Solved: Reducing Duplicate Leads from Facebook Ads

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on this duplicate lead issue you're having. It's a really common problem with Facebook's lead forms, honestly one of the most frequent complaints I hear, so you're definitely not alone in facing it.

Getting 20-30% duplicates is really frustrating and a massive waste of ad spend, so I get why you're keen to sort it. You're already doing the right basic steps by excluding past signups and uploading your subscriber list, which is more than a lot of people do. The blunt truth is, those methods will never be perfect. Meta's ability to match the users in your uploaded list to actual profiles is notoriously patchy, and people use different emails or details, which makes it even harder. So you'll always get some leakage. But 30% is way too high and points to a deeper issue in the strategy.

The problem isn't just about excluding the wrong people better. It's about attracting the right people in the first place, and making the process just sticky enough that they remember doing it.

We'll need to look at why this is really happening...

Think of your current exclusions as a plaster on a wound. They help a bit, but they don't fix the underlying cause. The real reason you're getting so many duplicates likely comes down to two things: your audience targeting is too broad, and your offer is too low-friction. This combination attracts a lot of low-intent people who click on ads almost habitually, forget they've done it five minutes later, and then do it again when they see another one of your ads.

To properly fix this, we need to stop focusing on just blocking old leads and start building a system that brings in higher-quality, higher-intent people from the start. People who are genuinely interested are far less likely to sign up multiple times.

I'd say you need to rethink your ideal customer...

This is probably the biggest lever you can pull. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile like "men aged 25-40 in the UK". That tells you nothing useful and leads to generic ads that speak to no one. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their specific, urgent, expensive nightmare of a problem.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic; it's a problem state. For instance, if you're selling a lead gen service, your ICP isn't 'small business owners'. It's 'a B2B agency owner who's terrified of a dry pipeline and is constantly stressed about where the next client will come from'. They can't sleep properly because they're worried about making payroll next month. That's a nightmare.

Once you know that nightmare inside and out, you can find them. Where do they hang out online? What industry newsletters do they actually read? What software do they already pay for? What podcasts do they listen to? For a B2B audience, maybe they follow people like Jason Lemkin or are in specific SaaS Growth groups on Facebook. This is the intelligence that forms your targeting strategy.

Instead of targeting a broad interest like "small business owner", you could try layering interests that are more specific. For example, people who are admins of a Facebook business page AND have an interest in 'HubSpot' or 'Salesforce'. Or targeting interests in competitor software. I remember one campaign we worked on for a B2B software client where we managed to get registrations down to just $2.38 each. This was largely because we got super specific with the targeting around the exact problems their software solved, rather than just who they were. This kind of specific targeting brings in people who are actively feeling the pain, and they don't tend to forget signing up for a potential solution.

You probably should use your ads to filter people out...

Your ad copy itself should be your first line of defence against low-quality and duplicate leads. A great ad doesn't just attract the right people; it actively repels the wrong ones. It needs to speak so directly to the nightmare we just talked about that anyone who doesn't have that problem just scrolls right past.

A framework I use a lot for this is Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS).

-> Problem: State the nightmare directly. "Getting 30% duplicate leads from your Facebook campaigns?"
-> Agitate: Pour salt in the wound. Make them feel the pain. "That's hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds in ad spend completely wasted every month, going to people who are already on your list. All while your sales team wastes time chasing phantoms."
-> Solve: Introduce your offer as the clear, logical solution. "Our 3-step filtering process eliminates duplicates at the source, so every penny of your ad spend goes towards finding genuinely new customers."

When someone reads an ad that describes their exact situation, it's incredibly memorable. They feel understood. They're not going to mindlessly click and forget about it. They're going to think, "Finally, someone gets it." This pre-qualification is vital. You want people clicking who are already half-sold because the ad has done the heavy lifting for you. A generic ad gets generic clicks, which leads to your duplicate problem.

You'll need to add a bit of 'healthy friction'...

This might sound contrarian, but the biggest issue with Facebook's Instant Forms is that they are too good. They're too easy to fill out. A couple of taps and the data is sent, often without the person even really processing what they've just done. This is a recipe for low-quality leads and duplicates.

You need to introduce what I call 'healthy friction'. A small hurdle that forces a moment of conscious commitment. This will immediately filter out the mindless clickers.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. Ditch the Instant Form and Use a Landing Page:
This is the single most effective change you can make. Instead of the ad opening an instant form, send traffic to a dedicated landing page on your website. Yes, your conversion rate will drop. You will get fewer leads. But the leads you do get will be of vastly higher quality. Why? Because a person has to click the ad, wait for the page to load, read your copy, and then manually type their details into your form. That's a multi-step process that requires actual intent. The people who can't be bothered to do that are the exact people you don't want on your list anyway. It's the ultimate pre-qualifier.

2. Add Custom Questions to Your Lead Form:
If you absolutely must stick with Instant Forms, you need to make them a bit harder to complete. Don't just ask for name and email. Add one or two custom, open-ended questions. For example:

-> "What's the single biggest challenge you're facing with [your area] right now?"
-> "On a scale of 1-5, how urgently do you need to solve this problem?" (Multiple Choice)
-> "What other solutions have you tried in the past?"

Just the act of having to type a short sentence is enough to deter the tyre-kickers and accidental submitters. It forces a moment of thought and significantly increases the quality and memorability of the submission, drastically cutting down on duplicates.

Let's talk about how you structure your audiences...

A sophisticated campaign structure is another key to solving this. Most people just lump all their audiences together. A much better approach is to seperate your campaigns by the temperature of the audience, from cold to hot. This is often called a ToFu/MoFu/BoFu structure (Top, Middle, and Bottom of Funnel).

-> ToFu (Top of Funnel - Cold Traffic): This is your prospecting campaign. You target your detailed interest/behaviour audiences here. The goal is to introduce new people to your brand. You MUST exclude all your existing leads and website visitors from this campaign.

-> MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Warm Traffic): This is for retargeting people who have shown some interest but haven't converted. This includes people who have visited your website, watched a percentage of your videos, or engaged with your social posts. You'd show them a different ad, maybe a testimonial or a case study. Here, you'd exclude your existing leads.

-> BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Hot Traffic): This is for retargeting people who are very close to converting. People who visited a specific landing page, added a product to the cart, or initiated checkout. Again, you show them a very specific ad designed to get them over the line, and you exclude existing leads.

By structuring your account this way, you ensure you aren't showing the same introductory lead gen ad to someone who is already in your funnel. It's a more organised way to manage exclusions and helps prevent the audience fatigue that can lead to people re-submitting. We've seen this kind of structured approach work wonders. For one recruitment SaaS client, we took their Cost Per User Acquisition from a painful £100 down to just £7 by implementing a proper funnel structure and refining their targeting and messaging at each stage.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To pull all this together, here’s a summary of the strategic shifts you should consider. It's about moving from a reactive, leaky-bucket approach to a proactive, high-quality system.

As you can probably see, doing this properly is a significant amount of work. It involves deep strategic thinking, audience research, copywriting, and meticulous campaign management. It's not just about tweaking a few settings in Ads Manager; it's about building a robust lead generation engine.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference. An experienced paid ads specialist can diagnose these issues quickly and implement the right structures and strategies to not only cut out the waste from duplicate leads but also significantly improve the overall quality and profitability of your campaigns.

I hope this detailed breakdown gives you a much clearer path forward. If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply these principles specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation initial strategy session where we can go through your account and give you some more tailored advice.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh