Facebook Lead Gen Ads Tutorial

Key Takeaways

Facebook lead gen ads are some of my favorite types of campaigns to run on the Facebook platform. I've seen them work really well across our book of business for B2B, B2C, advertising, content, demo requests, call back, all sorts of stuff. I think one of the main reasons that they don't get used is honestly the transparency into them within the actual Facebook platform. So today what I want to run through is where in the world the actual lead gen ads library is in the Facebook platform, what types of questions you can have within the form itself, what type of text can you put in there, and then what are the different tracking settings you can have to make sure that your lead gen ads actually then map all the information appropriately back into your CRM so your sales team can follow up with them. Let's jump in. In the Facebook ad platform, the easiest way to get to the lead gen library is to start from your own personal profile. There's not really a good shortcut to get to it through business manager. But the thing is, you do need to make sure that you have admin access to the page before you try and find this because you will, one, not be able to find the correct link on the page itself, and two, once you get there, you will not be able to actually create the lead gen ad. So make sure you have page admin access before trying to jump in. So what you need to do is come to your personal profile page, um and then up here in the top navigation bar, click this down arrow. Yes, I realize I have a lot of alerts. I don't really check Facebook that often. Um but when you come in here, one of the drop down pieces at the top will be the pages that you have access to. It'll show you three at the top and then a little see more button down below it. But for today, we're just going to use the Paid Media Pros Facebook page. So once I click on that, it'll take me to the Paid Media Pros page, but there will be something that looks a little bit different at the top if you have access, and it's going to be this go to business manager link here. Um if you want to actually manage the page. If you have access to a page on Facebook, it will look like this when you actually go to the live page on Facebook. So, if nothing else, this is a great way from the outside to test if you have the access that you need. Since I do, I'm going to click on the Business Manager text and it'll take me into Business Manager. So, now it still shows the page just a few additional things. You'll notice the header changed and it looks like the Business Manager heading, all that good stuff. So, to find the Lead Gen Library, we need to come over to the uh Publishing Tools link in this top navigation. Most of the time it shows up here off the top, but for some reason now it's in this more drop down. So, I'm going to click on Publishing Tools. And it'll bring me to a page that looks like this. It starts off with our posts, videos, tools, all sorts of stuff on the left. Um and you'll see the published posts in the middle here. And if you'll scroll down just a little bit, you'll see the Lead Ads Forms section. And we want to go to the Forms Library to start creating our forms. And that'll take you to this page. You can see that we haven't set up any forms yet. So, that's what we're going to do today is basically run through it. This is where the Forms Library lives. If you ever need to come in here and create a form, this is where it is. So, it takes a few steps to get there. It's not as easy as coming up into the regular navigation and finding it in here. So, just know that if you're trying to get here, even though it looks like there's this Pages link, it's not actually one of the ones that's available in here. So, you do have to go through that slightly squirrely setup to actually get into the Forms Library. So, now what about actually creating forms? Let's go up and hit create. Here you can start with two different areas. So, since we don't have any forms, it's going to default to a new form. If we did have forms already set up in here, this is a key, is that you can duplicate from an existing form, meaning that you can click this radio dial, type in the name of the form that you want to duplicate, and it will basically give you that form in the Forms Editor to make some tweaks and then publish again. So, let's go ahead and create a new form. And now you can see what the form builder looks like. And one of the nice things is that on the right-hand side over here, it will always have a preview of what the different form looks like for you to just understand what it's looking like and what the user will see based on the different settings that you've got over here on the left. So, all the editor stuff is going to be on the left. First thing is you can change the name just by clicking in here and changing the name to whatever you want it to be. So, I'll just change it to test. And now that's finished. There are two different key areas within the form builder. The first is content. This is going to be the forward-facing piece. This is what people will actually interact with. And the other one is the settings. I want to start off with the settings and then we'll kind of bounce back and forth between the two. So, the first part is going to be the regular form configuration. One thing to keep in mind is that you can have forms in different languages. So, the default is going to be the English US for for the vast majority of you. If you want it to be in a different language, Facebook does support quite a number of different languages. So, you can change it to Spanish and you'll notice that all of the pre-populated text and all of the prompts for the different fields will change into Spanish. One of the things to keep in mind is that when we go back and start to create customized text for these spaces, um like this section right here, you can actually customize and we'll get to that in a minute. If