A Guide to Facebook Lead Ads

Using the Power of Lead Ads to Fuel Your Business

Contributors: Jake Tenenbaum, Client Success Manager, Kenshoo | Katie Spannbauer, Manager Advertising Operations,Targeted Victory

Leads Are Still the Holy Grail in Advertising

The mobile revolution has changed the way we do practically everything, from

connecting with friends and family to shopping for a new car. Likewise, advertising

has been transformed with the advent of entirely new ways for businesses to

reach and engage their consumers.

Through all these changes, two things remains the same—the value of quality

leads, and the challenge of acquiring them.

It’s difficult to get prospects to fill out forms and share personal information,

even if they are interested in your product. On mobile devices—where consumers

prefer fewer click-throughs and minimal typing—it’s even harder.

Enter Facebook’s Lead Ads. Marketers no longer need to rely on multiple click-

throughs and time-consuming form submissions. All of it can easily be done on

Facebook within an ad unit.

Hooray! One less obstacle to quality leads! Let’s dive in...

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They look like regular Facebook ads. The ad unit looks just like a regular link, video or carousel ad, consisting of an image, headline, text and call-to-action (CTA). The main difference is that the CTA links to a contact form.

The contact form is customizable. When a user clicks on the CTA, they are taken to the contact form requesting their information. You can customize the questions based on your goals.

IMAGE: A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS. CHOOSE YOURS CAREFULLY.

CALL-TO-ACTION: WHAT IS IT YOU WANT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE TO DO ?

TEXT: THIS IS WHERE YOU MAKE YOUR PITCH.

HEADLINE: KEEP IT SIMPLE, AND

DON’T BE AFRAID TO TEST DIFFERENT OPTIONS TO

ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE.

The contact form is pre-populated. The contact form is pre-populated with information Facebook already has about the user. The user can easily edit any info they’d like and then hit submit.

The contact data is shared with you. Once a user submits their information, they are served a submission confirmation screen and then the lead is captured. You can download your leads manually in a CSV file, set-up an integration with your CRM, or use the Facebook API.

What is a Lead Ad?

Lead Ads are an easy way for marketers to collect information from prospects, quickly turning Facebook users into leads. Here’s how they work:

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What’s the Big Deal About

Lead Ads?

Lead Ads make it easy to collect information from your prospects. They are a highly flexible ad format great for a range of goals including: building an email list for your consumer newsletter or product offers, signing people up for test drives of a new electric car, or registering attendees for a conference. Here are the key benefits of Lead Ads:

Easy to Complete: Lead Ads are pre-populated with information that consumers have already shared with Facebook, simplifying the data entry required, which is especially important on mobile devices and drives more form submissions. Consumers can also easily edit the pre-populated data.

Highly Customizable: You can customize the fields in the lead form, making these ads highly flexible and a great solution for a variety of goals.

Targetable: You can hone in on a particular audience, whether it’s an existing Custom Audience or audiences curated with Facebook’s native targeting. Users cannot convert on the same form more than once, ensuring you are efficiently serving to new users only.

Efficient: You can optimize for leads by setting a bid price based on your target cost-per-lead (CPL) and enabling the algorithm to automatically optimize.

Simple Access to Your Leads: There are three ways to access your leads. You can download leads manually in a CSV file, set-up an integration with your CRM, or use the Facebook API.

Safe & Secure: The information shared by the user only goes to the advertiser with the user’s consent, and advertisers are not permitted to share or sell this personal information. This policy reinforces the trust you want to build with your consumers.

8 Steps to Success

Since the launch of Lead Ads, we’ve worked with several advertisers to optimize their campaigns for maximum lead generation. Here are eight best practices that drive Lead Ads success:

1. Use Engaging Creative: Compelling creative is always important, but it’s even more critical with Lead Ads because you’re asking prospects to share personal information. Be sure to choose a strong CTA and headline. Also, provide detail on what the prospect will receive in exchange for their personal information. Are they signing up for a monthly newsletter, weekly deals email or a free trial? Take advantage of context cards, an optional tile that pops up after the prospect clicks on a lead ad but before they get to the form.

2. Use An Incentive: Offer a relevant incentive or a lead magnet to motivate prospects to fill out the form. For example, you can offer leads a free e-book, discount codes for a product, a free trial, or a free info session.

3. Keep the Form Simple: It may be tempting to include a lot of questions, but be sure to only ask for the information you really need. Every additional question may become an obstacle to completion. Also, try to limit free form responses as they place more of a burden on the user and are difficult to analyze.

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4. Be Where Your Prospects Are: Run your Lead Ads across both desktop and mobile. Lower CPLs are more likely when Facebook is able to reach users where they convert best.

5. Test, Test, And Test Again: Test both the creative and the form in order to optimize ad performance. You may find that videos outperform static images, or that asking a specific question decreases the form submission rate.

6. Optimize for Lead Goals: With Lead Ads, you can optimize your campaign towards lead goals but be sure you’ve set your CPL goals high enough so you’ll get sufficient reach for your campaign. Facebook recommends bidding the true value of your lead.

7. Continue the Conversation: Automate the uploading of leads into your CRM to continue the conversation with new leads in real-time. You can also tailor your message depending on the engagement your audience has with your Lead Ad. Lead Engagement Audiences enable you to target your audience in three ways:

• Send users who clicked on the form but didn’t submit an alternate message.

• Retarget users who discarded the form with a different or optimized form.

