. Targeting is never precise enough and low quality leads quickly pile up. Here’s the fix: teach ad platforms what a quality lead looks like so fewer low-intent contacts enter the inbox.

After ParcelDaily integrated Meta’s Conversion API and TikTok Lower Funnel Events with respond.io, lead quality increased so agents spent less time filtering junk and more time engaging real customers, while ad spend became more efficient because optimization was based on actual revenue impact, not just engagement like clicks or form fills.

Meta’s Conversion API helped it achieve a 60% increase in conversion rate, while Facebook and TikTok leads grew by 35% as ad campaign optimization improved.

Just as importantly, lead quality improved in a measurable way: cost per lead from Meta Ads decreased by 10%, driven by conversion-based optimization through CAPI and TikTok lower-funnel events.

noonmar increases new customers 65% by optimizing click to chat ads

noonmar is a global e-commerce marketplace known for authentic Turkish goods, including sweets, health and beauty products, jewelry and accessories, and home décor. It runs click to chat ads on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok that drive conversations to WhatsApp. While the business saw a high volume of chats, it couldn’t determine how many actually led to purchases.

By integrating Meta’s CAPI and TikTok Lower Funnel Events with respond.io, noonmar started sending conversion events back to Meta and TikTok. This helped both ad platforms improve targeting by learning which types of users were likely to convert, leading to higher-quality leads and better ad performance.

By optimizing its click to chat Meta ads via CAPI, noonmar has seen a 40% increase in new customers. Thanks to better targeting, the leads it attracts are more likely to buy. The number of leads has also increased by 10% as the business has a greater understand of which ads motivate conversations.

Start tracking Meta + TikTok ROI with respond.io

If you’re running click-to-message ads, your best optimization lever isn’t another creative refresh; it’s feeding Meta and TikTok the outcomes that actually predict revenue.

With respond.io, you can:

• Respond instantly to ad replies with AI Agents

• Qualify leads consistently

• Automatically trigger Workflows that send conversion events when leads get qualified, booked, or paid

• Connect conversation outcomes to revenue so ROI is measurable

If your sales happen in conversations, your tracking should reflect that. When Meta and TikTok receive the right conversion events, they can optimize toward the conversations that actually turn into revenue.

Create a respond.io account today to start sending real conversion signals from your conversations and measuring ROI end-to-end.

Further Reading

To learn more about how to get the most of your click to chat ads, check out these other articles.

• Click to Message Ads: 4 Best Practices to Maximize Leads

• Click to Chat Ads for Lead Generation: The Ultimate Guide

• Harness TikTok Messaging Ads to Boost Sales