What are Facebook Lead Ads?
In today’s blog post, we’re going to talk briefly about the benefits of Facebook Lead Ads! As you are aware, most of us are captive servants to our mobile phones. This of course presents an opportunity and a challenge, especially for activities that require longer research and contemplation. Mobile-users have twitchy attention spans and often won’t make the leap from social browsing to website research in between texting and waiting in line for their favorite latte. And if your client has a website with multiple conversion barriers and a bad user experience, the challenge of capturing user data gets even steeper.
Enter the Facebook Lead Ad
The great thing about Lead Ads? They cut out the middleman entirely and allow you to engage with users right there on the Facebook platform without having to disrupt their scrolling activities (too much). No website needed! Plus, they’re inexpensive, easy to build and they just work.
You can run them on Facebook and Instagram for additional reach. Unlike other Facebook ad types, Lead Ads include a contact form that let’s your potential prospects/customers engage with you by sharing their information. They’re a great way to collect email signups for a newsletter, collect detailed inquiries from potential customers or offer irresistible deals and promotions.
And That Is Just The Tip Of The Proverbial Iceberg
What other ways can you utilize this ad unit you plead? Well, let’s see… how about event registrations, scheduling consultations, enabling demos, product test drives, price quotes, webinar signups, white paper downloads… you get the picture.
But Do Lead Ads Work? The Proof…
Take a look at this quick example of how we were able to significantly improve one of our client’s lead generation efforts by testing and adopting Facebook Lead Ads.
Our client is an award-winning property management company with more than a hundred luxury rental apartment properties. Each property runs and maintains its own separate Facebook Page and website, all with different branding, navigation and user experience unique to the property. The challenge of having so many landing page experiences is that each property website follows a different conversion path with most of the best pages lacking the ability to convert.
In this case, a conversion was the completion of a quick website form expressing interest in potentially renting an apartment. In initial testing, the varied user experience and difficulty in navigating to a conversion page showed up in the data. Overall, conversion rate was an anemic 0.9% with cost per lead climbing well over $150 on some of the better performing campaigns.
And then we introduced the Lead Ad format. The test results were stellar compared to the more traditional conversion path. With the new Lead Ad forms in place, conversion rates started climbing (above 6%) and cost-per-lead metrics plummeted to a more acceptable $26 in less than 45 days. With CVR improving almost 600%, we rolled the ad unit out to the rest of the campaigns and the results were practically identical across the board.
Why Do They Work?
Impressive numbers, indeed. There are several benefits to this ad format that accelerate their effectiveness.
When a user clicks on the ad, the user is taken to a pre-filled contact form that already contains their details, which streamlines the process of submitting. You can ask custom questions, too, to prequalify or segment users, such as:
- Short Answer to ask a question that leaves room for people to provide a one line open answer
- Multiple Choice to give different option to choose from
- Conditional to create a set of questions with conditional answers that change based on how someone answered a previous question
- Store Locator to let people search for a nearby store or location
- Appointment Scheduling let people request a date and time to make an appointment with your business or schedule a visit
- If you’d like to add additional questions, click + Add a questionwhere you can add up to 15 custom questions
Where did everybody go?
Once somebody submits their information via the Lead Ad type, Facebook makes it easy to download the leads using a variety of different methods. You can download your leads directly on the Facebook Page (CSV export), or from the Ads Manager. If you’re a little fancier, you can also have them downloaded through an API or from a CRM partner integration that syncs with Facebook.
Optimization Tips
Lead ads are specifically designed to increase the amount of lead volume, even if it means that the quality of the leads is reduced. When quality leads are the primary objective, you can include a “Higher Intent” review step that gives your prospects a chance to confirm their information. Under the Content tab, simply click Form Type and then select the Higher Intent option during the setup process. This adds one more step to the submission process to make sure the user intended to submit their information to you.
Also, keep your forms short as longer forms often decrease conversion rates. Use the KISS model generously here. Only ask for the most important information in the lead form and ask for additional information upon follow-up.
Use open-ended questions sparingly. The more typing that is required the more people lose interest and drop out of the process. Multiple choice is a great alternative as it lets you steer the direction of the information being gathered so it is the most helpful to those following up on the leads.
If using multiple choice, reduce scrolling by limiting the number of options to 3 or 4. This keeps the most important visible on one screen and keeps the user focused on the prize – the submit button.
Conclusion
Lead Ads are great at engaging people right on the Facebook platform. Whether your website experience is stellar or not, they are worth a test to see if you’re able to drive quality leads. Try them out and let us know if they help improve performance on your campaigns.
