Meta promotes two things together: the catalogue, which lets people browse products inside the chat without moving to a shop. And click-to-WhatsApp ads, which open a conversation instead of a landing page.
Both are good. Both remove a serious amount of friction: instead of filling in a form, somebody taps once and writes "hi".
Why a tap beats a landing page
- No form, no fields, no drop-off halfway through.
- A familiar app. Nothing new to learn.
- The question gets asked while the interest is still fresh.
- The thread persists. You can pick it up days later without starting over.
On the frequently quoted 98 percent open rate versus roughly 20 percent for email: those figures have circulated for years without a solid primary source, and they measure the wrong thing anyway. What matters is not whether a message is opened but whether it is answered — by you.
The part the ad does not cover
Sunday, 22:47. Somebody sees the ad, taps, lands in the chat and asks: "do you have that in a 42 in blue, and when would it arrive?"
The catalogue cannot answer that. It displays products. It does not check stock, does not know delivery times and qualifies nobody. By Monday morning the person has either found it elsewhere or forgotten about it.
That is the most expensive moment in the whole funnel: the purchase intent was paid for and present — and then no answer came.
What the answering half has to do
- Reply in under a minute, day and night.
- Answer real product questions — size, availability, price, delivery — from your data, not from guesswork.
- Qualify inside the conversation instead of bolting a form on afterwards.
- Recognise when a human has to take over.
- Follow up when the conversation stalls.
And one more thing: the pixel sees none of it
What happens in the chat never reaches Events Manager. Meta then optimises for clicks, because clicks are the only thing reported back. Connect the Conversions API and you report the events that matter instead: qualified conversation, booked appointment, sale. How that works technically is here.
alkaio is the answering half: the agent answers the product question at 22:47, qualifies, books and hands over — and reports the outcome back to Meta.