What you'll learn in this Facebook Lead Generation guide:
In pretty much all the campaigns we've run with clients, we've seen at least a 50% reduction in cost per lead vs sending to a landing page with Facebook Lead Ads.
As an early launch partner, we’ve seen lots of campaigns across multiple industries like Auto, Education and Real estate, and the results are pretty consistent. Lead Ads don’t work for every company doing lead gen, but in most cases the performance beats landing pages (as long as you follow best practice guidelines to keep lead quality high too - more on that later).
The FB Lead Ads user experience is designed to make it ultra-simple to fill out the form. The form fields pre-fill with profile data where possible, and the form itself loads instantly, because it’s part of the native application.
Lead Ads are perfect for mobile users, which make up the bulk of people you will reach from your Facebook Ads campaigns. With a few taps of the thumb, you can submit your details.
Check out the video to see a Facebook Lead Ad in action!
95% of the time, Facebook Lead Ads will outperform landing pages, but there is a role for both formats. One thing to note is that unless you follow best practices (below), your lead quality from Lead Ads is likely to be lower than a landing page.
If you use landing pages a lot for lead gen, you might want to read our detailed article on the differences between lead ads and landing pages.
Facebook charges on a cost per impression basis, so your average cost per lead is your ad spend divided by the number of leads you generate.
The average cost per lead you achieve will vary depending on lots of factors, but here are some things that might help you plan costs:
Facebook Lead Ads are very flexible, with plenty of options for things like targeting, ad formats and form structure. You should play around with the experience for the campaign you are running, but here’s a quick guide to create your first Lead Ads campaign.
Create a campaign, then choose 'Lead Generation' as an objective to get started.
When the customer clicks on the call to action button of the advert, it will open the Facebook Lead Form wizard. This form is pre-filled where possible from profile data to save the customer time.
We’ll walk you through each option in the Lead Ad form;
High intent vs More Volume
You have the option to choose a High intent or More Volume option in the form.
The High Intent form adds an extra review confirmation step to the form to make sure people understand what they are submitting.
This is a great feature if you’re seeing low quality leads, but but it might be an idea to launch your first campaign without this step.
Intro
Although this is an optional step, we highly recommend adding it. It’s an important gate for ensuring people know why they are submitting their details.
The Intro step increases lead quality, but also reduces the number of bounces from people not reading the first ad properly. People only spend a few seconds reading each post on the Newsfeed, so it’s a really important step to talk through what benefits they get from submitting your form.
We usually use the bullets option, as it makes it ultra clear what benefits the customer gets in return. Think about how they might feel when they reach this step, and what would help them feel comfortable and excited about sharing data with you.
What questions should you ask?
Privacy Policy
With Lead Ads you have lots of control over your disclaimer, consent opt-ins and you can link to your own Privacy Policy.
Thank You screen
The Thank You screen is an important part of any lead form. You have a highly engaged user at this point, so make the most of that attention, and help them take some next steps or get to know your offering better.
With lead ads you can download a CSV of your leads, but this means you’d be responding daily (at best).
Instead, make sure you use a lead ads sync to your CRM like Driftrock. We’ve made it incredibly simple to setup, and help make sure you never lose a lead. More on this in the next section!
Make sure you check through your new campaign in detail before pushing the play button. For all our clients, we follow a rigorous testing process to make sure you don’t lose any leads:
You can’t optimise what you don’t know. My general advice is to never launch a paid ads campaign where you can’t track conversions to an Ad or Keyword level. It gives you a huge competitive advantage knowing what works, what doesn’t, and how hard you can push the bids.
More on Lead Ads Measurement and Tracking in this section.
The faster you respond to a lead, the higher the conversion rate. You get a 9X boost in conversion rates by responding in <5 minutes according to a study by MIT!
The Driftrock Facebook lead sync makes it quick and simple to setup, while ensuring that your leads arrive in your CRM in real-time.
We process millions of leads for companies like Honda, BMW and Heineken, so you know your leads will arrive safely and securely.
It’s easy to take for granted how easy it is to measure the performance of digital marketing campaigns compared to media like radio, TV. Good measurement and tracking is not only essential for measuring your profitability but a massive competitive advantage over people who don’t measure properly.
Here’s an example
Imagine two automotive dealerships selling the same BMW vehicle range.
Targeting audiences on Facebook are not equal. Some generate cheaper leads, some generate more sales.
Dealer 1 now competes in more auctions for the high quality audience than Dealer 2, so grows sales faster and steals sales off Dealer 2.
In reality, on Facebook you are competing not just with your direct competitors, but anyone looking to reach that audience. If you can’t maximise your bids to the true value of the audience, your Facebook campaigns won’t scale.
