Facebook has introduced a new feature which means you can use the conversion objective when setting up an ad on Facebook, without having to wait for conversions.

Key things you need to set up a Facebook Ad optimized for a conversion:
1: Facebook Pixel on all the pages you want to track on your website (pretty much all pages).
2: Event or custom conversions set up for the conversion you want to track eg: leads, sales

So in the most simplistic form Facebook needs data to optimize ads for the objective you as a business owner require.

Eg: If you were selling running shoes and asked Facebook to optimize your ad to get more sales. This would mean Facebook would show the ad to the people most likely to buy your running shoes in the place they are most likely going to see the ad, (mobile, news-feed, right hand side or audience network) at the time they are most likely to see it.  Instead of you trying to figure this out, Facebook through all it’s data collection does the heavy-lifting for you.

However, for Facebook to figure this out it needs data, usually around 50 conversions. So up until now you might have run an ad to get people to click through to your website (this would mean Facebook would show the ad to people most likely to click), then you would rely on your website converting people and once you had enough conversions you would set up a new ‘conversion’ objective ad.

The new feature inside Facebook’s conversion objective means you can set up a ‘conversion’ ad and then choose to optimize for website link clicks, whilst Facebook learns the conversion data. Once it has enough information, it automatically switches to optimizing for conversions.

Here is a video showing you how to do this: