What are Facebook lead ads?
Lead ads or lead generation ads on Facebook are customer information forms that are promoted throughout the platform. These forms collect customer information such as name, email address, postal codes and more. This information can then be used to further connect with the customer for lower funnel engagements or awareness of related events such as: contest registrations, newsletter subscriptions, email upsells, or future retargeting campaigns.
The Main Benefits of Lead Generation in Facebook:
Optimized for Ease of Opt-in
Lead ads are optimized for mobile users and are designed with pre-built forms that automatically populate with user data from the Facebook platform when the users opt in.
Brand Awareness and Encourages Lower Funnel Engagement
It warms upper funnel audiences and potentially converts prospects into high quality brand followers, while also creating opportunities for the brand to interact with the audience through emails, contests, etc.
Cost Efficient
Lead generation ads on average, are lower cost when compared to conversion focused ads. Thus, campaigns can be set up to focus on generating a large volume of leads for a relatively smaller budget, when compared to conversion ads.
Highly Targeted Segmentation
Facebook allows us to show lead ads to highly targeted audience segments in terms of interests, location, demographics, and more. This increases the quality of lead generation.
Strategy
Ideally users are incentivized somehow to provide their email, such as entry to a contest, etc. When you see Cost Per Lead increasing over time, you should switch the creative / offer to renew buying efficiencies.
We recommend using general ‘higher level’ targeting for lead ads and reserve current highly targeted segments for Conversion Ads. Conversion ads are designed to get people to take an action (such as purchase) on the website which is why it costs more per result. Although, lead ads are cheaper, the major trade-off when it comes to running lead generations ads instead of conversion ads is that you risk gaining leads that are higher up in the funnel. This means that although you may be generating a high volume of leads for a lower cost, a portion of those leads may be individuals who are not as interested to convert later down the funnel – we call these low-quality leads. However, there are methods you can employ to reduce this risk and increase the quality of leads.
Next Steps:
Existing conversion objective campaigns yield healthy results and are integral to the success of ongoing promotional ads, so plan to continue using conversion ads, but leverage lead gen campaigns simultaneously to test potential new markets.
The following strategy uses lead gen ads as a method to test target markets:
- Create the right image/video creative that is relevant to the market.
- Keep the form simple and ask only the questions required for future retargeting.
- Offer a gated incentive (e.g. a coupon) that can only be accessed when interested customers complete the form.
- Use collected first-party data to run future contests, events, email sequences, newsletters, etc. This also creates excitement and increases brand awareness in prospect audience. 5) Use a custom audience of those who have submitted their email address to exclude those people from seeing lead gen ads.
If you need assistance developing and executing the right Lead Generation strategy on Facebook or across any other digital platform, please contact us. Our team is here to help.
POV By Andrew Lee, Paid Social Analyst
