Facebook is a behemoth, and you must find a way to get results from the Facebook Ads platform. You can’t ignore it.
While it might seem easy to create profitable Facebook campaigns , it’s not.
Facebook’s ad interface is complex with tons of options for advertisers. Of all the options available, Facebook Lead ad campaigns are one of the most promising ones that help advertisers generate leads and nurture them till they become customers.
While Facebook Lead Ads (now used with Instant Forms) might seem all easy to set up, there are a few practical considerations and a few strategic practices for you to think.
Here’s how you run Facebook Lead ads properly:
Profitable Facebook Lead Ad campaigns: Be sure to set up & test the Pixel
The Facebook Pixel is the all-powerful piece of code that you need to add to your website and landing pages. The Pixel comes in two parts:
- The base pixel, and
- The event code (for leads, conversions, page view, purchases, initiate checkout, etc.) — choose the event code that makes sense for your campaign.
While the base pixel has to fire on absolutely every page of your website, the event code part of the pixel should only fire on pages that show up when a conversion event happens. Examples of these pages are a thank-you page that loads after a lead signs up or a purchase-confirmation page which comes after a purchase has been made.
Additionally, there are several other events you could track, such as “initiate checkout”, “pageview” and “content view” if you want to better understand how your Facebook Ads perform.
Be sure to place the pixel properly on your website and/or landing pages. You can use the free Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome extension to test your Pixel placement.
Think of an offer to make
No one is going to click through and sign up on your Facebook Lead generation Ad forms (Instant forms) if you don’t make an offer.
If you don’t make an offer, there’s no incentive for your target audience to sign up. You want people to click through the ad and sign up for something you are giving away for free (just like a traditional opt-in offer).
Here’s what HubSpot does to generate leads for their business:
If you notice, HubSpot targets very specific audiences of startup founders and co-founders, marketing managers, agency owners, and other similar audiences to make a very specific offer — an Email Marketing Kit.
For Facebook Lead generation ads, it’s absolutely important to make an offer of some sort — a free eBook, a set of free videos, a whitepaper, a free online course, a free online membership, a free demo, etc.
You get the drift.
One form, two ads
For each campaign, you will essentially have one instant form created for that campaign and two ads (in pairs, so that you can test one ad against the other). You could also split test forms if you’d like but we suggest you only test forms after you already generate several leads with the one you first created.
Ads, however, are easier to test within each Ad set. So, start with ads A & B within the same ad set and test ad images or videos, ad copy, etc.
Be sure to add a “privacy policy” link to your Lead Instant forms, check for grammatical errors, and let it roll.
Note: You can add Instant forms or lead gen forms for your regular image or video campaigns too so that you can generate leads, just in case.
Bidding strategy for profitable Facebook Lead Ad campaigns
When you first launch your campaigns, Facebook will put your campaign through a “learning phase” where it’s trying to determine the best possible and most responsive audiences for the exact objective you’ve chosen (such as link clicks, conversions, landing page views, or leads).
Normally, Facebook needs about 50 “conversions” — depending on what you’ve set as conversions here — to make a learned decision about your campaign and then use their massive data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to show your ads to the exact audience you seek.
For Facebook to do this, it needs data.
According to Facebook,
“A good time to check to see if an adjustment is necessary is after your ad set has got about 50 optimization events. At that point, its delivery should be relatively stable, so you can get a pretty accurate sense of its performance.”
Most businesses and marketers start with their Lead generation ad campaigns optimizing for leads (obvious enough) but for “lowest cost” possible.
While it might seem like the sensible thing to do with Facebook Lead generation ads, it really isn’t.
Opting for the “lowest cost” makes your costs of acquisition go up over time. In short, you’ll let Facebook determine what the best cost of acquisition is. This is fine for the initial stages of your campaign but it gets more and more expensive as time goes by.
A better way to use the “lowest cost” bidding option is to set a cap — a price point which is near or equal to the actual cost of acquiring a lead for your business.
You can also use the “target cost” method if you know the cost of acquisition of a lead.
So, once you set up a lead generation campaign:
- Think of an offer and create two ads based on your offers.
- Double-check your ads, copy (and also for grammatical or design errors).
- Your Facebook lead generation campaign will be optimized for leads.
- Determine your daily budget (stay at a comfortable amount — not too high, not too low), a schedule, and launch your campaign.
- Instead of choosing “lowest cost”, choose the lowest cost with a bid cap or a target cost.
- Wait for Facebook’s learning phase to complete (usually around 50 conversions).
- Make significant edits (such as changing ads, copy, or bidding strategies) only after the learning phase. Note: Making significant edits will reset the learning phase thereby extending the time you need to run the campaign.
Connect your lead form with a CRM
On clicking the ad, an instant form pops up collecting basic information (or pre-set questions used for lead qualification and is set by advertisers).
The form is pre-filled with customer data (Facebook automatically inserts some basic information like names, phone numbers, and email addresses).
Your potential leads will fill up any other questions you might have included in your Instant forms.
All of this data is captured by facebook (and you can later download this data as a .CSV file). Thankfully, Facebook also integrates with several CRM providers and this helps you to avoid the manual work of downloading and uploading data.
If you are lucky enough to work with a CRM that Facebook already integrates with, the data is automatically synced with your CRM or email service provider such as MailChimp.
Depending on your setup, you can immediately trigger email autoresponders, marketing automation, and other email sequences after your leads submit the instant form.
Use email autoresponders to welcome your leads, or deliver what you promised (free coupon or free eBook?).
Manage your audiences
If you remember, you’ve already set up the Facebook Pixel on your website. One of the wonderful things you could do with your Facebook pixel is to create audiences.
The types of custom audiences that you create depends on your business (things are different for a service-based business compared to e-commerce business, for instance).
Sticking to lead ads campaigns for regular businesses and integrating with an email service provider like MailChimp are not enough. There are a few more things you must do:
- Create custom audiences for all website visitors or visitors to specific pages that are important to your business (such as pricing pages)
- Upload your existing email subscribers list to Facebook and name it as another audience.
- If you have a list of customers, make a separate list and create another audience for them on Facebook (you can also use the special LTV (Lifetime Value) based audience on Facebook for this.
- If your email marketing automation system allows for direct integration with Facebook, you can also automate things in a way that after each lead signs up through your campaigns, you could automatically add them or remove them from one of your custom audiences.
You could then include or exclude custom audiences depending on how you structure your campaigns.
An example of a simple use case might be that you don’t want to include your existing email subscribers for your Facebook lead generation campaign since they’ve already signed up for your offer. You might also want to exclude your customer list from these campaigns.
Managing your audiences by including or excluding them is essential for running targeted Facebook lead ad campaigns, to stay relevant, and to keep your costs low.
If you need help with your Facebook Lead Ad Campaigns, please feel free to fill out this form and we’d love to discuss your strategy with you.