MIQAS
By Ensign
Docs · Connect your ad platforms

Meta lead ads with MIQAS, start to finish

This page is for the person who runs the ads and the person who runs the sales team, whether or not they have done this before. It explains what happens between a Meta lead form and a closed deal, what MIQAS does on its own, and the few things only you can do.

What Meta sees today

When someone fills in your Instant Form, Meta records one moment: the form fill. It does not know whether that person ever visited, signed or paid. So when Meta looks for more people like your leads, it looks for more people who fill in forms. Plenty of leads, not many buyers, is the usual result, and it is not a targeting mistake. Meta was never told who bought.

What changes with MIQAS

Every form lead lands in MIQAS within seconds of being submitted, with the answers and the ad it came from. Your team works the lead in MIQAS and marks what happened: qualified, appointment booked, visited, deal won. MIQAS sends each of those moments back to Meta within 5 minutes, tied to the exact lead. From then on Meta can judge your leads by what happened after the form, and look for more people like the ones who bought. TikTok and Snapchat, when they are connected, receive the stages they accept: booked appointments and won deals on both, plus qualified leads on TikTok.

Step 1: connect Meta, once

Only one person can do this: someone who is an admin of the Facebook Business that owns the ad account and the Facebook Page the form belongs to. In MIQAS they open Settings → Integrations and press Connect with Facebook, choose the business, tick the ad account, the pixel (Meta calls it a dataset) and the Page, and leave every permission switched on. The details are on Connect Meta. Until this is done nothing moves in either direction, and MIQAS shows the lead stages as "not connected".

Step 2: run your lead campaign as you always have

Nothing changes in how you build the ad. A Leads campaign with an Instant Form, the questions you want, the audience you want. MIQAS picks the leads up by itself, the moment they are submitted, with Meta's own lead ID attached. You do not export anything and you do not add any code.

Step 3: your team marks what happens, in MIQAS

This is the only daily work, and it is the whole point. On the Leads page each lead has a stage (Enquiry, Qualified, Appointment booked, Visited, Deal won) and a status (Contacted, No response, Cold, Warm, Hot, Converted). When the team moves a lead forward, MIQAS sends that move to Meta within 5 minutes, once. A lead that is never moved tells Meta nothing, so a team that does not update MIQAS gets none of the benefit.

If your business uses its own stage words, such as Proposals sent, Meta still lists MIQAS's fixed names: Qualified, Appointments booked, Visited and Deal won. Your words show only inside MIQAS.

Step 4: tell Meta to optimise for buyers, in Ads Manager

MIQAS never changes your campaign settings; this part is yours. Open the ad set, find the Conversion section, and change the performance goal from "Maximise number of leads" to "Maximise number of conversion leads", then pick the stage you want more of, for example Visited or Deal won. Meta offers this once it is receiving your stages (it calls them CRM events) and then needs 2 to 4 weeks of learning before the full effect shows.

At the ad level, the Tracking box lists every kind of data Meta could use and writes "Set up" next to the ones your account has not sent yet. CRM events: Set up changes on its own after your first stage arrives from MIQAS; there is nothing to click. Offline events: Set up is for uploading files of in-store sales and is not needed with MIQAS. A warning that your Meta Pixel is not active refers to the pixel on your website and does not affect Instant Form leads.

What Meta requires before it optimises

Meta's own conditions for the conversion leads goal, from its developer documentation: at least 200 leads a month; the stage you optimise for reached by 1 to 40 percent of leads; that stage reached within 28 days of the lead; data sent at least once a day (MIQAS sends every 5 minutes); and the goal works only with Instant Forms. Below those numbers MIQAS still sends every stage and Meta still shows them in your reporting; it just does not optimise on them yet.

Who does what

  • The business admin: connects Meta in MIQAS, once.
  • The sales team: moves leads through stages and statuses in MIQAS, every day.
  • Whoever runs the ads: switches the ad set to conversion leads once Meta is receiving stages, and reads the results.
  • MIQAS: everything in between, automatically.

Questions people ask

Does MIQAS turn my lead campaign into a conversion campaign? No. It stays a Leads campaign with an Instant Form. What changes is what Meta learns from: real outcomes instead of form fills.

Does MIQAS send the lead itself back to Meta? No. Meta already counted the form fill. MIQAS sends only what happened afterwards.

The team moved a lead a minute after the last send. Is it lost? No. Every change waits in a queue and the next run, within 5 minutes, takes everything that has not been sent yet. Nothing depends on timing.

What if a lead is moved by mistake? A stage that was sent cannot be taken back, and moving a lead backwards sends nothing. Moving it forward again to a new stage sends that new stage, once.

Why does Ads Manager still say CRM events: Set up? Because no stage has reached Meta yet. Either Meta is not connected in MIQAS or the team has not moved a lead. It updates by itself after the first send.

Can Meta see my customers' phone numbers?No. A Meta form lead is matched by Meta's own lead ID. Phone numbers and emails are hashed one-way before anything leaves MIQAS, and raw values are never sent.

What about leads from my website form? Once the MIQAS pixel is on your site, any submitted form with an email or phone becomes a lead by itself, with its answers; see Install the pixel on any website. Their stages go back to the platforms the same way, matched by the click that brought them.

What about leads I import from a file? They are reported too, after you tick the confirmation at import that the contacts gave you their details directly and the list was not bought. A contact who opted out is never reported, whatever the source.

What about TikTok, Snapchat and Google? When connected, TikTok receives Qualified, Appointment booked and Deal won, and Snapchat receives Appointment booked and Deal won. Neither receives Visited or the statuses; those go to Meta only. Google does not receive lead stages yet; its offline lead conversions need a connection MIQAS does not hold today.

How do I know it is working?In MIQAS, each lead shows which platforms received its stages and any reason a platform refused. In Ads Manager, the ad's Tracking box lists the CRM events, and Events Manager shows them on your dataset.

The technical detail of what is sent, how a lead is matched and the consent rules is on What MIQAS sends back for lead businesses.