Have you tried running a lead generation ad on Facebook? Lead generation ads are an alternative to running a website conversion ad which goes to a lead page for visitors to sign up for more information or to download a piece of content. The advantage of lead generation ads is visitors stay within Facebook and information is automatically populated by Facebook.
We have a Facebook Lead Generation Ad running at the moment to attract leads for the next running of our Diploma in Social Media for Business course:
Step 1 – The ad seen is:
Clicking Learn More will show
As you can see, this gives the opportunity for the business to give more information about the benefits of what you are offering.
Clicking Send Me More Information (you can choose what the button text says) will display:
You need to include on this screen the URL to your a privacy policy on your website. You can choose what fields you would like prospects to complete in this form. Email and Full Name are automatically completed by Facebook based on viewer’s settings (which may not be correct). The trick is to make this as easy as possible for prospects to complete, so it is probably not a good idea to include too many fields.
Clicking Submit will show
It is not possible to add URLs to this text or to change the ‘View Website’ text.
Leads are available to download within the Facebook Ads manager. This is either done manually or you can automatically link the form to a CRM System (e.g. MailChimp) so an email is automatically sent. This is currently done through Zapier – but is a premium Zapier option so would be an additional cost.
We have opted for the manual download option as we want to send a personal email to people interested in the qualification but if you were asking people to download a document, you would really need to set this up to happen automatically so that the download was instantly available.
This works much better if a lead page is set up and the website conversion ads are used. Whether the lead page is set up on your website or using one of the third-party lead generation tools, you can normally send an automated email pretty easily.
To me, the advantage of a Facebook lead generation ad is that it is quick and easy for prospects to leave their contact details – particularly on a mobile phone. Once you have those contact details, you can then use other methods to market to them.
At first glance, the cost of the lead ad looks significantly more expensive than the cost of a website conversion ad. However, it is worth looking closely at the numbers and it might be worth doing some split testing.
For example, you can normally expect to pay between £0.30 and £0.75 per click for the conversion ad. Note, this is per click. You then need to get people to sign up on your lead page. Assuming a 5% conversion rate on the lead page, if your ad was clicked by 100 people. It would cost between £30 and £75 for 5 leads. The lead ad is working out between £5 and £10 per lead – so between £25 and £50 for 5 leads – slightly cheaper in this case.
Have you had any success with lead generation ads? Do share.
Do you want to learn how to get more out of Facebook and Facebook Advertising? Why not take our Facebook for Business Online Course?