How to Set-up a Facebook Lead Generation Campaign

Whether you're looking to increase sales, business leads or enquires, discover how in our guide

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Maybe you’ve run a traffic campaign or two on Facebook, so you know which audiences are clicking to visit your website, but you aren’t getting as many conversions as you’d like. Or, perhaps you’re new to Facebook ads, but you have a good idea of who you want to target. Perfect – either way you are ready to build a Facebook lead generation campaign!

Firstly, why run a Facebook lead generation campaign? Is it right for my business?

Facebook lead gen campaigns are designed for companies who are looking to “Drive more sales leads, from people interested in your brand or business”. In a nutshell, they are a Facebook ad which includes a data capture form.

Here are the reasons why we recommend running a Facebook lead generation campaign, both for your business and for the customer.

Top 3 benefits of Facebook lead generation ads for your prospect customers:

  1. People don’t want to leave the platform (and Facebook don’t want them to either!)
  2. People don’t like waiting for a website to load – generally if a site takes over 3 seconds to load people tend to ‘bounce’ and won’t stick around. With native lead gen forms, users don’t leave the platform, so slow website loading times or the risk of a high bounce rate (and ultimately no conversion) doesn’t have to be a factor
  3. People are lazy (and that includes us, too!). We want results quickly – the less clicks the better. Facebook pre-populates the form with data that’s in your Facebook profile (name, email, number, postcode). This saves users typing in their details, which results in more completions in this format than on your website.

pre-populated-facebook-lead-form

Top 3 benefits of Facebook lead gen ads for businesses:

  1. If the current landing page on your website isn’t generating many leads, a native form means you can get leads through Facebook without directing traffic to your website. (We recommend getting an attractive landing page designed that is optimised for conversions long-term and for other channels or campaigns. The web design work is worth the initial cost to ensure a better user experience on your website and to encourage conversions, especially if you are running ads on other platforms such as Google Ads)
  2. As mentioned above, you don’t need to worry about your website load time
  3. In our experience and from research, native lead gen forms have a much lower cost per conversion. For automotive, this can be around £43 on the website and between £7-£17 using Facebook lead gen forms. It’s a no brainer – spend less, get more leads!

For one of our clients, we ran Facebook lead generation campaigns throughout lockdown, and their leads are up +71% YTD. So you may be thinking now isn’t the right time, but if you’re offering a service that people want, or if you want to collect emails to build up your mailing list ready for when things are back to ‘normal’, it’s the perfect time to start.

So, if you’re ready to start getting leads from Facebook and your Facebook lead generation strategy* is ready to be implemented, let’s get started!

*if you don’t have a Facebook lead gen strategy in place yet and you’d like to discuss your ideas, get in contact today. We help clients by planning the full strategy from start to finish, including budget, targeting and ad creative.

How to set up a Facebook lead gen campaign:

  1. Go to Ads Manager. Click ‘Create’, then click ‘Lead Generation’ under ‘Consideration’.
  2. Name your campaign. We opt for ending the campaign name with ‘- leads’ so we can easily filter to see all lead gen campaigns together in Ads Manager at a later date.
  3. If you don’t know yet which ad sets perform best; you’re trialling new targeting, or you want less management, choose ‘Campaign Budget Optimisation’. Facebook will distribute the budget between all ad sets.Be aware, whilst the algorithm spends more of the budget on the ad sets that are performing best, it also pushes more budget to those that are larger in audience size so the budget distribution isn’t even (something to bear in mind if you have a remarketing ad set in there!).Setting minimum or maximum spend limits per ad set, or not running Campaign Budget Optimisation helps to manage this.
  4. Choose your budget. If an ongoing campaign choose Daily, if a set campaign duration choose.
  5. Choose a bid strategy. Unsure which bid strategy should you use for a Facebook lead generation campaign? Here’s our recommendation between bid cap and lowest cost:a. Bid cap – if you have a benchmark cost per lead, or CPCs that you are measured against, we recommended running your campaign with a bid cap. After a short while, Facebook will flag if the bid cap is limiting reach.In our experience, running a Facebook lead generation campaign with a bid cap strategy limits the reach and number of leads. Also, CPC or cost per result data from Facebook campaigns with a different objective aren’t really ‘transferrable’. This is because a lead generation campaign is a stronger lead, and therefore it will cost more.b. Lowest cost – if it’s your first lead generation campaign, we recommend choosing ‘lowest cost’, running the campaign for at least 4 weeks, and then reviewing the data.4 weeks gives you enough time to have a clear benchmark. Of course, some ad sets will have a higher cost per lead than others, especially if there’s ‘conquest’ targeting, so keep an eye on this. With this data, you have a benchmark cost per lead (CPL) that you can use to set as the bid cap when you run a lead gen campaign again.
  6. Name your ad set – we generally name based on the targeting, i.e. Remarketing, Interest area, etc – make it descriptive so it is easy to review what is working best.
  7. Select your targeting – you can either build this here and now or do this in advance in Audience Manager and then select this from the dropdown of saved audiences (recommended if you want to run a Remarketing ad set).
  8. Location targeting – choose the relevant locations and select ‘People living in this location’ (dropdown at the top of this section). This is one way to prevent bot or spam traffic (although this isn’t a concern with lead gen campaigns, more so with traffic or brand awareness, but it’s a good practice to get into).
  9. Ad placements – Facebook lead generation campaigns can only serve on Facebook and Instagram. If budget is limited, choose Facebook or Instagram only. We recommend targeting both placements in one campaign because if you split out the campaigns by placement, you’ll have overlap with the targeting, which can hinder campaign performance.You can always run the campaign, and then after it has finished select ‘Breakdown’ to see which placement generated the most leads/lower CPL. You can use this data for next time (or you can review this whilst the campaign is still running to optimise performance).
  10. Select your start and end dates – is it for an ongoing campaign or is it a fixed offering for a limited time only?
  11. Name your ad – we name based on the content i.e. video or single post (again, for ease when reporting).
  12. Double check the Facebook page and Instagram page selected are the correct ones as Facebook can be buggy (only needed if you have access to other accounts).
  13. Upload the creative – we recommend a clear headline so that the objective (what you want people to do) is obvious so that leads are high quality. Choose a relevant CTA button – below are the options available.facebook-call-to-action-options-lead-forms
  14. Don’t forget: you want to set up an audience exclusion of people who have already completed your form so that once completed, they don’t see the ad again.This 1. Saves your budget but 2. Stops your ad annoying them by popping up in their feed again. They can’t fill it in twice, but they can click it again to visit the website and you’ll pay for that click.

That’s your Facebook lead generation campaign built, now it’s the most important step, building the lead form itself.

newsletter-facebook-lead-form

How to create a Facebook lead form

  1. Click to create form. Name it something obvious so it’s easy to differentiate between each form in the future; we opt for campaign name and the month/year (it defaults as the date and time).

create-facebook-lead-form

  1. Form type: generally, we click ‘More volume’ – Facebook flags during the build if you are starting to add more questions than recommended. If you run a lead gen campaign and find all leads aren’t high quality, run again with ‘Higher intent’ – this adds a review step where users review what information they inputted and confirm it.
  2. Intro: headline – here describe what users are signing up for, i.e. ‘Sign up to our Newsletter’.
  3. Image: if imagery is limited, you can use the same image used for the ads itself. Where possible, uploading one sized at 1,200 x 628 pixels is best as this is the size of the image served, so square images will have a blurred background added to each side.
  4. Layout: Choose bullet or paragraph, whichever works best. This can be similar to the ad copy or a place to provide more information about what the user is signing up to. It doesn’t have to be lengthy, something like ‘You’ll receive our monthly newsletter filled with advice and latest company news and competitions” is enough.
  5. Select your questions. The less the better to keep it simple – the more fields the less likely a user will complete the form. For example, for a Newsletter campaign it can simply be name and email.
  6. Enter the company’s privacy policy and the opt in selections (number, email, etc).
  7. Populate the thank you page – you add a final link so you can encourage users to visit your website once they’ve finished the form. (Whilst you can track outbound link clicks, this isn’t the objective of the campaign so don’t focus on this metric too much, the aim is to get the conversion within Facebook). Then click publish – once saved you can’t edit your lead form so don’t click publish until you’re 100% happy with it!
  8. Test the form! Click the ad, copy preview link, then view in your Facebook feed. Once you have completed the lead form, go to your Facebook page > Publishing Tools > Forms Library. You can download from here. There’s software available to allow the linking of a Facebook lead form with your CRM – if not, you can download leads manually from Facebook.
  9. And you’re done! Turn the campaign on and wait for the leads to come in. Continual management and ongoing optimisation is recommended to reach relevant audiences, get as many leads as possible and to reduce the cost per lead.

We hope you are feeling confident building a Facebook lead gen campaign now. If you have any questions, or if you want support with your social media marketing, we aren’t just a Facebook advertising agency, we specialise in social media advertising across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter & LinkedIn!

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Sources:

business.facebook.com/adsmanager