It is the most used ad format by those who sell via WhatsApp and the one that burns the most budget in Brazil. The reason rarely lies in the creative or the audience: it lies in what happens — or doesn’t happen — in the first minutes after the chat starts.
In this article
How ads that open chat work
This format features an ad button that, instead of leading to a website, opens a direct conversation on the company’s WhatsApp — usually already with a pre-written message that the person just needs to send. The appeal is clear: it eliminates the website, the form, and the wait. The customer leaves the ad and lands in a chat.
It is also the format that wastes the most budget in Brazil, for a specific reason: it transfers the entire conversion burden to customer service. In ads that lead to a form, the lead is recorded and can be worked on later. Here, if no one responds within minutes, the chat cools off and the click money is already spent.
In other words: the decision to run this type of campaign is not a marketing decision. It is an operational decision. If customer service is not ready, the campaign will buy chats that no one will answer — which is an expensive way to sell nothing.
The three reasons for waste
1. Delay in the first response. The person clicked because the problem was on their mind at that moment. Thirty minutes later, they are already onto something else; three hours later, they have talked to two competitors. There is no channel where speed matters more.
2. Volume of curious people. Clicking is too easy. People arrive who just wanted to know the price, who clicked by mistake, or who were looking for something else. This is not a flaw of the format — it’s a feature, and it is solved with qualification in the first message, not by complaining about lead quality.
3. Lack of tracking. All chats arrive in the same place, with no indication of which campaign generated them. Without this, there is no way to know which ad brings customers and which brings curious people — and the budget continues to be spent blindly, month after month.
The question that defines if you should run it: if thirty chats arrive tomorrow between 19h and 22h, will someone respond? If the answer is no, the problem to solve first is customer service — not the ad creative.
How to know which ad each chat came from
This is the technical point that separates those who scale from those who give up on the format. The simplest and most robust solution is to use the pre-filled message as an identifier: each campaign opens the chat with a slightly different text.
Thus, the campaign for one service starts with "Hello! I want to know about [service A]" and another with "Hello! I saw the ad about [service B]". When the message arrives, the customer service system reads this text and automatically tags the chat with the correct origin. It does not depend on complex integration and works at any volume.
With chats tagged by origin, three numbers exist per campaign: how many chats it generated, how many responded to the first message, and how many converted to sales. This is what turns ad budget into decisions — and it is the same set of indicators as the customer service metrics, now segmented by origin.
| Without tracking | With tracking by campaign |
|---|---|
| "The ad brought a lot of people" | "Campaign A brought 210 chats at R$ 9.80" |
| "I think most are curious" | "Campaign B has 71% response; C has 34%" |
| Budget divided by intuition | Budget concentrated on what closes |
| Salesperson complains about the lead | You can prove which origin converts |
The first message does the screening
Since the format attracts volume, qualification needs to happen right at the start — preferably automatically, to work at eleven at night. The structure that works has three parts and fits in four lines:
- Immediate confirmation, so the person knows their message arrived: "I received your message!"
- A closed question that separates customers from curious people. Two options, not five. It serves to direct and, at the same time, reveals intent.
- Time expectation: "A specialist will respond in a few minutes" — during business hours; outside them, say when.
Those who answer this question show real interest and go to the priority queue. Those who don’t answer go to a secondary queue, with a follow-up the next day. This simple separation usually doubles the team’s time efficiency because it prevents the salesperson from spending the morning on people who clicked by mistake.
The math of a campaign
Monthly budget of R$ 4,000, cost per chat started of R$ 11.50:
Campaign month
Cost per sale: R$ 148. Return on budget: 2.9×.
Now the same month with slow customer service — average response time in hours instead of minutes. The response rate drops from 62% to about 40%: that would be 139 chats responded instead of 216. Keeping other proportions, the number of sales drops to 17, revenue to R$ 7,310, and cost per sale rises to R$ 235.
The budget was exactly the same. The ad was the same, the audience was the same, the price was the same. The R$ 4,300 difference in the month came entirely from how long the customer waited for the first response.
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What to prepare before launching the campaign
- Who answers, at what hours. Including at night and on weekends, if the ad runs during those times. If there is no coverage, restrict the ad schedule — it’s better to buy fewer chats than to buy chats that no one answers.
