Click to WhatsApp Ads: Leads and the Free 72-Hour Window

A Click to WhatsApp ad is a Facebook or Instagram ad whose button opens a conversation in your WhatsApp instead of taking people to a website. When the person sends the first message, Meta opens the normal 24-hour window for you to reply. If your reply goes out within those 24 hours, Meta opens a second window, 72 hours long, in which any message to that person is free, including marketing messages. If the reply does not go out in time, the free window never exists, and you paid for an ad that brought a lead you will now pay for message by message.

This guide explains what happens from click to sale, how to tell which ad each lead came from, and how not to waste the most valuable part of the ad, which is a fast reply.

Short answer: what is a Click to WhatsApp ad

In documentation and tools the acronym is CTWA, for Click to WhatsApp Ad. The ad runs on Facebook, Instagram, or both, and the difference from a regular ad is the destination: the button does not open a page, it opens a conversation with your number, with a greeting already filled in for the person to send.

It exists because, for many Brazilian businesses, the sale does not happen on the website. It happens in the conversation. A clinic books the appointment on WhatsApp, a store answers the size question on WhatsApp, an online course creator handles the objection on WhatsApp. The ad skips the form step and delivers the person straight to where the sale happens.

What changes when the number is on the official WhatsApp API, the direct link between the number and Meta that a provider like Frame Conexa offers, is that the lead stops being just a conversation on a phone. It arrives tagged with its origin, enters a queue, can be answered by more than one person from the dashboard, and can later become the audience for a bulk send. And the free 72-hour window becomes visible, instead of a rule nobody keeps track of.

How to create the ad in Ads Manager

The Ads Manager interface changes often, so it is more useful to understand what does not change than to memorize screens.

Three things need to be in place. First: the WhatsApp number must be linked to the Facebook Page, or to the business portfolio, where the ad will run. Without that link, the WhatsApp destination option does not appear. Second: when building the ad, you choose WhatsApp as the place where the conversation will happen. That choice turns the ad's button into "Send message" and defines where the click goes. Third: you define the greeting the person will see pre-filled in the text box. It is the start of the conversation and, as we will see, it is what makes the first message arrive carrying the ad's tag.

The number can be the same one that is in the phone app. If it is in coexistence, the lead's message arrives in the app and on the API at the same time, and the reply can go out from either.

Tip: it is worth making the pre-filled greeting specific. "Hi, I want to know about the September promotion" tells the agent what it is about before the first question. "Hi" says nothing.

What happens when the person clicks: 24 hours to reply

The click itself opens nothing. What opens the conversation is the first message the person sends, almost always the pre-filled greeting. From there, the rules of any conversation on official WhatsApp apply.

The central rule is the 24-hour window, which belongs to Meta, not to the provider. After the person writes, the company has 24 hours to reply with a free-form message: text, image, audio, anything. After 24 hours without a new message from the person, the company can only write with a template, which is a message approved by Meta before sending, and each delivered template is charged according to its category.

On an ad lead, that 24-hour window carries extra weight. It is not just the deadline for replying for free. It is the deadline for earning the next window.

The free 72-hour window

Meta calls it a "free entry point conversation." The rule, on Meta's pricing page, is this: if the person wrote from a Click to WhatsApp ad, or from the WhatsApp button on a Facebook Page, using the app on Android or iOS, and the company replied within 24 hours, a 72-hour window opens, counted from the delivery of the reply. Inside it, every message to that person is free.

The condition almost every blog forgets: it only exists if you reply within 24 hours

Most of what you read about the "free 72 hours of Click to WhatsApp" treats the window as if it opened on the click. It does not. It opens on the reply, and only if the reply arrives within 24 hours of the person's message. An ad lead that sits a day and a half without a reply is an ordinary lead: it opens the 24-hour window, the window closes, and from then on it is templates only, charged.

A fine detail that also matters: the click has to come from the phone app. Someone who clicks on a computer still becomes a lead and still opens the normal 24-hour window, but not the free 72-hour one. A WhatsApp ad designed for a desktop audience leaves that benefit on the table.

