Instant forms allow advertisers to collect lead information via lead ads without sending people to an external website. In this post, we’ll cover every step of the instant form creation process.

To create your own instant form, there are a couple of requirements.

1. Use the Leads campaign objective.

2. Select a conversion location in the ad set that includes instant forms.

Then when creating your ad, go to the Destination section and click the button to create a new form.

The instant form creation process is separated into the following sections…

Note that the Review Screen step will only appear when using the Higher Intent form type.

Now let’s explain what goes into each step of the instant form creation process…

1. Form Type

If you’ve created instant forms before, Meta may pre-fill the form using information sourced from your Facebook Page, previous lead forms, and similar advertisers.

This is just a starting point, and you can edit any of the auto-generated suggestions.

First, name your form.

If you skip this step, a name will be generated for you. You’ll want to be sure to name it something to reflect what people are subscribing for because you will run into this later on.

There are three form types. “More Volume” will be selected by default.

• More Volume: Quick to fill out and submit
• Higher Intent: Add a review step to confirm sending info to improve lead quality
• Rich Creative: Opportunities to provide much more information about your business

The differences found when using Rich Creative can be found in the Intro step.

2. Intro

You have the option of providing a background image for your form. By default, you’ll use the image from your ad when this is turned on.

The option to upload a separate 1200×628 image is only available if you turn on the Greeting.

Provide a headline and description to explain why the person should provide their contact info. You can use either paragraph…

…or a list.

2. Intro (Rich Creative)

If you selected the Rich Creative form type, the Intro section is completely different.

Add a square 600 x 600 image to the top of this section.

Provide a headline (up to 60 characters).

Provide an overview (up to 80 characters). This is similar to the Description using the other form types, but it’s much shorter and only in paragraph format.

Benefits work more like the list version of the description with the other form types. With this optional section, you can provide up to three benefits (up to 57 characters).

The Rich Creative form type gives you the option of providing up to four sections that help build your story.

The How it Works section can also be labeled Get Started, More About Us, How We’re Different, and Highlights.

Regardless of what you label it, you can add two to five steps to this section that include a title and description. It’s completely customizable.

The Products section can also be labeled Services, Best Sellers, Plans, Courses, or Programs.

Regardless of how it’s labeled, this section is constructed with two to five carousel cards that feature a 1200 x 803 image, title, description, and two to three benefits.

The Social Proof section can feature Reviews, Accreditations, Certifications, and News Stories.

You can build this section with two to five carousel cards using a 1200 x 803 image, name, and quote (how this is labeled will depend on what you are featuring).

The optional Incentive section allows you to highlight a benefit to motivate people to provide their contact info. This section includes the incentive (up to 30 characters), description (up to 40 characters), and disclaimer (up to 40 characters).

What you provide here is completely customizable. Check out this blog post for more examples of how Rich Creative (formerly Custom) looks and works.

3. Questions

This section is broken up into two groups:

1. Custom questions
2. Contact information

In most cases, you may only ask for contact information. But the custom questions may be your best tool for managing lead quality.

Meta may recommend a few questions based on those that have been asked in the past.

Otherwise, you can create a question from scratch.

Multiple Choice allows you to craft a question with restricted options of potential answers.

Short Answer allows you to ask a question that yields an open ended, but brief, answer.

Conditional allows you to create a set of questions with conditional answers that change based on how someone answered a previous question.

This is accomplished with a CSV file. Here’s an example of what that might look like…

Appointment Request allows you to give people the ability to request a date and time to meet with you.

Slider allows you to ask questions that people can answer based on a predefined range. For example, they could rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how interested they are in buying a new car.

Advertisers can make any of these custom questions, other than Conditional, optional. When checked, people can skip the question.

You can make these custom questions even more impactful by turning on Conditional Logic (Note: You can’t make questions optional when this is on).

When turned on, a Logic column will be added to the answers.

“Go to a question” allows you to send a person who answers this way to a specific question — or create a new question that they’ll be asked.

“Submit Form” allows you to send a person who answers a specific way to the End page — or craft a new End page for these people.

“Close Form” allows you to send people who either don’t answer or provide an answer that indicates they aren’t a lead to a special end page. Their contact information will not be submitted.

The Contact Information portion of this section allows you to collect the basic information that you’ll need to reach out to a new lead.

