What Is a Custom Conversion in Meta Ads?

A standard event such as Purchase counts every sale. Sometimes you care about only some of them: a single product line, or orders above a set amount. A custom conversion lets you draw that line with rules, without changing your site’s code, and then hand the narrower action to Meta as something to optimize toward and report on.

What can a custom conversion do?

Meta lists four uses:

• Filter events. Add rules to standard events, custom events or all URL traffic, for example to count purchases of a certain colour or price.
• Log standard events without extra code. If the pixel base code is on your site, URL rules can stand in for event code.
• Serve as a performance goal. You select it when you create an ad in Ads Manager.
• Share selectively. You can share single custom conversions with business partners instead of your whole data source.

Custom conversions cover website events. Meta says they aren’t available for app events at this time, and offline events have their own setup.

What does a custom conversion rule look like?

Meta’s example is a clothing store that wants to count online sales of men’s clothing over $50. It picks Purchase as the conversion event and adds two rules:

Rule type	Condition	What it checks
URL rule	URL contains “mens”	That the purchase happened in the men’s section
Parameter rule	Value is greater than $50	That the order was above the price threshold

URL rules can use contains, doesn’t contain or equals. For equals, Meta asks you to paste the full URL, including https://www..

How do you create one without extra event code?

1. Go to Meta Events Manager and click Custom conversions in the left menu.
2. Click Create custom conversion, enter a name and, if you like, a description.
3. Select your data source, then select All URL traffic as the conversion event.
4. Choose a standard event category for optimization; Meta recommends keeping the one it picks for you.
5. Set URL rules with contains, doesn’t contain or equals, and click + to add more.
6. Enter a conversion value in whole numbers if the events don’t already carry one, then click Create.

All URL traffic is built from PageView events, so on its own Meta can’t tell which page is a checkout and which is a home page. Your URL rules supply that meaning.

How do you know a custom conversion is working?

After creating it, visit the page it refers to so that it fires. Then open the Custom conversions tab in Events Manager and check that its status is Active. The same tab shows how many times Meta has received it. Meta says that once it has received a custom conversion enough times, you can use it as a performance goal; it doesn’t publish a number.

What limits apply?

Each ad account can have up to 100 custom conversions. You can delete ones you no longer need to make room. You edit, delete and share them in Events Manager.

FAQ

How many custom conversions can one ad account have?

The maximum is 100 per ad account. Meta says you can delete custom conversions you no longer want and then create new ones, so the limit is on how many exist at once rather than how many you ever make. Remove old test rules before you hit the cap.

Can I build a custom conversion from app events?

Not at the moment. Meta’s help page says custom conversions are for website events and aren’t available for app events at this time. Offline events have a separate custom conversion process, which Meta covers in its own article.

Who can see the custom conversions I create?

If you create one with an ad account that belongs to a business portfolio, people with access to the portfolio can view and manage custom conversions from both the ad account and the portfolio. People with access only to the ad account can see and manage only the custom conversions that ad account created.