If you’re looking to build your email list, you’ve probably wondered if Facebook Lead Ads are right for you. It’s a tempting proposition: access to Facebook’s enormous network, coupled with their existing knowledge of users and access to their contact information. This makes it incredibly easy for a Facebook user to opt-in to your Facebook Lead Ads. The question is: at what cost?
Nearly everyone has a Facebook account these days, from pre-teens to grandparents. Each generation uses it a little differently, but there’s no denying it has tremendous influence in today’s digital world. Facebook’s ad targeting capabilities are second to none, and Facebook Lead Ads can be an incredibly powerful tool to help build your email list. But are they right for you? Here are a few reasons they work well and are worth testing…and one reason you might want to focus lead generation efforts elsewhere.
There are a tremendous number of options available when building a Facebook lead generation campaign. The targeting capabilities, form builder and multiple media types are very powerful, but they can also be overwhelming when you’re first starting to capture leads without landing pages on Facebook. First-time Facebook lead generation campaigns may be a bit simpler. But as you gain experience with the platform, it can be beneficial to dig into the more advanced options available to you. Here are a few opportunities to boost your Facebook lead generation performance.
Whether it’s your first or your fifteenth time running Facebook Lead Ads, your campaign can almost always benefit from testing and optimization. Even top-performing campaigns eventually become stale or oversaturate their audience. A few tweaks at various points can keep your Facebook Lead Ads running efficiently, providing you with high-quality leads to nurture and convert into customers.
There are a lot of moving parts to a Facebook Lead Ad. From creative to call-to-action, form fields to friend-of-a-friend targeting, every aspect of your Facebook lead generation campaign is carefully crafted to work together for lowest cost per lead and highest lead quality. But what if your cost per lead is higher than you’d like? Or you’re struggling to convert these leads and need more qualified potential customers? There’s one quick fix that can drastically improve your Facebook lead generation efforts: retargeting.
Video rules the web, and Facebook is no exception. In fact, Facebook is investing tons of resources into video products and capabilities, particularly around advertising. Videos attract more eyeballs and get more interaction from users than other types of content, whether it’s organic content or a paid video ad. A Facebook Lead Ad video will increase your leads in both quantity and quality. How? Not only will the video itself attract more potential leads, but the story you can tell in a video is more likely to fully and adequately explain your brand promise, improving your lead quality. Here are a few ways to make that Facebook Lead Ad video work harder for you.
Facebook offers a wealth of data and services to advertisers. As they continue to add new features for users, advertisers benefit too. Their latest advances attempt to connect the online and offline experience to improve conversion rate and customer value, which can have a big impact on your Facebook lead generation efforts.
Facebook realized that not every step of the conversion path happens on Facebook, or sometimes even online. In an effort to help advertisers more accurately track the true effectiveness of their Facebook Lead Ads, they’re launching an Offline Conversion solution that allows them to combine known customer data with Facebook behavior and offline actions. Advertisers upload the results of their lead campaigns or integrate their CRM in order to access more valuable results data and improve the effectiveness of their ads.
You’ve got your first Facebook Lead Ad campaign up and running. Creative looks good, call to action is strong and your offer is compelling. You’ve even added a concisely worded Context Card and pared back your lead form field to encourage quick submission. But are your Facebook Lead Ads working? Are they generating Facebook Leads for you? And furthermore, what’s the quality of those leads? Here are a few questions to answer in order to tell:
Log into Facebook Ads Manager and take a look at your Facebook Lead Ad campaign. First and foremost, you want to see the sheer number of Facebook Leads you’ve gathered through your campaign. (We’ll get to cost and quality soon.) The Facebook Ads Manager Dashboard will quickly show you campaign metrics, including the number of leads submitted.
Image credit: Facebook
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.
A Facebook Lead Ad can be a pretty powerful lead generation tool, when run effectively. But there are a lot of moving pieces in each Facebook Lead Ad Campaign. How can you be sure you’re optimizing for the highest quality leads and lowest cost per lead? The key is to break it down piece by piece and optimize step by step, continually testing along the way. To start, let’s tackle the Facebook Lead Ad itself: the creative.
As with any type of advertising, your Facebook Lead Ad headline needs to entice users to click. Highlight the key selling proposition of your company, or the main benefit of your lead generation offer. The Facebook Lead Ad headline is the largest text they’ll see but space is limited, particularly on mobile devices. Keep it to 40 characters or less. Think short, sweet and to-the-point. It’s OK to be direct and somewhat salesy here; your supporting copy and Context Card can tell more of the story, but your headline is what will convince users to read on and continue clicking. Your headline is one of the easiest items to test and highly correlated to clicks, so be sure to test multiple headline variations of your Facebook Lead Ad.
Your headline and visual will do most of the heavy lifting in your Facebook Lead Ad; if a user isn’t interested in those they will quickly move on. A video will naturally attract more eyeballs in the crowded Newsfeed, so if you’ve got one, use it. Video not in the budget? You can create a moving slideshow right within Facebook to still include motion in your Facebook Lead Ad. In some cases a carousel of static images may be preferred; just make sure there’s no text in the image and that you elect to have Facebook show the top-performing graphic first. The visual creative is not quite as easy to swap in and out as a headline, but it is the most powerful part of your ad, so experiment with a variety of ad formats, media types and visual look and feels to find the one that works for your business.
Once your catchy headline and compelling visuals have drawn in users, your Facebook Lead Ad copy comes into play. If they’ve read this far, you can do a little more storytelling here or expand on the key features of your offer, product or service. But keep it short! Think of this as the caption for a Facebook post. Aim for a maximum of 130 characters; 90 is even better as it presents best for mobile viewing. (And Facebook Lead Ads are extremely powerful on mobile, where users are less likely to browse away from Facebook.) This is the most complex part of the ad to test, so you may want to save it for after you’ve optimized all your other Facebook Lead Ad components.
The final piece of your Facebook Lead Ad is the CTA button. Facebook has pre-selected a set of Call-To-Action buttons for use with a Facebook Lead Ad: Apply Now; Get Quote; Download; Learn More; Sign Up; and Subscribe. Your business may more closely lend itself to one over others, but test different CTAs to see what works. Again, these are very easy to swap but can have a large impact without a lot of overhead.
While you’re testing, keep in mind that there is no one right answer for any piece of your ad. Each one interacts with the next, and the right combination for once audience may be very different than another target. Got your Facebook Lead Ad in a good spot? Then it’s time to improve your Context Card and Lead Form.