you customize that text yourself, it will not translate to the language that you chose that you've chosen here. So, the only thing that will be translated to the language that you have is the placeholder text that Facebook has. So, just keep that in mind. It could get really confusing if you think that it'll translate all of your custom text and it won't. So, only choose a different language if you're either going to one, use placeholder text throughout the entire thing, or two, if you know the regular customized text that you're going to use in that other language. So, just keep that in mind when you're setting these pieces up. But, for the rest of the uh tutorial here, I'm going to leave it set as English. Now, sharing is the next setting. This is a really nuanced setting, but I think it's important to go through. So, what this means is who is allowed to fill out this form. Restricted means that only the people that you are targeting in your ad campaign can fill out and submit the form. That's what you would use if you're really trying to go after a very specific target audience and make sure that the lead quality is as high as it can be because you're only allowing certain people to fill out the form. If you don't necessarily care who fills out the form, you if you've got a really broad ranging B2C type of offer, you can choose this open button, which basically means that when somebody who is in your target audience interacts with your form or shares the ad that your form is on cuz they like it, it can go to their network and other people that are not in your target audience can fill out the form. So, keep this in mind whenever you're setting things up. If you're starting to see that you're getting lots of lead form fills from people that you don't want that don't seem to fit your target audience, make sure that you have this set on the restricted option. But, if you really want to see a just a lot more volume come through and you don't necessarily care who's filling out the form, maybe you check the open one. So, that's it for form configuration. Next is field IDs. You'll notice that the two preset pieces in here are email and full name. What they've done is they've basically allowed us to start customizing what those are. This is very useful if your CRM has different language and mapping for the form fields than what Facebook does by default. If for some reason you need to have this full name not include the underscore here, you can change this to just be full name without it and type in whatever custom piece you need and change it to whatever you need that actual text to be in place. We can then, as we start to add in different questions, we'll pop back in here and I'll show you that it'll populate all the additional fields that we have in place. Next is tracking parameters. These can be really helpful to make sure that your lead gen forms are mapping to appropriate traffic sources within your CRM. This field ID makes sure that the information that comes from the form, so if somebody's email maps into the email field of your CRM, their full name goes into the full name field of the CRM. That's different from the tracking parameters. These tracking parameters you can use to make sure that you're actually attributing it to the right source, medium, campaign type. Maybe you're trying to offer something really specific with this lead gen form. You can customize these to be whatever you want. You just need to make sure that you set up the parameter name and the actual value. So, a good example would basically just be to make sure that you have it set up as source equals Facebook, and that would look something like this. Now, although when although people won't see it on the user side, and there's no URL that will trigger like a UTM source type of piece here, your CRM will know that the source parameter is Facebook for this campaign, for this lead, so it will map appropriately to the attribution model that you need within your CRM. If you need to add in a number of different custom parameters, you can just keep adding and make sure that you've got the parameter name and the value included for what you need it to be. Now, let's hop into the content section. What is actually going to be in our form? One of the first things that you're going to see at the top is the form type. There are two separate pieces, and they kind of go back to the settings of whether it's open or restricted, but it's in a different manner. So, it's within those two settings that you've got. So, more volume basically means that they're going to start showing it to people that will likely fill out the vast majority of the form. And then there's also an offer an option of higher intent. So, what this does is it makes people have a review step at the end that gives them a chance to confirm their information. It's effectively putting the brakes on the entire lead gen conversion process and saying, "Are you sure?" to the user. Because there are many times where if somebody just starts clicking through, if you have all pre-populated information over here like email, full name, these are two fields that Facebook will automatically populate for the user. They don't actually have to type anything in. So, the review step at the end allows them to say, "Oh, wait. That's not what I wanted to do. I didn't want to send in my lead form my lead information to these people." and back out of it. So, if you want to make sure that you're only getting lead forms from people who have higher intent, this is a great way to do that. Next, let's look at the intro piece. This is optional. You don't have to do this, but I would encourage you to do it to make sure that the leads that are actually coming from your campaigns are of higher quality. So, one of the things you can do is start to customize the text that is before the series of questions over here. So, you'll see there's headline text here and that is controlled by this field over here. And