A field measurement shows the size of the problem. In a Frame Conexa production base, measured on September 5, 2026, there were 414 conversations that came from ads. Of those, 399 were answered, and 372 within 24 hours. Nine out of ten free windows opened. The other 42 were paid ads that never turned into a window: 27 replies came late and 15 leads were never answered.

What is free inside it, including marketing

Inside the 72 hours, Meta does not charge for any message to that person: free-form messages, utility templates, and also marketing templates. It is the only case on the platform where a marketing message goes out for free. For a store, that means the full offer, with photo and button, can go to the ad lead at no message cost. For a clinic, the reminder and the appointment-time proposal are the same.

Meta also says that opening this window closes the other charged conversations that were open with that person. In practice, whatever goes out to them in the next 72 hours falls under the free account, with no overlap with an earlier conversation.

What the window does not change is consent. A marketing message still requires that the person agreed to receive it, and someone who wrote from an ad for your offer gave that signal for that conversation, not forever. When the 72 hours end, the rules of official bulk messaging apply: approved template, charged, with the right to opt out.

What changes in October 2026: nothing on delivery

Starting October 1, 2026, Meta will charge per message for free-form replies inside the 24-hour window and for utility templates sent inside it, according to the pricing updates page. The same page says the ad's 72-hour window remains unchanged for message delivery.

In other words, the free window becomes more valuable, not less. After October, replying to an ordinary lead will carry a per-message cost; replying to an ad lead on time will still cost nothing for the 72 hours. The detail on what each category costs is in the WhatsApp Business API pricing guide.

Important: the 72-hour window is free on the Meta account. The provider may or may not charge per message on its own. Frame Conexa never charges per message; the message bill is always between you and Meta.

How to tell which ad each lead came from

Without an origin, every WhatsApp lead looks organic, and the ad never gets credit for the sale. The good news is that Meta delivers the origin together with the message. The bad news is that it delivers it only once.

What the API delivers: ad, headline, and link

When the lead's first message arrives through the official API, it comes with a block called referral, the ad reference. It carries the ad identifier, the headline and text the person saw, the media type, the ad link, and a click identifier.

{
  "from": "5511999990000",
  "type": "text",
  "text": { "body": "Olá, quero saber sobre a promoção de setembro" },
  "referral": {
    "source_type": "ad",
    "source_id": "120200000000000000",
    "source_url": "https://fb.me/xxxxxxxx",
    "headline": "Avaliação gratuita em setembro",
    "body": "Agende pelo WhatsApp e ganhe a primeira sessão",
    "media_type": "image",
    "ctwa_clid": "ARDx..."
  }
}

For anyone integrating, this block arrives untouched in Frame Conexa's outbound webhook, which is the automatic notification your system receives for each event. The envelope's payload field is the raw content Meta sent, so the origin is at payload.messages[0].referral. The guide on how to integrate the Cloud API with webhooks shows the whole envelope and signature validation.

The source_id is what matches the ad in Ads Manager. The headline is useful on screen, but it does not work as a key: the advertiser rewrites the headline when editing the creative, and the identifier stays the same.

Why only the first message carries the origin

Meta sends the referral only on the first message after the click. The same person's second message, five minutes later, arrives without it. If the person clicks another ad weeks later, the first message of that click carries a new referral, from the new ad.

This has two practical consequences. First: the origin has to be saved right away, together with the message. Whoever processes the webhook and discards the field loses the attribution forever, because there is no way to ask for it again. Second: a contact can have more than one origin over time, and "came from ad X" is true about a conversation, not about the person.

How Frame Conexa shows the ad lead and the window

In the dashboard, the word is "ad." You will not see CTWA, referral, or free entry point, because the person handling the conversation does not need Meta's vocabulary to act.

Inside Conversations, anyone with an ad lead gets an "Ads" tab and a filter with only those conversations. Each conversation shows which ad the person came from, with the headline and a link to open the real ad on Facebook or Instagram. The creative's image is deliberately not displayed: its address expires quickly, and a broken image inside a conversation reads as a broken product.

