Messenger ads that start a conversation.

Ads that open a chat with your business instead of sending people to a website. Most run as click-to-Messenger ads in the Facebook or Instagram feed; tap one and a conversation opens straight away, often with an auto-reply to get things moving.

They run from the same Meta Ads Manager as the rest of your campaigns.

Same auction as the rest of Meta, paid mostly per result. The cost worth tracking is per conversation that turns into a booking or sale, not per chat opened. A pile of opened chats that go nowhere is an expense, not a result.

Work out what a customer can cost you with the calculator on this page, then judge conversations against it.

Someone or something does, fast. You can answer personally, share it with a team, or set up auto-replies and a chatbot to handle the first step. What you can't do is start conversations you never answer, which is the quickest way to waste the budget.

For most small businesses, a simple auto-reply plus a human for the real questions is plenty.

They can be excellent, because a chat qualifies people as it goes. Instead of a form, you ask the questions that matter and warm leads identify themselves in the conversation.

The trade is speed: a lead who's chatting wants answers now, so the reply time decides whether the lead stays warm.

Click-to-Messenger ads appear in the feed and start a new chat when someone taps. Sponsored messages land in the inbox of people who've already messaged you, so one finds new conversations and the other revives old ones.

They suit different jobs, and what's available can vary by region and over time.

For the opening moves, yes: answering common questions, qualifying, booking a time, handing the tricky ones to a person. A good bot keeps the chat alive long enough for a human to take over, especially after hours.

What it shouldn't do is pretend to be a person or trap people in a loop. The handover to a human has to be obvious and quick.

Anyone who sells through a conversation: trades quoting jobs, clinics taking bookings, dealerships, real estate, education, high-consideration products. If your customers usually ask a question before they buy, Messenger meets them at that moment.

Pure impulse purchases that need no discussion get less from it than a straight feed ad.

As close to instant as you can manage. Interest fades by the minute once someone's reached out, so an auto-reply within seconds and a real answer within the hour is the standard worth holding.

The businesses that win on Messenger aren't the ones with the cleverest ad. They're the ones that answer.

Yes. People who've opened a chat become an audience you can follow up with, through sponsored messages or ordinary ads. A conversation that stalled is a warm lead worth a second touch, not a dead end.

How that follow-up should run is covered on the remarketing page.

They're part of the same system, so yes. Many accounts run feed ads to sell directly and Messenger ads for the buyers who need to ask first, letting each customer take the path that suits them.

Pointing every campaign at a chat would be a mistake. Messenger earns its place for the offers a conversation actually helps.

Only if you do it badly. The chat starts because someone tapped your ad, so they invited it. Stay helpful, answer what they asked, and make leaving easy, and it reads as service, not intrusion.

It tips into creepy when businesses spam, auto-message people who never engaged, or refuse to let a chat end.

Then start with automation, or wait. A simple auto-reply that answers the basics and books a time can carry the load between human replies. But a channel built on conversation needs someone, eventually, to converse.

If nobody can commit to that, the budget will do more on a feed campaign that sends people to a page instead.