Facebook Lead Forms, How They Work and Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Are you looking for a faster, easier way to generate leads on Facebook? Facebook lead ads are a fast and simple method of generating leads in Facebook Ads. We’ll go over how Facebook lead ads work, the process for creating a lead ad, and pitfalls to look out for when using lead ads.

Timestamps:
[0:27] – Introduce Lead Ads
[1:10] – Overview of how to create a lead ad
[7:29] – Consumer experience using lead ads
[8:01] – Potential pitfalls with lead forms

Transcript:
Are you looking for creative ways to use the Facebook platform to generate more leads? Have you ever considered Facebook Lead Forms? Facebook Lead Forms allow a consumer to contact you as an advertiser without ever leaving the Facebook platform. We’ve also seen cost-per-lead decreased by as much as 50% using this ad format. Today we’re going to talk about Facebook Lead Forms, how they work and the best way for you to utilize them in order to generate leads at a lower cost.

[0:27] Facebook Lead Forms: The basics
I’m Adam Arkfeld, owner of ParaCore, a pay-per-click lead generation agency. Facebook Lead Forms are technically an ad objective within Facebook. They’re not an ad format. Ad formats are Images, Videos, Carousel Ads, Slide Shows, that type of thing. As an objective, the interaction occurs after someone clicks the Learn More button when they’re viewing an ad. So when someone clicks the Learn More button after seeing an image for example, a Lead Form will pop up with their information prefilled, pulled right out of Facebook, and they can just hit the submit button to send their information to you as an advertiser, expressing interest in whatever you’re selling. They never go to a landing page, they never leave Facebook, it’s all right there within the Facebook platform and it happens very quickly.

[1:10] Overview of how to create a lead ad
I’m going to start by talking about how Lead Forms are created within the Facebook interface so that you can see the different options that are available when you’re creating the Lead Form. As I mentioned at the top of the video, Lead Forms are an objective, they’re not an ad format. So when you create Campaigns, Campaigns are organized by objective.

I always like to keep all my Lead Ads into one Campaign because they have the same objective being Lead Forms. Here we can see down at the bottom, “Collect leads for your business,” and this is Lead Generation right here, this is the Lead Generation objective. The campaign name, I usually just keep it as the objective unless it starts getting more specific into clicks or conversions. Just for Lead Forms, I keep it general. So we’re going to do Lead Generation Campaign and I’m going to hit continue.

Here are standard ads and options. So we have our page ParaCore that we’re advertising on behalf of, we’re going to be using a Saved Audience, Phoenix Marketing Professionals (Job Titles), normal stuff that you’re doing on the ad set level, and budget optimization, all important factors but things that we would be talking about in another video at another time. So I hit continue. I already prepped this ad just a little bit. We are going to be creating an ad for the purpose of sign-ups for a lead generation educational event, just hypothetically. We’re going to do a single image, again Lead Forms are an objective not an ad format, so we’ll choose a Single Image ad, we could do a Carousel, Single Video or a Video Slideshow. We chose an image that has someone speaking in front of people, put a little bit of text on here, “Free Event: Learn How to Generate Leads on Facebook,” and with a sign-up call to action.

All this is normal ad stuff in the Facebook interface. At the bottom is where the Lead Forms come in. This is only available when you have a Lead Form objective. You can use an existing Lead Form, so here we have two that ParaCore uses, PPC Leads and PPC Leads v2, or you can create a new one. We’ll create a new one, and you can duplicate an existing form if you want that’ll allow you to these faster in the future.

Once we’ve decided to create a new Form, we just need a name. We’re going to say, we’re going to say, “Event Lead Generation.” We can use this Form in the future for any event that we’re creating. I’m going to make it generic. There’re some advanced options here that you can decide to use if you want. You can change the field IDs, this is good when you’re integrating with the CRM, and you can decide to include or exclude organic leads.

If someone shares the ad, because again it’s a normal ad and someone else signs up, that’s kind of an organic lead, you’re not really paying for that to some degree because it’s been shared out. We’re going to select these options and we’re going to keep those normal and we’re going to hit next. The Context Card is actually an intro to your ad. When people click the ad this will give them more information on what they’re actually signing up for. There’s some context around the ad itself. We’re going to decide to add a Context Card, these are very helpful.So it says, “Show context card” is turned on, Headline, and our headline’s going to be, “Free Marketing Event.” It’s a free event that we’re doing.

We’re using an image from our ad, this could be another image if we wanted to upload it, decide to do that right here, and then there are a couple of different layout options. So here we are going to add in just a few bullet points,

• “Learn how to generate leads on Facebook.”
• “How much do you need to spend each month?”
• Ten things not to do when creating Facebook Ads.”

Okay. So as you can see these bullet points that appear on the right hand side, this is what someone’s going to see and read when they see your Context Card. You can also do a paragraph style which allows you to write more free-flowing text. At the bottom here, we’re going to change the button text to, “Sign me up!”, and that’ll change the button text at the bottom. And this is the form that someone sees and they complete when they’re clicking your ad.