- Automatic opening reply with the screening question, active for 24 hours.
- Distinct pre-filled message per campaign, so tracking works from day one.
- Defined distribution among agents, so the chat doesn’t remain ownerless or receive two replies.
- Ready templates for the questions that will come — price, deadline, how it works. This allows responding in minutes without writing from scratch.
- A funnel stage for those who haven’t responded yet, with scheduled follow-up. A chat that died on first contact was paid for and can be recovered.
Where this format wins and where it loses
Not every business should use this format as the main one. It wins when the customer’s decision is quick and the service has some urgency: the problem exists now, the person wants to talk to someone now, and the chat solves it. Local services, on-demand service, medium-ticket products with simple questions — all benefit from shortening the path to conversation.
It loses in two scenarios. The first is high ticket with long decision, where the person needs to research, compare, and involve others before chatting: here the click comes too early, the chat doesn’t progress, and costs accumulate without sales. The second is products that need visual explanation — in these cases, sending the person to a page that explains first and only then opening the chat usually yields more, because those who arrive already understand what they are buying.
There is also a middle ground that works well and is little used: run both paths in parallel, with separate budgets, and compare the cost per sale of each over a month. Not cost per click nor cost per chat — cost per sale. In many businesses the result surprises, and almost always the conclusion is a mix, not a single choice: the direct chat format captures those ready now, and the page path captures those still deciding.
Mistakes that burn budget
- Launching a campaign without coverage hours. Ads running at dawn with service from 9h to 18h is money given away randomly.
- Using the same pre-filled message everywhere. You lose tracking and, with it, the ability to decide where to invest.
- Judging the campaign by cost per chat. Cheap chats that don’t close are expensive. The number that matters is cost per sale.
- Complaining about lead quality without qualifying. The format naturally attracts volume; screening is your responsibility.
- Giving up in the first week. Campaigns need time to stabilize and minimum volume to generate reliable conclusions.
- Not recording sales by origin. Without closing the loop to the sale, you optimize clicks instead of revenue.
Start small and measure the entire cycle
Before increasing budget, prove the complete path with little money: one campaign, one identifiable pre-filled message, automatic screening reply live, and someone assigned to respond within minutes. Run for two weeks and analyze the four numbers — chats, responses, qualified, and sales.
If the cost per sale fits your margin, increase the budget. If it doesn’t, the problem is almost never the ad: it’s the response time or screening. And that is the good news about this format — the two points that define the result are entirely internal, and fixing them costs no extra media spend.
Frequently asked questions
Is it worth running ads that open chat on WhatsApp?
It’s worth it when customer service is prepared to respond within minutes, including during the hours the ad runs. The format eliminates the website and form but transfers the entire conversion burden to response speed: chats that cool off are not recorded as leads to be worked later — they simply die, and the click value is already spent.
How to know which ad each chat came from on WhatsApp?
The simplest and most reliable way is to use the pre-filled message as an identifier: each campaign opens the chat with a slightly different text, and the customer service system automatically tags the chat based on that text. From there, you get per campaign the number of chats generated, response rate, and sales closed.
Why do leads from this type of ad seem poor quality?
Because clicking is very easy, so the format naturally attracts mixed volume — people who just wanted the price, clicked by mistake, or were looking for something else. This is not solved by complaining about lead quality but with a screening question right in the first automatic reply. Those who answer go to the priority queue; those who don’t go to a secondary queue with follow-up the next day.
Which metric should I track in this type of campaign?
Cost per sale, not cost per chat. Cheap chats that don’t close are expensive. Track four numbers per campaign: chats started, how many responded to the first message, how many qualified, and how many converted to sales. This closed cycle allows focusing budget on what actually brings customers.
Does response time really change the result that much?
It changes more than any creative adjustment. In a R$ 4,000 campaign with 348 chats started, a 62% response rate led to 27 sales and a cost per sale of R$ 148. With slow service and a response rate around 40%, the same investment generated 17 sales and a cost per sale of R$ 235 — a R$ 4,300 difference in the month coming only from how long the customer waited.
Each chat tagged to the right campaign
VeyloCRM identifies the origin of each chat, responds immediately with the screening question, distributes to the team, and shows the cost per sale of each campaign.