Using Facebook Lead Ads For Your Business

A lead is someone expressing their interest in your product, service, or industry. The generation of leads is a hugely important process for businesses in marketing themselves and increasing sales. The key is to acquire high quality leads at the lowest possible price.  Facebook have now come up with a new efficient way of lead generation; Facebook Lead Ads.

What are Facebook Lead Ads?

As you know, when creating an advert on Facebook, you can select various different objectives for your ad e.g. send people to your website, gain app installs, get video views etc. Now you can create one with the sole purpose of generating leads. These ads look just like general link ads, however, rather than taking people to an external site and away from Facebook, it allows people to fill in a form. Facebook also prefill certain information from what they have on their profile e.g. name, email address, number etc. making it an even more simple process for the user.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Lead Ads

Just like all the different Facebook ad objectives, Lead Ads come with both advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

1. The user doesn’t need to leave Facebook – The fact that the user can enter their information there and then without having to be taken to an external site is a huge advantage. It makes the process simpler and doesn’t lose the users attention.
2. Information autofill – As mentioned before, Facebook import whatever information they can straight from the users profile, simplifying the process.
3. Mobile only – If you don’t have a mobile responsive website, then it doesn’t matter, as everything is done through Facebook.
4. Load times are eliminated – The fact that the user doesn’t have to go through a link takes away the negative of load times.

Disadvantages:

1. Mobile only – Although this is under the advantages, it can still be seen as a disadvantage as it means you can only target mobile users.
2. No website traffic – As all is done on Facebook, it means you get no website traffic.
3. Reach cost – The cost to reach people is on average double that of other types of ads.
4. No CRM integration – At the moment, there is no CRM integration, meaning you have to do it manually.

What to do when creating Lead Ads

As you know, Facebook has a bigger and more powerful tool for creating ads than the standard ads manager. It is called the power editor. At the moment, Facebook Lead Ads can only be created in the power editor tool. One thing that you have to keep in mind is that you can’t pull content from meta data, it all has to be input manually. Once you have tailored your demographic so that you are reaching the audience you want to be targeting, you then have to create the lead form. Firstly you need to select the user information that you want to gather e.g. name, email, date of birth, gender etc. On top of this you can also add in 3 additional questions, you can use the options they have given you or you can create your own personal ones. These questions can be open ended or multiple choice. One thing to remember is you need to add in a privacy policy with your lead form. You can also add a disclaimer, however, this is optional. Finally, you can also add a link to your website.

What is coming to Lead Ads in 2016?

1. Desktop placement – as we mentioned before, at the moment you can only place Lead Ads on mobile. However, in the future, you will be able to place them on desktop.
2. Video Lead Ads – soon you will be able to add videos to Lead Ads.
3. Carousel ads – since their release, carousel ads have been a huge success. Soon, rather than taking people to your website, you can use one of the image links to take people to a lead form.
4. CRM integration – having to access your leads manually is a big pain.

With Facebooks ever improving advertising tools, it is exciting to see how the Facebook Lead Ads are going to be used and how successful they are.