By default it just has your email and name which is auto-filled by Facebook when they open up this page. You have a lot more options. You have first name, if you decide not to do full name these are grayed out. But you have phone number, you have city, you can do country and you see all these then populate down throughout the form. Again, if Facebook has the information they’ll prefill it, if they don’t it’ll be empty and they’ll have to fill it out. I would highly recommend keeping this very simple which will increase the conversion rate of your ads. You can also ask a custom question. So we’re going to say, “What day do you want to attend?” It’s going to generically say Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So here you now have a select box with a custom question that allows people to choose an option which is really cool. You can add another question, “Dietary Restrictions?” and then they can just put in the answer if they wanted, you could do like a yes/no option there.

You can add custom questions or you can choose a lot of prefilled information from Facebook. Just remember, just like any other Lead Form, the more information you put in, the lower the conversion rate might be. Alright. So we hit next here, you do need a privacy policy so we’re just going to say Privacy Policy, paracore.com. This needs to be on your website, and usually you just put a page on your website, so let’s say /privacy, so people can link to, it’s very important, it’s a requirement of Facebook to do that, and then we’re going to hit next here, and after they submit the form, Facebook is going to then encourage them to visit your website.

So, “Thanks, you’re all set. Your info has been sent to ParaCore. Tap below to visit ParaCore.com,” boom, here’s the website, and that’s where the visitor will go.

When we hit next, now we can see what the experience looks like for a visitor. They’ll click the ad, they’re going to see this Context Card that we’ve created, it has our same photo, company name, our title and our bullet points. Then, when they hit sign me up, they’re going to get the form. They’re going to choose the option from this drop-down, they’re going to answer about dietary restrictions and this email, full name and phone number will be auto-populated by Facebook. When this is auto-populated it makes it very easy for them to submit the form and then they hit submit and then they’re going to see this final page, “Thanks, you’re all set. View website,” encouraging someone to go to the website.

The Lead Forms are really easy to create, they have a number of really good options. They do make it extremely simple for consumers to submit the form and that’s the basic setup experience for Facebook Lead Forms.

[7:29] Consumer experience using lead ads
Now that we’ve created a Lead Form, the experience for a consumer is incredibly easy. They’re going to be scrolling through their Facebook feed, see your image ad and click the Learn More button. The ad’s going to pop up, usually with a Context Card first, when they hit the next button they’re then going to see a form with their information already prefilled from Facebook. If they’re interested in continuing or learning more, they’re going to hit the submit button and the information is going to be sent directly to you as an advertiser with this person expressing interest.

It’s simple for everyone involved, the advertiser and the consumer, and they never even go to a landing page.

[8:01] Potential pitfalls with lead forms
There are couple things to watch out for when you’re building Lead Forms, though.

The first one is when someone submits the form and they expressed interest in your advertisement, you actually are not notified by Facebook.For some reason, Facebook stores all this information in a database and doesn’t notify you that people are actually submitting leads. You have to go in there every single day and download that list of leads and then contact them, you know, as you would for whatever the next step is.

In order to get around that we at ParaCore decided to use Zapier to integrate with Facebook Ads. Anytime someone fills out a form, that lead is then sent through Zapier and either emailed to us so that we can contact them right away, or in the case of some of our clients, that information is pushed into a CRM, something like HubSpot or Salesforce.

It’s a manual setup that we have to do outside of Facebook but what it does is it automates the process when someone fills out the form and they want to learn more. If you don’t do that, you literally have to go into Facebook once a day, once a week however often you want, download the leads, look for new ones and then contact those people. It’s incredibly painful.

The next thing to look out for is the quality of the lead that’s coming through on Facebook. Because the information is prefilled and it’s such a quick experience, we see that the quality of the lead has decreased a decent amount for when someone goes to a landing page and they’re taking a more proactive action.

We also see that the contact information is sometimes out of date when someone’s filling out these forms. They may have signed up for Facebook 10 years ago and put in an old email address or an old phone number and that information is not always current. While you may be getting a very high number of leads at a lower cost-per-lead, just be aware that the quality of the lead might decrease a little bit just because of the ease of signing up through these forms.

The only other thing to know about Facebook Lead Forms is that from a targeting method, you can actually use the Engagement targeting method to remarket to people that maybe haven’t submitted your form or have submitted your form or maybe just started the experience in your form.

In the Audience targeting, you can actually create an Engagement Audience and target people that have just opened your Lead Form, have gotten partway through but not submitted it or that have submitted your Lead Form and maybe haven’t taken the next action.

The Engagement targeting method is pretty cool on Facebook. It allows you to basically segment how far people have gotten through that little Lead Form funnel and then you can send them other advertisements based on how far they got.

That’s all today on Facebook Lead Forms. Hope you found it interesting. If you want to talk more about Facebook or learn more about what we do, my contact information is in the description below.

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