Best Marketing Agency Singapore
10-slide breakdown

Facebook told me I got 106 leads. In reality I only got 50.

The Lead column counts the form opening, not the form finishing, and your cost per lead is calculated on the first one.

  1. Facebook told me I got 106 leads. In reality I only got 50. F*** Facebook's tracking.
  2. The Lead column counts the form opening. Not the form finishing. Somebody types their email on the first step and Facebook records a Lead. Whether they ever finished is a different column, and nobody looks at it. Your cost per lead is calculated on the first one.
  3. My own account. Last month. Best Marketing's ad account, August 2026, every campaign in it:
  4. 56 people I paid for and never actually got. They opened the form, gave an email, and stopped. Facebook counted every one of them as a lead anyway. On the main cold campaign alone it was the same story. S$6,008 spent, 91 leads reported, 45 who finished.
  5. Then it goes looking for more people like them. Facebook optimises towards whoever triggers the event you told it to chase. If that event is Lead, it learns from the 106, not the 50. So your budget quietly goes hunting for more people who open forms and wander off.
  6. And you cannot fix last month. There is no button in Ads Manager that deletes a lead that was never real. Yesterday's number stays wrong permanently. The only thing you can change is what it learns from next.
  7. So change what it optimises for. Point the campaign at the finishing event, not the opening one. Send the genuine ones back as their own signal so it learns from those instead. It does not repair the old number. It changes who turns up next month.
  8. Check yours tonight. Four numbers, fifteen minutes, all of them already in your account:
  9. This is the most watched number in marketing. Cost per lead is on every report, every dashboard and every monthly call. And on most accounts nobody has ever once checked which column it was calculated from. It gets quoted with total confidence by people who have never looked.
  10. Your leads probably cost more than you think. And your ads are probably learning from the wrong ones. Both are fixable this week, and neither needs a bigger budget. Send this to someone who quotes their cost per lead straight off Facebook.

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