Your email opens and WhatsApp replies are conversion signals you are throwing away
You have been generating high-intent engagement data for years. It dies inside your inbox instead of teaching your ad platforms who actually engages.
You sent
Opened the email
→EmailOpened
Clicked a link inside it
→EmailLinkClicked
Replied on WhatsApp
→WhatsAppReplied
business_messaging
Tapped a tracked link
→LinkClicked
website
Four more reasons for Meta to keep this person in your audience - and four more things its bidding now knows about who actually engages.
Ad platforms optimise on the events you send them. Most stores send purchases, sometimes add-to-cart, and nothing else. Meanwhile the same store gets thousands of email opens, link clicks and WhatsApp replies every month - all of them genuine signals of interest from real, identified people - and sends none of it.
What is worth sending
- An email open, and more usefully an email link click, which is a deliberate action rather than an image load.
- A WhatsApp reply or button tap, which is about as strong an engagement signal as exists in commerce.
- A tracked link tap from any channel, with the destination it went to.
What it does for bidding and audiences
Two things. It gives the bidding model far more events to learn from than purchases alone, which matters enormously for stores with modest order volume. And it keeps custom audiences warm with people who are demonstrably still paying attention, rather than letting them age out on a fixed window.
Do not fake it. It is technically easy to fire synthetic page views to keep an audience alive, and it corrupts every model downstream. Send real actions only, with no value attached where no value exists.
The retention window
Audience retention is a real lever and is usually left at whatever the default was. An engagement audience for a two-week consideration cycle should not be set the same way as one for a six-month cycle. Set it from your own time-to-purchase distribution.
What to do next
Count last month's email link clicks and WhatsApp replies, then compare that number to your order count. The ratio is how much signal you are currently not sending.
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