For most of its life WhatsApp had no advertising at all, and its founders were famous for refusing it. That ended in June 2025, when Meta announced ads inside WhatsApp itself. They are now rolling out around the world, and "are there ads in WhatsApp now?" has two answers depending on whether you are a user or a business.
For users: yes, but only in one tab, and not in your chats. For businesses: WhatsApp is now both a place to advertise and, as it has been for years, the place an ad on Facebook or Instagram can send people. This guide covers both, and then the step every ad guide leaves out: what happens in the minutes after someone taps the ad.
Where ads appear in WhatsApp, and where they do not
Every ad placement Meta announced lives in the Updates tab, the tab that holds Status and Channels. Your chat list, your personal conversations, your groups and your calls have no ads, and Meta has said they will not. If you never open the Updates tab, you will not see an ad in WhatsApp.
- Ads in Status. A sponsored status appears between the statuses of people you follow. It is labelled, you swipe past it like any other, and it can carry a button that opens a chat with the business.
- Promoted channels. A channel admin can pay for their channel to be more visible when people browse the channel directory.
- Channel subscriptions. A channel can offer exclusive updates to followers who pay a monthly fee.
The rollout was gradual: select markets first, then most of the world through late 2025 and early 2026, with some European countries later because of regulatory review. If you do not see ads yet, your country may simply not have them.
What data WhatsApp ads use
Meta was specific about this, and it is worth quoting closely because it is the first thing customers ask. Ads in the Updates tab are targeted using limited information: your country or city, your language, the channels you follow, and how you interact with the ads you see. If you have chosen to add WhatsApp to Meta’s Accounts Center, your ad preferences and information from your other Meta accounts are used as well. If you have not, they are not.
Equally specific were the things that are not used. Your personal messages, calls and the groups you are in are not used to decide which ads you see, and those messages, calls and statuses remain end-to-end encrypted so that nobody, Meta included, can see them. And in Meta’s words: "We will never sell or share your phone number to advertisers."
Click-to-WhatsApp ads: the format most businesses actually use
Status ads are new. The workhorse is older: a click-to-WhatsApp ad is an ordinary Facebook or Instagram ad whose button opens a WhatsApp chat with your business instead of a website. You build it in Meta Ads Manager, choose WhatsApp as the destination, connect your business number, and optionally set a pre-filled message so the customer’s first message tells you which ad they came from.
The appeal is that the customer does not fill in a form and wait for an email. They are in a conversation with you within two seconds, on an app they already have open forty times a day. The cost is that the conversation is now your landing page, and unlike a web page, it needs someone to answer it.
- 1
Use a number your team can actually answer
An ad that opens a chat on the owner’s personal phone produces leads nobody sees until the evening.
- 2
Pre-fill the first message
A short line such as "Hi, I saw your ad for the spring offer" tells you the source and gives the customer something to send without thinking.
- 3
Answer in minutes, not hours
Interest decays fast. The person tapped on impulse and will have forgotten the ad by tomorrow.
- 4
Decide what happens out of hours
Ads run at night. Either schedule them for the hours you can answer, or have an automatic first reply that sets an honest expectation.
- 5
Track the conversation, not just the click
Ads Manager counts conversations started. Only your inbox knows which of them became customers.
After the click: where ad money is won or lost
An ad that starts a conversation has done its whole job. Everything after that is operations, and it is where most of the budget is quietly wasted. The common failures are dull and fixable.
- Nobody answers. The chat lands on one phone, that person is busy, and the lead goes cold.
- Two people answer. The number is shared through WhatsApp Web on several computers and nobody knows who has it.
- Nobody knows where the lead came from. Without a pre-filled message or a tracked link, every new chat looks the same, and you cannot tell which ad is paying for itself.
- The lead has no name and no number. Many new WhatsApp conversations now arrive without a phone number, so a tool that files customers by number has nowhere to put them.
- There is no follow-up. The customer asked a question on Tuesday, got an answer, said "let me think", and nobody wrote again.
Related: WhatsApp LIDs: why chats arrive without a phone number
How Spun handles the conversations an ad brings in
Spun does not buy or manage ads; that stays in Meta Ads Manager. Spun is what the ad’s conversations land in. It connects to your existing WhatsApp number with one QR scan and turns it into an inbox the whole team works in, each person signed in as themselves, so a lead at 9:02 is seen by whoever is free at 9:02. Everyone can see when a colleague is already replying, and every sent message carries the name of the teammate who wrote it.
For sources you control, such as your website, a QR code on packaging, an email footer or a link in a bio, Spun’s Smart Links are trackable WhatsApp entry links that tie a click, its source and its campaign tags to the conversation it actually produced, so you can see which placement brings customers rather than clicks. A link can also trigger an automatic first reply.
Out of hours, an auto-reply rule answers a first message with an honest expectation, under limits you set, and steps back the moment a person replies. A lead who arrives without a phone number is handled like any other conversation and linked to a contact in one tap. Then the ordinary tools do the follow-up: a note, a pipeline stage, a reminder for Thursday.
Related: Smart Links: trackable WhatsApp entry links · AI Auto-Replies · WhatsApp CRM pipeline