What are Click-to-Messenger ads?

Meta’s Marketing API guide says ads that click to Messenger send people who click “directly into conversations with your business in Messenger”. They support an image, a video, a carousel or a slideshow, and the guide says you can add call prompts. The ad is published to Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, and the chat itself happens in Messenger with your Page.

When someone taps, they see a first message. The guide says the default text is “Hello! Can I get more info on this?”. You can replace it with your own greeting, add icebreakers (tappable starter questions) and set autofill text. The guide caps an icebreaker title at 80 characters and an icebreaker response at 300.

Making the ad in Ads Manager needs no code. The API route, which the guide documents, needs an ad account, a Page, the Messenger Platform set up for your app and a Page access token from someone allowed to advertise on the Page.

• General click-to-message ads, where the campaign goal is engagement, sales or traffic and the optimisation goal is conversations.
• Messenger ads for leads, where the chat asks a few questions in order (a welcome step, up to several questions, a confirmation and a message for people who do not qualify) and the campaign goal is leads.
• Click to Subscribe, where tapping the “Get messages” button counts as the person agreeing to receive marketing messages from your business.

The guide treats Click to Instagram and Click to WhatsApp as separate ad types with their own pages, so a Messenger ad does not open an Instagram chat.

The ad only starts the conversation. Someone, or something, has to answer. A person can reply from the Page inbox, or a bot can reply through Messenger’s API. If you use software, check Meta’s messaging-window rules in your own app, because replying outside the standard window is restricted. The ads guide we read does not cover them, so we do not restate the limits here.

Tip: Write the greeting as the first line of a real conversation: say who you are, what the ad promised and one thing they can type or tap. A generic hello wastes the one moment the person is paying attention.