• Retarget users who submitted the form with a related offer to move them down the purchase path.

8. Follow-up Right Away: Don’t wait to reach out to new leads. Take advantage of your lead ad and brand being top of mind to continue the conversation with leads as promptly as possible. For example, if they submitted their email address to receive an e-book, send them a download link immediately. Then, follow-up the next day asking for their feedback on the content.

Take It To The Next Level

With Kenshoo

Here’s how Kenshoo capabilities can take your Lead Ads campaign to the next level:

Easy Creative Set-up: In Kenshoo’s creative flow you can easily and simultaneously create multiple versions of your Lead Ad to test which version performs best. For example, you can test a video ad against a static image, or two carousel ads with different messaging.

Ad Sequencing: Leverage Kenshoo’s Creative Manager to automate when your audience sees pre-selected creatives and ad types in order to reach them at the right moment. For example, you can target your audience with a video to introduce your brand or product, then retarget the most engaged audience after a few days with a lead ad to collect their information.

Retarget Searchers: If you’re connected with Kenshoo Search, Intent Driven Audiences (IDA) is also an effective way to retarget users who have searched for particular keywords related to your products or brand, increasing the likeliness for that user to complete a form.

Dynamic Optimization: You can also tap into Kenshoo Portfolio Optimization (KPO), an industry leading algorithm built on top of Facebook’s optimization solution, which automates bid and budget adjustments, helping to achieve your goal CPL. KPO enables optimization across ad sets to save time and keep an ROI positive CPA while testing creative, targeting, or optimization strategies.

Easy Analysis: Use Kenshoo’s Analysis Grid to easily see which Lead Ads are performing best. No need to download reports or create any pivot tables. The Analysis Grid does it all for you in one place.

The Power of Lead Ads

Drives Your Business

Because Lead Ads are so flexible, they are a powerful way to drive leads for a range of advertiser objectives. Conversion paths that require an initial introductory step or downstream approval, like buying a car, applying to school, or getting a loan are great fits for Lead Ads.

Here are a few examples of different verticals and business objectives that put the power of Lead Ads to work:

Retail: Sign-up new consumer for a product offer or newsletter. Collect information from local consumer who want to know about new store opening details.

Autos: Register prospects for test drives at local dealers, enable users to request online quotes for the make and model they are looking for, or allow prospects to configure the car of their dreams.

Education: Sign up prospective students for an information session, or for quarterly catalogs of classes.

Financial Services: Use the form to start the prequalification process, or to allow prospects to indicate interest in your specific banking product or service.

Gaming: Create an email alert list of prospective gamers for your next release, or build out a subscriber list for weekly newsletters.

Ride-Sharing: Sign-up new drivers or new customers for your ride-sharing service.

A KENSHOO CASE STUDY

Targeted Victory

with Lead Ads

Targeted Victory, a Kenshoo client and major player in political advertising vertical, put many of these best practices to the test and had a big win with Lead Ads recently.

One of their primary goals was to grow client email sign-ups efficiently and at the lowest CPA possible. Targeted Victory had been highly successful with a variety of lead generation campaigns, but were looking for new and innovative methods to achieve their goals efficiently.

The Solution: Lead Ads to the rescue! Targeted Victory leveraged Lead Ads to drive email sign-ups for their clients, integrating directly into their client’s’ Salesforce CRM. They also refreshed their Custom Audiences based on incoming leads, using exclusion rules to prevent duplication of any names they already had in

their database and minimize wasted spend. The team leveraged Kenshoo’s easy and intuitive ad creation tools, coupled with Kenshoo Portfolio Optimization, which automated the optimization of campaigns and drove increased efficiencies across ad sets to reduce manual efforts and maximize CPA efficiency.

The Results: The campaign resulted in a 31% decrease in CPA and the team saw a 90% decrease in the daily operations necessary to manage the campaign.

Targeted Victory continues to leverage the power of Lead Ads for their clients so they can efficiently gain leads at low CPAs. For many clients, this ad unit has performed better than traditional means of collecting leads through page post link ads and has become the primary method of collecting leads on Facebook. Targeted Victory + Lead Ads for the win!

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What You Need to Get Started

Regardless of whether you’re creating your Lead Ad directly in Facebook or through Kenshoo, here’s what you need to get started:

1. A Lead Magnet or Incentive: Lead Ads are more effective when you offer a tangible reason for a user to share their personal information. An offer, such as free content download or trial, increase performance.

2. Images and/or Video: Similar to other campaign objectives, you can use images, video ads or carousel ads for your creative. Test different creative to find the most relevant content for your audiences.

3. The Questions You Want to Ask: Remember, only ask for what you really need. The shorter the form, the better the response rate.

4. The Audience You want to Target: Targeting is similar to other campaigns. Tap into Lead Engagement Audiences and hone in on people who’ve seen the form but haven’t completed it.

5. A Link to Your Website or Landing Page: Provide a direct link to your site or to the lead magnet on the confirmation page.

6. Tracking: Set up the Facebook pixel so you can track downstream conversions as well.

Get Started Today!

If capturing leads is important to your business, Facebook Lead Ads need to be part of

your marketing mix. We hope you’ve seen the benefits of Lead Ads and feel equipped

to take advantage of some of the best practices of running a successful campaign.

Please reach out to us Kenshoo or Targeted Victory if you have any other questions or

feedback. We’d love to hear from you.