The great thing about lead gen is that it’s possible to track campaign, adset and ad performance right the way through to a sale by attaching the marketing source info to each lead. Lead submissions tend to occur in the same session rather than 2 weeks later like eCommerce.
This means that later you can total up the high quality leads or sales for each campaign, adset or ad to see what works best with a good degree of accuracy.
We’ve made this incredibly easy at Driftrock with our free lead tracking and analysis tools. Simply signup and connect your Facebook Ads account to get started. It’s free, and is going to save you lots of time!
We’ve run countless Facebook Lead Ads campaigns with our clients. Here are some of the secrets we’ve learnt for reducing cost per lead!
If you acquire the wrong leads, you’re wasting time for your sales team, and the time of the people who connect with you.
When we talk about increasing lead quality, we’re not just talking lead qualification and filtering, we’re talking about increasing the percentage of leads that are high quality.
In short, don’t just throw low quality leads in the bin, but instead optimise your campaigns to find people you know you can service.
We can’t understate how important optimising for lead quality is. It’s the difference between a successful lead gen campaign, and an unprofitable one.
It’s critical you measure campaigns, Adsets and ads through to sales to measure ROI.
If not sales, then at least optimise to a quality lead rather than all leads with some simple lead qualification scoring or segments.
Take this example:
Here’s a few top tips from working with our clients, across lots of industries:
1. Offer a true value exchange
In return for the customer sharing their details, create compelling content that adds real value to them or their business.
2. Add a welcome message
Facebook Lead Ads have the ability to add a welcome message to the form. This gives you a valuable chance to educate and explain why they should complete the form.
3. Ask more questions
Don’t be afraid to ask more questions than you might with a web form. Quality is higher, and the algorithms find more people, likely to fill out your form, so CPL doesn’t increase too much.
4. Optimise targeting and creative
Make sure you can track the number of quality leads or sales from each Campaign, Adset and Ad. You’ll find different targeting has a big impact on lead quality. You can do this quickly and easily with Driftrock track and analyze.
5. Educate first
We found that a customer who has watched a brand video first, then filled out a form second converts better downstream than a cold lead. This can be done with with Facebook Video View Engagement Audiences, then retargeting these with Lead Ads.
6. Give multiple options
Give the customer multiple options like; “I’d like a quote”, or “I’m just looking for more info” offer some insight into the stage they are in the lifecycle to that you can serve them better. It also helps people understand the context for the form.
7. Try Facebook Lead Ads High Intent form option
The Lead Ads high intent forms feature asks for confirmation and review before they submit the form.
We don’t recommend using this feature from the start, but if you are getting a healthy cost per lead, but are struggling with quality, it’s worth giving it a try.
We’re all familiar with lead qualification criteria, but we’re going to focus on how to increase the percentage of people who match our quality criteria.
The goal is to understand which Campaigns, Adsets and Ads perform the best for cost per qualified lead so that we can optimise our campaigns.
If you add the campaign, adset and ad names to your lead submissions then you can crunch the numbers in a spreadsheet to discover the performance of each campaign.
You can automatically create high quality lead segmentation in Driftrock, and view these as conversions using automatic Offline Conversions sync back to Facebook.
Now you’ve worked hard to acquire all these high quality leads, its all about converting to purchase or beyond.
We’re not going to talk sales strategy, but instead, how we extend the marketing funnel help nurture customers through to sale.
In this section, we’ll cover our playbook for converting more leads.
You have a huge amount of data at your fingertips with your lead gen campaigns, that you can put to use right away to increase lead conversion.
Every question you ask is a potential opportunity to segment and score your leads. For example, for automotive clients we always recommend adding “When are you looking to buy”.
It’s a simple question that allows us to create segments of customers who are ‘in-market’ now to buy a car vs people planning to.
We can therefore plan and communicate with each of these segments in different ways to increase conversion rates and response times.
Find some wall space in your office, and start mapping out all the key customer segments you have into journeys. This allows you to start planning how you communicate to each, depending on the stage they are at in the funnel.
Now you’ve mapped out your segments and customer journeys, it’s time to start planning how best to communicate with people at each stage.
Respond quickly
Remember that the faster you respond, the higher the conversion rate. In an MIT study they found that responding in the first hour increases conversion 7X. You can go much faster than autoresponders too!
Prioritise intent
If someone is urgently trying to buy your product, put them top of the list. As opposed to someone that is just browsing. Know when to give them space.
Although I’m sure you have an email nurturing program in place for your leads, this only covers half the story.
You don’t necessarily need Driftrock to give this a try to start with. Simply download a CSV snapshot of a customer segment, and try advertising to the segment alongside your email campaign.