Facebook leads campaign - phantom clicks on WA web
Hello folks,
This is my first instance here, and I would like to introduce you to an issue/weird behaviour that I am facing with my Facebook ad campaign.
And before I start, I contacted Meta support, looked up until the 6th page of google search, asked GPT, and Claude, but I am still unable to find an answer.
So.. I have thought that this might have been something I would find an answer for here, with seasoned advertisers, or maybe someone who happened to have dealt with something similar.
I run an image-creative lead generation ad campaign, and the goal is messaging conversations directly to my Whatsapp business number (Connected, No APIs, and I have tested it on my partner's phone by clicking on the ad, and it redirected him to WA and all was fine).
-My campaign budget is 6$ a day, with one adset, containing two ads for different ad text (Same creative).
-Target audience size is 450K.
-Page is 3 months old, and I run ads for a similar business in the same industry, so I have a good idea on what to target as a start.
The issue is, after running the ad for 3 days, when I check on my "Messaging Conversations Started" column, the number is off by around 10x. I mean... I know from my experience that Meta reporting is not reliable, however, you would expect about 80% accuracy that you can build a general understanding on the campaign's performance.
However, the interesting thing is, when I open my WA business account on WA web, I started noticing new chats (Empty chats), that just appears on WA web with the following prompt (+XXXXXX turned on disappearing messages. new messages will disappear from this chat in 24 hours). Just like that, no prefilled message sent, no nothing.
These chats do not appear on my WA app, only on WA web.
I thought this might be bad quality traffic, however why are they all on disappearing messages mode!
Finally, when I decided to keep WA web open, I counted them, including the few real messages I got, they almost match Meta reporting.
Is this normal? these numbers are local numbers (Local numbers here requires national IDs), some with profile pictures that looks legit.
Sorry for the long post, but please let me know if anyone has experienced similar issue.
Cheers!