A Facebook Lead Ad is a powerful marketing tool. This self-contained lead form and ad unit in one can be the cornerstone of a lead generation campaign and is a highly effective method for lowering cost per lead by gathering leads without landing pages. But you have to use it effectively to reap the true benefits. There are a few mistakes that are easy to make, but even easier to correct, once you know what to look for.
Putting Too Much In Your Facebook Lead Ad
Every Facebook Lead Ad includes multiple screens: the initial ad unit, an optional Context Card, an interactive lead form and a confirmation screen. There are quite a few required elements on each screen as well, such as header imagery, privacy policy links and call-to-action buttons. But don’t let the many screens and places you can put text trick you into thinking you should. Keep it simple!
Image credit: Facebook
When you’re talking about losing the landing page altogether, it’s tempting to want to stuff more information into each part of your Facebook Lead Ad. However, most of these ads are viewed on mobile, so space is limited. (Not to mention attention span.) Your ad copy should be about 90 characters. This is what will be displayed in the Newsfeed, so you’ve got to make it stand out and get people to click! Then you can take a little more time and a few more words to convince them to enter their personal information. Your Context Card is the place to do this, not the initial Facebook Lead Ad unit.
Targeting Too Narrowly (Or Too Broadly)
Your Facebook Audiences might be the most important part of your Facebook Lead Ad—even more important than your Lead Ad creative or offer. Because even the best offer, when targeted to the wrong people, will fail. Facebook provides guidance along the way as you create Saved Audiences using interest targeting and demographic information. Their reach estimates can help you determine if you need to broaden or narrow your targeting pool to suit your budget.
The amount you are willing to spend (per action, such as click or impression as well as overall budget) and who you are trying to reach (the criteria for your audience) work together to create targeting estimates. Highly specialized, narrow targeting will often yield high costs per action. This may be appropriate for certain industries, but more often it will simply lead to a high cost per lead and low results. On the flip side, an undefined and very broad audience will burn through budget quickly at a low cost per action but with little to no leads acquired.
Not Priming Your Audience
Facebook Lead Ads are very powerful, but as with any lead generation campaign, they can’t do all the work themselves. You should create a Facebook lead funnel and target your desired audience with awareness messaging and branding before you hit them with the hard sell of a Facebook Lead Ad. Utilize video and immersive Facebook Canvas ads to create retargeting pools and lookalike models off the audiences that engaged with your content the most. You should always have multiple Facebook ad campaigns running to people in various stages of the funnel. By the time they see a Facebook Lead Ad they are familiar with you and a warm lead that is much more likely to provide their personal information.
Take a look at your current Facebook Lead Ad campaigns. Are you making these mistakes? Many do, so don’t feel bad. But take the time to correct them to see your lead capture rate go up, and your cost per lead go down.