The Share format of Lead Ads on Facebook and Instagram is a popular trend in the world of online marketing and social media advertising. It appeared in 2015 and still works well and efficiently.

Lead Ads ("lead generation" or "generation of leads") is a type of campaign that uses a lead form on Facebook to collect contacts of the target audience without bringing them on the website, business page on Facebook, or to an app.

Anton Viborniy

This way, the format allows for a significant decrease in the number of refuses when transferring social media users on the website and enables collecting contacts of people when they're interested in the offer the most.

Let's study the advantages and disadvantages of the format. Looking ahead, I have to say that some of the items may belong to different columns during two different periods of time: depending on the context of what is happening and your advertising offer.

Advantages:

1. Obtaining "living" contacts at the first touch.
   
2. Having all major announcement formats (one image, one video, a slide show, a circle gallery).
   
3. An optimal price for a lead that is appropriate for most businesses.
   
4. An opportunity to let the client go to the website, call the company, or download the materials (for example, a presentation) from your website.
   
5. An opportunity to determine the data you want to collect in the lead generation form on your own.
   

Disadvantages:

1. A relatively cold target audience base you need to work with after receiving data.
   
2. Paid display.
   
3. The target audience requesting fast feedback: most frequently, data are left by very interested users; therefore, they expect to be contacted soon.
   

Let's discuss the process of customizing and working with Lead Ads for promoting our customer. We provide them with a flow of applications for a chain of sports clubs. In spring, we started promoting their sports summer camp.

The primary advertising channel for us is Facebook and the Lead Ads format in particular; there are only two reasons for that:

1. The client has their own team of sales managers who handle requests connected with the chain of sports clubs, franchising and who can theoretically process applications for the summer camp.
   
2. Under the conditions of the increasing demand, we couldn't afford to lose traffic at the stage of transferring the customer from the social media to the website; therefore, we decided to put money on the number of contacts at the expense of their "warmness."
   
   

It turned out quite interesting. We'll speak of the results below, but the recommendations on customizing Lead Ads first.

The key moment about configuring audiences is about realizing that payments in the lead generation campaign type are for displays and not clicks, unlike the standard traffic campaign. Thus, it's to your interest to maintain moderate numbers for the range. However, a significant narrowing of the audience may cause an increase in the lead price. Therefore, maintaining balance is crucial.

The format works on Facebook and Instagram, and thus it is functional. It doesn't support only Audience Network and, what is logical, Messenger.
Tip 1: Start with placing in one of the attached placements and add another one with time controlling changes in the statistics. For instance, launch in the Facebook news feed first, after that in the Instagram news, and then in Stories.
Tip 2: Create separate groups of announcements for each placement (Facebook and Instagram). It is easier to track efficiency, affect the figures, and also create separate announcements for each platform this way.

This configuration is important and will have an impact on the number of contacts left. Let's explore briefly how to create a lead form.

The content of a lead form is an extended version of your banner, video, or circle gallery where you have the opportunity to expand your offer logically, add the missing information, and motivate the user to leave their contacts in any other way.

Facebook allows editing titles in the form, creating comprehensive textual descriptions, including those with lists, adding original images. In a word, the format reminds a "canvas" with primitive features.

The variants of data we may request from the user

Once the user fills out and submits the form, they will see the thank you screen. You can also customize the screen; for example, offer the customer to visit your website, call the specified phone number, or download the presentation of your product.

It easily becomes a problem if your product is of high demand. This desired for most entrepreneurs phenomenon may quickly turn into the worst nightmare for the brand's reputation.
Just in the first two weeks of the advertising campaign, we managed to destroy the sales department of our client and paralyze its operation. The managers were receiving an enormous number of applications and had no free time for processing them.

The thank you screen where we offer calling the company right after sending the contacts.

Results of the advertising campaign for the first two weeks of its operation

Ill-timed processing of applications results in the negative response among users: some of them didn't receive the information they had left their contacts in the lead form for in time.

Think in advance about engaging several additional managers for the period of performing the active advertising campaign. Moreover, take care of the place where the applications from the lead form will be flowing to and configure the integration with email or CRM if necessary.

We've mentioned earlier that the advantage of Lead Ads, that is obtaining contacts of "living" people at the stage of the first touch, provides for a relatively cold audience appearing in the base, which must be immediately handled additionally.

This audience is not that much "distant" from your business like with cold calls or email distributions because these customers actually had the opportunity to get acquainted with your offer. But they still know almost nothing about it as the announcement is strictly limited, and one can't place all the necessary information there.

The skills of active and aggressive selling are your best cards.

In 9 out of 10 cases, the contacts we collect during the advertising campaign won't be used by the customer in their marketing at all. In other words, the base of contacts is either converted into selling or gets abandoned. This attitude is crucially incorrect because the significant percentage of users are converted not at the moment of the first touch but after being "warmed up" or regularly reminded of us.

Let's assume that we're collecting the minimum data: the name, telephone number, email address. Below there are possible variants of the use of these data:

• calls from CRM;
  
• adding users into your list of email distribution;
  
• creating the individual audience on Facebook;
  
• creating the audience for advertising in Gmail;
  
• remarketing depending on the website activity.
  
  

It is a short unfinished list of how to reengage the collected audience and convert it at the next step or in one step.

We wish you luck and rewarding advertising campaigns.

It is a fast step-by-step guide on customizing Facebook Lead Generation Ads. At the very beginning, you'll have to enter the ad account of your business page on Facebook.

Then, you'll need to create a new advertising campaign.

Choose "Lead generation" as the campaign type and click "Continue."

You'll have the opportunity to customize the audience you want to show your ads to. There are many strategies on how to configure the audience for targeting. To start with, filter out the audience by location, age, and interests.

After that, click the "New Form" button.

Now, our task is to create the appearance of our lead form. You need to upload an image, enter the headline, and write a short description of the offer.

You're offered to collect email addresses and names in the lead form by default. You may add the telephone number. To do this, click "Add New Question" and select the question we need. The system contains many other questions that will help you qualify the lead, but don't take it too far. With every new question, the conversion will be falling. The most optimal option is the name, email address, and telephone number.

What is obligatory is to mention the link to the page with the Privacy Policy. You won't be able to launch the ads without it.

The last step in lead form creating is the development of the thank you page. Here, you need to kindle the client's interest and ask them to go to the website.

At the end of the configuration, remember to save the advertising campaign.

Once you launch Facebook Lead Ads, you'll face the problem of lead exporting. All leads will be located on the Facebook personal account, and you'll have to go there and get them out manually every time.

With the help of Apiway, you can create an automatic notification about new leads in your CRM or Gmail. In most cases, users use the integration of Facebook Lead Ads with Gmail or Google Spreadsheets. Moreover, you can attach the lead form to the services for email distributions or marketing automation.