The window is shown too. Before the reply, the conversation displays the 24-hour window counting down. After a timely reply, the marker becomes the free 72-hour window, and the conversation's send mode stays on free-form message until it closes. When it closes, the dashboard switches by itself to template, which is what Meta accepts from then on.

The "no reply, window running" queue

This is the list of people who arrived through an ad and have not yet received a reply, sorted by urgency: the oldest lead, whose window is closest to closing, sits at the top. It exists because the free window is lost silently. Nobody gets a notice from Meta saying "two hours left." The queue is that notice.

The unanswered lead is the only one that shows up in amber in the dashboard. A lead that passed 24 hours without a reply does not get an error color: it is an ordinary lead now, and painting it red would not give the window back. What reopens the conversation is a Meta-approved message, charged, as for any contact outside the window.

There is one important caveat with coexistence. According to Meta's official page on WhatsApp Business app users, messages sent from the phone app do not open, extend, or affect the API's windows. In practice, the free 72-hour window is only born when the first reply to the lead goes out through the API, and in that case Meta returns the free_entry_point mark in the message status, confirming it is free. If your team handles customers from the phone, reply to the ad lead from the dashboard so you do not lose the window.

Note: the window is marked from the reply, not from the click, precisely because Meta's condition is a reply within 24 hours. A dashboard that counted 72 hours from the click would promise a free message to a lead that was never answered, and Meta would refuse the free-form send with error 131047 once the 24-hour window closed.

Audience of people who came from an ad

An answered ad lead is the best contact a base has: they asked to talk, from inside a specific offer. In Frame Conexa, these contacts can become an audience for bulk sending in two ways. A dynamic segment rule groups everyone who came from an ad, any ad. The audience of one specific ad, on the other hand, only makes sense as a fixed list, built from the contacts of those conversations.

The reason an ad's list is fixed is what was said above: the origin belongs to the conversation, not to the person. Someone who clicked ad A in August and ad B in September has B as their latest ad. An audience of "people who came from ad A" that recalculated itself would silently lose that person. The fixed list freezes who was there when you built it, and that is what keeps the next campaign's report matching what you saw.

A campaign to this audience follows the usual rules: marketing number, approved template, and, outside the 72 hours, a charge per delivered message.

Common mistakes: replying late, measuring by phone number, counting ROI without the origin

Replying late. This is the most expensive mistake, because the ad has already been paid for. The reply within 24 hours does not need to close the sale; it needs to exist. A qualifying question already opens the 72 hours, and the proposal can follow later, still for free.

Counting the 72 hours from the click. The window starts when the reply is delivered. Anyone who marks the calendar from the click loses the hours between the click and the reply, or worse, thinks they have a window when they do not.

Ads for desktop. A click on a computer opens a conversation and opens the 24-hour window, but not the free window. If the benefit matters, the ad targeting should prioritize mobile.

Measuring by phone number. The common attempt is to cross the contact list with a spreadsheet of phone numbers to find out who came from the ad. It does not work, for two reasons. Ads Manager does not hand over the phone number of whoever clicked. And the number Meta reports in the conversation does not always match the registered one: in Brazil it may come without the ninth digit (the extra leading 9 that Brazilian mobile numbers gained over the years). The origin is in the first message, in the referral, and only there.

Counting the return without the origin. Without saving the referral, every WhatsApp sale becomes "organic" in the report, and the ad looks like it does not convert. With the origin, you can add up sales by ad, compare headlines, and turn off the creative that brings leads that do not reply.

Letting the 72 hours pass and sending a free-form message. After the window, a free-form message fails with error 131047, "window closed." The dashboard shows the reason and the action: send an approved template. The other failure reasons are in the API error dictionary.

Warning: the free window is not a license to send ten messages in three days. The person can still block and report, and that weighs on the number's quality, which is what Meta uses to decide its sending capacity. Treat the 72 hours as time to serve well, not as a quota.

Next step

If your ad is already running and leads land on the phone with no queue or origin, the first step is to connect the number to the official API without taking it off the app: the per-number plans explain what each type of number does. For anyone who will integrate the lead's origin into their own system, the event format and signature validation are in the webhooks guide.