Get More Profitable Conversions in Meta Ads Using Intent Data

Why Traditional Meta Ads Targeting Is Breaking Down

Most performance marketing teams run some combination of broad interest targeting, lookalike audiences, and retargeting. None of these are wrong—they're just incomplete.

As more consumers opt out of third-party cookie tracking, signal quality on platforms like Meta degrades. Lookalike audiences assume future buyers look like past buyers. Retargeting only works after someone has already found you. Demographic targeting guesses intent based on identity, not behavior.

The result? Everyone fights over the same users, at the same stage, with rising costs and shrinking returns.

This playbook introduces a different model: target people based on observed research behavior—not inferred interest—and build a full-funnel system that captures and converts that demand across channels.

Leverage Intent Data for Custom Audiences

The first move is to stop guessing who's in-market and start knowing. Intent data captures real-time behavioral signals from people actively researching products or topics in your category—even if they've never visited your website.

How to build Intent Audiences with Untitled:

1. Log into your Untitled account and navigate to the Audience Library.
• Don't have an Untitled account? Search our Intent Topics here.
2. Search 36,000+ intent topics by keyword (e.g., "running shoes"), brand name, or competitor URL.
3. Select the topics that align with your products and ideal customers.
4. Save. Untitled builds the audience automatically—no spreadsheet uploads or manual list building required.

Once built, the audience is ready to push directly to Meta as a Custom Audience. More on that in Step 3.

Learn more about Untitled Intent Audiences →

Identify the Users Who Click Through

You're spending money to send traffic from Meta Ads to your site. The problem is that the vast majority of those visitors leave without ever filling out a form or making a purchase. Without identity resolution, those clicks are just wasted budget.

The Untitled ID Tag solves this by revealing who is visiting your website—name, email, household address, and up to 100 B2C attributes—even without a form fill. You'll see results within one hour of installation.

Getting started:

1. Create a tag in your Untitled dashboard—name it something identifiable, like your website's name.
2. Update your site's cookie consent and privacy policy. Follow Untitled's compliance guide.
3. Install the one-line script on your site. Untitled supports Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, and Google Tag Manager.
4. Within one hour, visitor data will appear in your dashboard under the Visitor table.

Learn more about the Untitled ID Tag →

Segment & Deploy Audiences to Meta

Now that you have intent audiences (Step 1) and identified website visitors (Step 2), it's time to segment and push them to Meta for activation.

Untitled's Buyer Intent model ranks every website visitor on a scale from Hot to Cold based on relative on-site engagement—session count, time spent, pages viewed, and how often they visit buying-related pages. Scores update every 24 hours.

Pushing an audience to Meta:

1. Connect Meta as a Destination in Untitled. We recommend the System User method for a stable, long-term connection that doesn't expire every 30 days.
2. Navigate to the Audience Library, open the audience you want to sync, and click "Setup sync" under the Destinations tab.
3. Type the audience name and confirm. A Custom Audience is created in your Meta Ads Manager and refreshes automatically every day at 12:15 PM EST.

Before you can sync, you'll need to accept Meta's Custom Audience Terms of Service if you haven't already.

Read the full Meta Ads integration guide →

Build & Test Intent-Driven Ad Sets

This is where the strategy becomes execution. You've built your intent audiences—now structure your campaigns to test and scale them properly.

Recommended testing framework:

How to use the Custom Audience in Meta:

1. In Meta Ads Manager, create a new ad set under your campaign.
2. In the Audience section, click "Add suggestions" or search under Custom Audiences to find the Untitled audience you synced.
3. For prospecting, use the intent audience as-is. For retargeting, layer it with your Untitled ID Tag audience of identified visitors.
4. Optionally exclude past converters or "Cold" intent visitors to focus spend on high-probability segments.
5. Let each ad set run for 3–5 days with enough budget to exit the learning phase before making optimization decisions.

What to watch: Compare CPA and ROAS across your intent ad sets vs. your existing interest-based or lookalike ad sets. Intent audiences typically outperform on conversion rate because you're reaching people with demonstrated research behavior—not inferred interests.

Meta's guide to using Custom Audiences in ad sets →

Retarget Across Every Channel

Not everyone will convert on the first click. That's fine—the goal is to make sure the demand you've captured in Meta doesn't die after a single touchpoint.

Because Untitled resolves visitors to real identities (Step 2) and scores them by intent (Step 3), you can push those same audiences to every channel in your marketing stack—not just Meta.

The key insight: Meta becomes the top of your funnel, not the whole funnel. Use intent data to put the right people into your Meta campaigns, use identity resolution to capture who clicks through, and then nurture across every channel until they convert.

Untitled supports syncing audiences to Meta, Klaviyo, Google Ads, TikTok, and more—all from the same Audience Library. View all available destinations →