“When you're running a start trial campaign the signal is like all the people who are willing to start a trial but not necessarily all the people who are willing to pay. When you have a purchase-only funnel every user that gets sent back to the ad network is one that's high intent, high quality — the algorithms are able to better find users just like that.”

Money-back guarantee on web funnels sends better purchase signal to Meta than free trial — quality users find you faster

Reading.com replaced the free trial with a 30-day money-back guarantee on its web ad funnels. Conversion rates dropped, but every conversion event sent to Meta was a real purchaser — high-intent signal the algorithm could use to find more like-minded users. Over time the higher-quality audience the algorithm learned to target more than compensated for the lower raw conversion rate, and few users actually exercised the refund.