New tools and best practices

Since its debut in 2015, Facebook Lead Generation Forms (LGF) has been a powerful tool for direct response marketers.

first, Facebook marketers You can use the power of the platform’s almost unlimited positioning function without directing traffic to the website.

We were then able to create a simple form for potential customers to fill in their information in the app, and even use Facebook account data as a pre-fill.

The emergence of the lead generation form solves the two biggest challenges that social marketers face when they promote low channel goals on Facebook​​: Traffic drop with Landing page conversion rate.

However, the pendulum swings in the opposite direction almost immediately.

By making the experience as automated and frictionless as possible, the prospect generation form can easily become a source of spam prospects.

As a result, in some cases, these potential customers have a bad reputation. Although some advertisers may be reluctant to try this valuable strategy, the quality of potential customers has been greatly improved due to recent updates to the tracking and optimization methods of potential customer generation forms.

Here are the latest developments and best practices you need to know in order to get the most out of Facebook lead generation forms.

Convert clues and.clue

If you have created a new “lead generation” campaign on Facebook in the past few weeks, you may have noticed a new option under the “Optimize ad serving” tool for your ad group.

This new optimization option is called conversion clues.

what’s the difference? Well, converting leads is a new option that uses Facebook’s conversion API to improve the overall quality of leads.

This is a simple breakdown:

• clue Optimize the number to provide the maximum number of potential customers for your budget. This is how the lead generation campaign works by default.

• Conversion clues Use signals from backend data to serve ads to users who are more likely to achieve higher-quality conversions.

Think of it this way: anyone can fill out the form and become the “leader” of Facebook. However, whether this “prospect” has any value to your business depends on its progress in your sales channel.

Potential customers can become MQL, potential customers, customers, etc.-and all this happens after the initial potential customer is created, usually in the CRM system.

By connecting your CRM system to Facebook Conversion API (CAPI), you can now send these funnel stages back to Facebook for tracking and optimization.

You can start optimizing for the types of leads that are more important to your business, rather than optimizing for quantity​​.

Pursue quality, not quantity.

Configure your CRM

Facebook screenshot, November 2021

Take advantage of (someone’s) Conversion clues In Facebook, you need to integrate your back-end data with Facebook through CAPI. The complexity of this process depends on the CRM you use.

You can find detailed instructions on how to configure CRM for CAPI integration hereSome integrations need to be built from scratch, and some partners have existing tools available to help achieve this with minimal development effort.

Once your CRM system is integrated via CAPI, Facebook will allow you to configure your “sales funnel” in the event manager.

In this step, you will classify the offline events sent back to Facebook via CAPI and let the platform understand the progress of potential customers.

After configuring the sales funnel, you can select new optimization events.

When you select “Convert Leads” as the optimization, this will be the lead quality indicator used by Facebook for optimization.

Choosing the right event means balancing the amount of available data with the importance of the event.

For example, B2B marketers may tend to choose “Closed Won” as their optimization event because this may be the final stage of the process.

However, there may not be enough data points to fully Train Facebook algorithm.

This is why we recommend an event that is both indicative of quality and rich enough to maximize the number of data points flowing into the platform. For example, B2B marketers can use something like “MQL” instead.

Best practice: Facebook lead generation form

As Michelle Morgan pointed out in her 2019 article 4 Strategies to Improve the Quality of Facebook Leading Client Ads, Advertisers can do many things through the form itself to improve the quality of submission.

As the Facebook platform continues to evolve, let us re-examine these suggestions, as well as some new updates, which can greatly improve your chances of getting the right people to raise their hands.

Higher clues of intent

Given that the quality of potential customers may be a long-term issue for Facebook LGF, contrary to the intuition of most direct response marketers, the first thing we should do is create some friction in the experience.

Facebook screenshot, November 2021

Selecting the “Higher Intent” form type will add a confirmation screen before submitting the lead. Although it may be unbelievable, quite a few people find themselves accidentally submitting contact information through these forms.

You can easily reduce this situation by adding confirmation barriers to ensure that only people who want to do business with you can share their information.

For qualified potential customers, the drop in conversion rate is usually negligible, so that it is difficult for me to recommend anything other than higher intent forms.

Use custom questions

Don’t be afraid to ask other questions, especially if your previous LGF drove a large number of transactions and the quality was dubious.

Increase potential potential customers Self-reported data It can not only improve the quality of your response, but also provide your internal sales team with more data for you to use in the qualification process.

Facebook screenshot, November 2021

Facebook allows you to create custom questions, which can be multiple-choice or short-answer questions. Questions can also be structured to contain basic conditional logic based on answers to previous questions.

Based on your company’s eligibility criteria, add other questions in the most effective format and try to match the fields as closely as possible to the CRM system you use. This can be done in the settings section under the field name heading:

Facebook screenshot, November 2021

warn: You may want to create a custom question to ask the user’s email address or contact phone number to request manual input. Although this is smart, Facebook has recently cracked down on this practice, and your form may be rejected.

Call after completion

Many advertisers pay too much attention to the problems and mechanisms of the lead form, so that they often ignore the experience after submission.

Depending on the type of form and the experience you create, Facebook provides advertisers with three options for them to choose from on the final screen after the potential customer submits.

These “call-to-action buttons” include:

• Visit the website.
• Download (for gated assets).
• Call business.

Facebook screenshot, November 2021

If your activity does not include providing users with closed assets (white papers, etc.), you may only want to bring potential customer submitters to the relevant login page.But you may miss the use of Highly Intentional Customers as soon as possible.

Test the “call business” CTA and allow the submitter to talk to the right person as quickly as possible.

We recently tested this CTA for one of our clients, and we are glad we did.

When an option was given, more than 12% of submitters dialed the number, and the pass rate of these high-intent callers was 20% higher than the form potential customers’ own baseline.

For many marketers, the so-called “quick lead” may be a problem, and follow-up will be carried out hours or even days after the initial lead is submitted. Adding the phone number to the post-submission page can almost completely eliminate the problem.

Flexible form delivery

If you missed it, Facebook now offers marketers the following options Convert an existing lead form into an automated chat.

This option is great because it collects information about the potential customers you are looking for and allows you to interact with your audience through Facebook Messenger after submitting the potential customer.

Facebook screenshot, November 2021

Recently, Facebook added a new option called “flexible form delivery” to its ad settings. Toggling this option will optimize the audience’s experience type (form or chat) based on the likelihood of conversion.

Some people prefer to fill out forms.Others are more active Facebook Messenger. Test this option can be customized according to the user’s best experience, thereby increasing your quantity, conversion rate and overall quality.

takeout

Facebook LGF can bring you a large number of leads at an effective cost per lead. But for most marketers, quality issues have always been a long-standing problem.

However, due to recent advancements in offline tracking and optimization through the Facebook Conversions API, marketers now have more leverage to increase the pass rate of potential customers driven through form marketing activities.

With these new advancements and proven best practices for creating high-conversion lead forms, now is the best time to add the Facebook lead generation form to your direct response marketing mix.

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