once you do include the intro, this headline is required. You also have a second required text field down here, um which we'll get to in just a second. So, first, let's just put in some placeholder uh text for the actual headline um and just show what it'll look like. You can see that as I was typing, it was editing the field on the right, so you can see what it's actually going to look like when you're finished. The second piece that you'll use is the image. So, you can use a custom image, whatever you have decided if you want it to be something that is specific to just this lead gen form. It'll go back to the typical 1200 by 628 pixels and you can upload your custom image. That will then show up here above all the text. The easiest option is just to use the image from your ad itself, which basically means that whatever ad that person clicked on, the image that was associated with it will populate in the top here. This just saves a little bit of time, but if you have something that needs to be customized or you have additional information within a custom image that you want to use here, feel free to upload your own image and you can make sure make it as custom as you want it to be within those pixel parameters. The last piece is the additional text down at the bottom. So, there are two different types of layouts that you can use. You can use paragraph or bullets. So, it's going to default to the paragraph look. So, let's just see what that looks like with some placeholder text on the right. And you can see that this tiny text over here showed up below our headline placeholder text. And just to give a little bit more information to the user about what they are getting ready to fill out, right? You can also then use a bullet option, which allows you up to five bullet points, each with 80 characters available. So, this is effectively what that would look like. And so on and so forth. You don't need to watch me type in bullet three, four, five, whatever. You get the idea. So, now that we've got the text in place above the questions that we want to fill out, now we want to actually start putting in the regular questions. If you want to see what it looks like without the intro option, you can also turn that off and it'll take away basically everything that we just put in there. So, I'm going to leave it on just because that's what I want it to look like. Now, we want to actually start jumping into the questions themselves. What do we actually want to ask people when they're filling out the form? The first piece is that you can customize this headline piece, but it is optional. You can leave in the sign up by providing your info below placeholder text if you want to. And just for sake of time, I'm going to do that. But, you can customize the text that you have in here if you want to. After that, we can start to customize the questions. It's already pre-filled with email, full name, all that good stuff. If you want to add a question, simply click the button and it will bring in this drop-down list of pre-fill questions and custom questions. Everything above this line here is a pre-fill question, which basically means that if that user has that information in their profile as the part of their profile, Facebook will pre-populate it for them. So, if their phone number, street address, city, state, first name, last name, date of birth, gender, marital status, job title, work email, if all of that is already part of their profile, Facebook will populate that for them and they don't have to sit there and type in their work email. If the information that we want from them is not part of a pre-fill question, we can easily use these custom questions down at the bottom and they have them in a number of different formats, which I'll go through pretty briefly because they're relatively self-explanatory. So, short answer is effectively an open-ended question. Um you can come in and just type in your question and you'll see that on the right it pre-populated and then people will be able to type in their answer below. And then multiple choice is a multiple choice question. What that will look like is a drop-down for the user on the right-hand side. You type in your question and then to make sure that we have the answers populated in the drop-down, you have to actually provide the answers and then in between each just hit enter and a blue box will show up around it. So, this is what that'll look like. Each time I type in a number, I hit enter and then you'll notice that there's a blue box with an X on it. So, if you do want to get rid of one, you can ditch one of the numbers in the middle. So, now I've just got one and three and over here on the right, select a number and only one and three will show up. Just know that when you type these in, they will show up in the order that you have them typed in. So, if you go put two back in here, it will show up as 1 3 2, which could be kind of stupid. Um so, make sure that you're keeping an eye on what order these are added in here because it will show up in that order in the multiple choice question. A couple other advanced types of questions are the conditional questions, which basically means that if somebody chooses one answer, the question that follows that will be different than if they would have chosen the other answer. That's a topic for a different video. Um and the other is just appointments scheduling, which you can use for businesses that can schedule appointments directly in the platform. Again, that's a topic for a different video. So, once we have all the questions in place that we want, now we need to jump down to privacy policy. This is a required field. We need to make sure that we have the privacy policy information in here. Um you can customize this as much as you want to. Um or you can leave it as generic as you want. The biggest piece is that you need to add in your website's custom privacy policy link down here. So, for the most part, that's