Should I send past customers as Purchase or Lead when warming up a campaign?
Short answer
Match the event to what each person did and to the campaign goal, split buyers from enquirers, and send real values or none.
Send each person as the event that describes what they actually did, and choose the event you plan to optimise on. If the campaign will optimise on purchase, send buyers as purchases. If it will optimise on leads, send leads as leads. The event should match the goal, not the other way round.
Think about what you are teaching. The platform treats each event as an example of the outcome you want. If you send everyone as a purchase, including people who only enquired, you are telling it that enquiring and buying are the same, and it will look for people who enquire.
If you have both buyers and non-buyers on file, split the list. Send buyers as purchases, ideally with their values, and send enquirers or booked calls as the lead or schedule event. Then pick the one that matches the campaign's optimisation goal as primary and keep the others secondary.
Values matter. A purchase with a real value lets value-based bidding learn which customers are worth more. If you do not have values, send the event without one rather than inventing numbers. Wrong values teach the wrong lesson.
Think about timing. Events are dated when you send them, not when the customer bought, so a three-year-old purchase will appear as a purchase today. Keep warmup events out of your normal reporting, and plan to measure the campaign by new conversions, not by the total including the warmup.
Consider recency. Recent customers are a better description of who you want than old ones. If the list is large, send the most recent and highest value first and see what the match rate and early results look like before you send the rest.
A made-up example, invented for illustration: an online course has 5,000 buyers and 20,000 free-lesson sign-ups. They send buyers as purchases with values and sign-ups as leads, optimise the new campaign on purchase, and keep the leads as secondary. The early signal has some real purchases to anchor on.
DataCops Ads Warmup lets you pick the event: Purchase, Lead, Complete registration, Add to cart or Schedule, and sends up to 20,000 people per upload to Meta, Google Ads and TikTok, with a result per person. You can run separate uploads for different groups.
Which outcome will the new campaign be optimised on?
DataCops in short
For this question: DataCops Ads Warmup lets you pick Purchase, Lead, Complete registration, Add to cart or Schedule per upload, with a result per person.
DataCops is a tool whose flagship feature, Ads Warmup, sends the customers you already have to your ad platforms before a campaign spends, so a new campaign learns from real buyers on day one, alongside a bot verdict on every visit and the real sale sent back from your CRM.
How DataCops does it
- Upload a customer list. A CSV of past buyers, old leads or booked calls; only email is required, up to 20,000 rows per upload.
- A match score for every person. An estimate from 0 to 10 from email, phone, name, location, click ID and customer ID, before anything is sent.
- Pick the event. Purchase, Lead, Complete registration, Add to cart or Schedule.
- Send server-side. To Meta, Google Ads and TikTok, with a sent, skipped or failed result per person. Google Ads credits only people who clicked a Google ad.
- Dated when you send. Each row carries the send date, not the old sale date. Preview is free; sending needs a paid plan.
Best for: new ad accounts, new campaigns and relaunches that have customers on file but no recent conversion history.
Ads Warmup: tell the ads who pays
Ads Warmup, DataCops' flagship feature, sends customers you already have to Meta, Google Ads and TikTok before a new campaign spends: upload a CSV (only email is required, up to 20,000 rows), see a 0 to 10 match score per person, pick the event, and send. Rows are dated when you send, and Google Ads credits only people who clicked a Google ad. Preview is free; sending needs a paid plan. Check your own consent basis for the list first. See Ads Warmup.
Ways to do this job
| Option | Best for |
|---|---|
| DataCops Ads Warmup | Sending existing customers as conversion events, with a match score and a result per person |
| A customer list audience (Customer Match or a custom audience) | Targeting or excluding people, which is a different job from teaching bidding |
| Waiting for conversions | Accounts that can afford to learn slowly |
When not to use DataCops
- Your list has no consent basis for ad use. Check your own consent basis for the list first. DataCops is not legal advice.
- You have no customers yet. Ads Warmup needs a list of real customers or leads to send.
Sources and further reading
More on this: Ads Warmup, and the complete guide to offline conversion tracking.
Decide the campaign's optimisation event first. The warmup event should follow from it.