Pay-Per-Call Facebook Ads: Run Meta Call Campaigns and Know Your Real Profit

The short answer

Build a Meta call ad with Calls as the conversion location. Use a phone number from the same country as your audience. Schedule the ads for the hours your buyer answers. Then pull Meta spend and call payout for the same dates and time zone, and subtract call-platform fees. What is left is the profit the campaign made.

Call ads vs call add-ons

Call ads: choose Calls as the conversion location

A call ad sends people straight to a phone call. Call ads can run with Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, or Sales. Awareness optimizes for the performance goal you select. Traffic, Engagement, Leads, and Sales optimize for 60-second calls (Meta: supported objectives for call ads). With Traffic, Engagement, Leads, or Sales, you pick Calls as the conversion location in the ad set.

Call add-ons: what they optimize for

A call add-on works differently. It sends people to your website first. A Call now button then opens in the in-app browser. Meta’s add-on page says: “Call add-ons optimize for website conversion events only.” You can choose “Website and calls” as the conversion location to optimize for both (Meta: create a call add-on).

Meta’s objectives page lists a different goal for each objective. For call add-ons, Traffic optimizes for link clicks, and Leads optimizes for leads and 15-second calls. Check the performance goal in your ad set before you launch.

Setup basics that shape the data

Objective: Traffic or Engagement optimize for 60-second calls

With Calls as the conversion location, the Traffic, Engagement, Leads, and Sales objectives optimize for 60-second calls. That is a Meta rule, not your buyer’s rule. If your buyer pays on a different call length, the Meta number will not match your payout. That gap is normal. The profit join below is what closes it.

Number in the same country as the audience

The phone number in the call-to-action must come from the same country as the target audience. The audience must be 18 or older. Meta’s Marketing API doc states both rules (Meta for Developers: call ads).

Schedule: hours and days matched to buyer hours

You can run call ads on specific hours and days. Meta recommends running call ads only during business hours. Match the schedule to the hours your buyer answers.

If you run regulated offers such as ACA, read our ACA pay-per-call page first. Those verticals have their own ad rules.

Set up a Meta call ad

These steps follow Meta’s create a call ad help page. Menu names can change, so check your own Ads Manager.

1. Pick Traffic or Engagement as the objective. Leads and Sales also work for call ads.
2. Set Calls as the conversion location in the ad set’s Conversion section.
3. Choose a Lifetime or Daily budget. Schedules need one of these.
4. Open Show more settings, then check “Set a schedule for ads.” Set the hours and days your buyer answers.
5. Add a phone number from the audience’s country to the call-to-action. Keep the audience at 18 or older.
6. Optional: turn on “Receive callback requests via Messenger” if you want people to request a callback.

What Meta reports, and what it doesn’t

Calls placed, 20-second calls, 60-second calls

Meta says call ad metrics are “partially derived through modeling, rather than a straight count.” Here is what each column means (Meta: view metrics for call ads):

• Calls placed. Times a call was made to your business by selecting an ad.
• 20-second calls. Calls placed that connected and lasted at least 20 seconds.
• 60-second calls. Calls placed that connected and lasted at least 60 seconds.
• Callback requests submitted. Requests people sent through the callback option.

To see the columns in Ads Manager, open Customize columns, then Engagement, then Calling.

Why metrics differ by account

Meta says some of these metrics are not available for campaigns created before 20 June 2025 outside the US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and Israel. So two accounts can show different call metrics, depending on country and on when the campaign was created.

Your payout follows the buyer’s billable rules

Meta counts calls. Your buyer pays on its own billable rules, and those rules live in the call platform’s payout settings. A common rule is a minimum call length.

Your profit comes from the buyer’s count. Copy the billable rule from the buyer’s terms into your sheet, next to the payout it affects, so the number is never a guess.

The profit join: spend, payout, fees, one window

Profit needs three numbers for one window: Meta spend, call payout, and call-platform fees. Pull each one for the same dates and the same time zone. Then subtract:

Net profit = call payout − Meta spend − call-platform fees.

ROI reads only Meta’s ad spend, not Meta’s call metrics such as calls placed or 60-second calls. It also reads Google and TikTok spend, if you buy there, and payout from the call platform. It places payout next to spend and posts net profit and ROAS to Slack every 15-30 minutes, depending on setup. Pricing is on the ROI page.

Try the free pay-per-call ROI calculator.

Worked example (example numbers)

These are example numbers to show the math, not real data. ROAS uses the definition from the profit formula guide: ROAS = (revenue − ad spend) ÷ ad spend, with revenue = call payout.

ROAS ignores fees. The example shows $100 above ad spend, but net profit is $70 after the $30 in fees.

Time zone and window alignment

Pick one time zone for the whole report. Check the zone each report uses: the ad account time zone in Meta, and the report zone in your call platform. Then pull both sides for the same window. ROI works in any time zone, so it can line up Meta spend and call payout in the zone you report in. For a Ringba setup, see the Ringba and Meta profit page.

Three ways to build the report

• Spreadsheet by hand. Export Meta spend by day, copy payout and fees from your call platform, and use the formulas in the profit formula guide. It works for a small account.
• DIY API build. Pull Meta spend from the Marketing API and payout from your call platform’s API, then join both on date and time zone. If you build the campaign through the Marketing API, the ad set uses destination_type PHONE_CALL and optimization_goal QUALITY_CALL. You own the code and every failure it has.
• ROI in Slack. ROI reads Meta’s ad spend (not its call metrics) and payout from your call platform, works out net profit and ROAS, and posts them to Slack. We read spend and payouts. We never bid. You can revoke access.

For how the five methods compare, see the pay-per-call profit tracking guide.