Facebook Lead Ads was launched in 2015 with a specific purpose: Generate leads by targeting people and giving them exactly what they care about. The goal was to generate high-quality leads at a fraction of the cost compared to other channels.
According to Facebook, car manufacturer, Mazda managed to get 5X more leads while reducing their cost per lead by 85%.
Secret Escapes acquired twice as many leads at 52% less cost than regular Facebook advertising.
Peloton — a lifestyle and fitness product company — used lead ads to drive 15% more leads for their products while massively benefiting from 67% lower cost per conversion.
Lead Ads, as a product, has evolved from a simple form to a complete suite of options available for businesses and advertisers to generate leads.
Facebook Lead Ads can be shown as a context card (as an extra tile before users get to a form), on Desktop on Mobile, leading to a native form built on Facebook, as a part of Canvas Instant Experience.
Lead Ads work great when you have something of value to give away (also called as lead magnets or lead magnet funnels).
The objective of lead ads is simple: make your targeted users take a very specific action, with a clear offer.
Clicking on the ad will reveal either a context card and a form, or just a form with each facebook users’ information pre-filled into the form.
As Facebook puts it,
“Unlike other ad types, lead ads include a contact form, called an “instant form,” that lets people show their interest in a product or service by filling out the form with their details and allowing a business to follow up with them.
On your lead ads instant form, you can request email addresses or contact information from people who click on your ad. You can ask people custom questions. Lead ads can be used to collect sign-ups for newsletters, price estimates, follow-up calls, and business information.”
With two clicks or less, leads are generated and passed on to you.
The advantages of Facebook Lead Ads are huge: you don’t need a separate set of landing pages, the instant forms or contact forms are built within Facebook or Instagram and are tied in together with your ad, native to the platform.
Here’s how and why you should use Lead Ads campaigns:
Start with a strong and clear offer (Hint: Provide value)
You are well aware of how to use lead magnets and offers to generate leads. You are probably using some of those tactics right now.
Unlike regular Facebook advertising or Google Ads (or any other advertising platforms), with Facebook Lead Ads you can’t just have an ad that requires people to click through to a landing page. Instead, you have to make specific offers right away. Your Facebook target audience is going to sign up for the offer by filling out the form that’s attached to your ad or your instant experience on Facebook.
Here’s an example of a lead ad from The HOTH
Put in the work for Facebook Lead Ads
Clicking a few buttons, creating a form, adding an image, and launching a Facebook Lead Ad campaign makes it easy but not necessarily effective.
Facebook would want you to believe that it is easy enough.
But just like regular Facebook Advertising, your Facebook Lead Ad campaigns will take work, investment resources, planning, optimizing, and split testing to get you the results you seek.
As Rikke Thomson of Sleeknote writes, you’ll need to prepare to make a strong offer, use relevant images, write impactful copy, and place a strong call-to-action button to make your Lead Ads work well.
Ask the right questions
Simplicity and minimalism are key to be sure that your forms will work on lead ad campaigns.
The number of questions and the exact type of questions you’ll ask will depend on the campaign idea, campaign objective, the offer you are making, or the kind of leads you are looking to generate.
Here’s what Facebook recommends:
- Don’t ask for anything you don’t need
- Just because you can add form fields and questions doesn’t mean you should.
- As with any kind of good old conversion principles, fewer questions means less friction which in turn means higher conversions.
- Keep Instant forms minimalistic
Use Lead Ads with Instant experiences
Facebook Canvas campaigns have been rebranded as Facebook Instant Experiences. They are a great way to make your campaigns work harder for your business.
Given that Instant Experiences are visual, built for mobile, they get you higher CTR (click-through rates).
This falls directly in line with Facebook campaign best practices such as using relevant content to show to your target audiences, using thumb-stopping creative, and to be mobile ready.
Don’t forget to make it clear from the start as to what you are offering and what you want your potential audience to do.
Further, since you are asking for information (like email addresses and phone numbers) from your audience, be sure to keep your brand identity front and center.
Manage audiences right
As you’d do with any Facebook ad campaigns, spend a lot of time trying to create the best possible audiences for your campaigns.
Don’t rush through this. Don’t pick audiences at random. Do your research with Facebook Audience Insights, your own Google Analytics data, and use common sense to try to identify the best target audience for your campaign.
Opt for “extended reach” for your audiences while setting up your targeting.
If you have already run Lead Ads for a while and have generated leads or managed to make sales happen, exclude these audiences from your new campaign.
However, be mindful of audience overlap. Audience overlap happens when you try to show your ads to more or less the same audiences as with your existing ad sets.
Respond to tour leads
There’s really no point collecting leads through a done for you lead magnet if you don’t have a way to nurture them from the minute they sign up. The time it takes you to follow-up has a significant impact on conversions and your bottom-line.
If your campaigns (and hence lead forms) require phone numbers and instant follow-ups, be sure to run your campaigns during your business working hours by using day-parting features within your Facebook campaign setup.
Make use of one of the native CRM integrations that Facebook provides to connect your CRM or your email marketing autoresponder so that an email can trigger each time leads signup with your form.
If your existing CRM or email marketing tool isn’t a part of Facebook’s native CRM integrations, make use of Leadsbridge, Connectio, Automate.io, or Zapier.
Are you running Facebook Lead Ads? How are they performing? If you need help with your lead generation campaigns, feel free to contact our experts and we’ll help you craft an effective strategy. We can even build out a Done For You Lead Generation System for you so you can watch the leads roll in (and convert to sales) while you focus your energy on running your business!