You told the algorithm what a good customer is. Then you got mad when it listened.
The day you send conversions back to Meta or Google, you stop measuring your customers and start defining them. Most founders never realize they gave that instruction — and then they blame the leads.
I’ve built the attribution stack for a commission-driven business — UTM tracking, funnels, pixel instrumentation, the whole thing — so let me save you a painful quarter.
There’s a feature every serious advertiser turns on eventually. You send your conversions back to the ad platform — Meta’s Conversions API, Google’s equivalent — so it can go find more people like the ones who convert. The pitch is true, by the way: better signal, better targeting, lower cost. I’m not here to tell you not to use it.
I’m here to tell you what nobody tells you when you flip it on. The second you send those conversions back, you are no longer measuring your customers. You’re defining them. You’ve handed the platform a description of a good customer, and the platform — which is genuinely excellent at its job — has gone out and found you thousands more people who match that description exactly.
The instruction you didn’t know you gave
Say your conversion event fires on any form fill. Congratulations: you just told the algorithm that a good customer is someone who fills out a form. Not someone who buys. Not someone who sticks around. Someone who fills out a form.
So it finds you form-fillers. Brilliantly. At a beautiful cost per form fill. Your pipeline fills up with people who love filling out forms and never buy a thing, and three weeks later you’re in a meeting saying “the lead quality has really dropped.”
It didn’t drop. You wrote a precise instruction and it was followed precisely. That’s not the algorithm misbehaving. That’s the algorithm doing exactly what you asked, and the gap is between what you asked and what you meant.
What to actually check
- Look at the event you’re really sending. Not the one you think you’re sending — go open it. Does firing it genuinely mean “good customer,” or just “someone did a thing on the site”?
- Optimize toward the money. If a good customer is one who pays and stays, feed back the payment, or a later-stage signal that tracks with staying. Not the cheap top-of-funnel event that’s easy to fire.
- Send quality, not just volume. The platforms let you pass a value or a downstream signal now. A closed deal three weeks later is a far better instruction than a click today. Use it.
You don’t need to understand the machine learning. Honestly, you don’t. You need to know you’re handing it an instruction, read that instruction back to yourself in plain English, and make sure it says what you actually want.
That’s not a technical skill. That’s the difference between delegating and abdicating — and it’s the whole game.