probably going to be your website.com/privacy. Something along those lines. That needs to be linked to in here. You can then add in link text that just says privacy policy or whatever. Um you can use your business name. You can customize this as much as you want it to. So, let's see what that looks like as an example. And you'll see that the text on the right changed a bit based on what I added into the platform. So, pretty easy, simple way to customize whatever we need to in there. Um you can also then add a custom disclaimer. If you are in an industry that has very specific legal considerations and you need to make sure that you say something up at the top, you can add in a custom disclaimer and it will give you additional uh title and text and then a consent checkbox to make sure that you have everything squared away. So, here's what that would look like. And then once you have in this consent question, is the user consent required? Yes or no. In some instances, you might need them to say yes that they are they knowingly are sharing their information. There are other times where you just might want to cover your butt and make sure that you have at least asked them for their consent, but it's not required by law that they give it, but you have presented that and it's on them to know that they have then shared their information over the internet. So, just keep that in mind and you can add in more custom consent questions if you need to. Lastly, let's look at the thank you screen. This is what happens after somebody has completed the form. They've already hit submit. This is the equivalent of a thank you page on your website. I'm a firm believer that these should be somewhat helpful. You don't have to reiterate what the person just did, but if anything, maybe start to tell them what they need to do as the next step or give them something to do after that. Don't just make it a black hole where they get lost. So, you can customize with a number of uh preset characters in here. You can then also add a description of whatever you want it to be and you can customize the button so that once somebody actually clicks on this, they can do a number of different things. In some instances, it would make sense if you were offering, say, a gated piece of content with your uh lead gen form, it might make sense to use this link, this call to action, as an the ungated link version because that person has just sent you their information. So, this would not make sense to use a regular landing page where it would then require them to fill out a form again. So, if you're offering content with your lead gen forms, this website link down here is where you would want to use the ungated content link for that asset. You can then customize this button to say download, call business. Um those are basically the three that you've got or website uh view website. Um and then you can change the text in here as well into whatever you want it to be. And that way you've got it all set up, so the person knows what they've uh they've already filled out the form, and they have a next step that they can take to come visit our site to see more videos. When you're finished with your lead gen form, one thing to keep in mind is that a lead gen form that has been created and finalized on Facebook cannot be edited. So, if you are not sure if this is the exact setup that you want, or you want to make sure that you have all the settings in place that you need, click save. This will save it in draft form, and you can then come back and edit this form later. If you're confident that everything is set up the way that you want it to be, and you don't need to make any changes later on, and you're ready to use it, and you want to use this lead gen form, click finish. This means that it will be in the finalized version, it will be set in stone, and it's done. You cannot edit this form then, but that's where that duplicate lead gen form function at the beginning comes in place. If you do find that there's an error in your lead gen form, you can simply go back into create a new lead gen form, click the duplicate form option, choose this form, and then make whatever edits in the builder that you need to, finish that new one, and then use this one instead with the updated settings that you had in place. Now that we've created the lead form, we actually have to leverage it in a campaign, right? So, when you go into the campaign manager in Ads Manager, you one need to make sure that you've already pre-selected that you're using a lead generation campaign. That's the only way that you'll be able to use the forms. When you go to create a brand new ad within that campaign, you will have all of the regular setup pieces that you have in here, everything you're accustomed to with the format, with the media, all that good stuff, but then if you scroll down a bit, you will see this instant form section. This is what it will call it. So, then you can basically just choose from this library that is scrollable of all the lead forms that you have, choose the one that you want. It will show you on the right that everything is squared away, and then you can finish filling everything out and hit save. If you want to use a lead gen form in an existing one, or if you want to change the lead gen form that you're using, that's pretty simple as well. Just find the ad that you want and click edit. And then in the ad editor section, in the same way you'll have all of the preset information over on the side, you simply scroll down to the instant form section again, and there'll be a drop down there. Then you just click the button, find the form that you want, change it around, and hit save, and hit publish, and you're good to go. You can also create a new lead form from right within the ads editor if you feel like you need to create something from scratch, and it'll populate it in the form piece here for you as well. 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