The Description is optional and can be used to explain what you’ll do with the lead’s contact information. An example is “We’ll use your information to send you our weekly newsletters.”

The typical information you might request are email address, first name, and last name. Much of this information will be prefilled from a person’s Facebook profile.

Click Add Category for additional questions you can ask related to contact info.

Contact Fields…

User information…

Demographic questions…

Work information…

And national ID number…

Note that you may be restricted from asking for some of this information if you are promoting something that falls within a Special Ad Category.

4. Privacy Policy

Meta requires that you provide a link to your privacy policy when collecting contact information. Provide the link and optional link text.

If you don’t provide link text, the Privacy Policy link text will read “View [Page Name]’s Privacy Policy.”

You can also add custom notices like legal disclaimers to the default Facebook privacy disclaimer.

You’ll likely only use this when you feel you are legally required.

5. Review Screen

There isn’t anything to do here. The Review Screen is only relevant if you selected the Higher Intent form type.

If you did, the potential lead will see this final review before submitting the form…

6. Ending

We’re almost done!

If you didn’t use Conditional Logic when crafting custom questions, this will be a simple page. This will be what people see when they’ve completed your form.

It starts with a headline and description. It could be as simple as a “thank you” and that more information is coming via email.

There are four different action items that you can feature:

• Go to website
• View file
• Call business
• Redeem promo code

“Go to website” may be most common. You may simply send people to your website generally or an archive page.

“View file” allows your lead to download a PDF, PNG, or JPG file. You’ll need to upload it to Meta during this step.

“Call business” allows you to provide your phone number so that when leads complete your form on mobile, they can click a Call button to initiate a phone call.

And finally, “Redeem promo code” is a way to offer a promo code to reward your new lead, whether it was in exchange for contact information or as a pleasant surprise.

If you used conditional logic with custom questions, you’ll have two separate Ending pages: One for leads and one for non-leads (and potentially more, depending on how you structured your logic).

Messages for non-leads could be as simple as thanking them for their interest and directing them to your website.

Settings

Don’t miss the Settings button at the top right when creating your form.

There are three settings: Form Configuration, Field Names, and Tracking Parameters.

Within Form Configuration, the first thing you can do is define the language people will see in your form. This can help Meta with delivery. It will likely be your main language by default, and you may never need to change it.

The Sharing section is one I’ve always found interesting.

By default, it’s “Restricted.” This means that only people you reach with your ads can complete the form. But, that means that there is no viral potential. If someone shares your ad, their friends of leads can’t complete it.

There may be times when this is necessary. But, I prefer to keep this set at “Open” to allow for more completions. It’s really easy to miss.

You can change how the field names appear in your exports within the Field Names section. Note that this will rarely be necessary.

And finally, you can include tracking parameters to help identify where leads come from. This is info you’ll be able to see when you access leads via API, Download, or configured CRM.

Your Turn

Facebook lead ads were introduced in 2015, and they’ve evolved a whole lot over the years. What was once a very simple process has expanded in complexity. The result is a very long blog post to explain instant forms! To learn more about Facebook Lead Ads, make sure to check out my guide.

Do you use instant forms?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post A Guide to Instant Forms appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Should you use Instant Forms (often referred to as Facebook Lead Ads) or send people to a website form to build your email list? It’s a common question that I get from advertisers, and my answer has long been based on my own assumptions — or simply an instruction to “test it!”

I decided to take my own advice and stop making assumptions. I ran a test that generated 630 leads, and I’m ready to share what I learned.

The results were surprising — they were not at all consistent with my assumptions.

Hypothesis

My assumptions are sourced from years of advertising and an understanding of the balance of quality and quantity. I have assumptions based on two common options…

1. Instant Forms: The benefit of using Instant Forms is that they are much easier for the user. They load immediately and do not take them off of Facebook or Instagram. The form is pre-filled with information from their profile (unless a custom question is asked). But, for the same reason that Instant Forms can lead to more volume, you can expect lower quality.

2. Website Forms: It can be a little bit more difficult to complete these forms. The user is directed to an external website, which may be considered an unexpected interruption. If form questions remain the same, the completion of the form will take more manual effort. Combined with the less dependable variable of website performance, you might expect that the volume of leads from website forms will be lower and more costly, but the quality should be higher.

In summary, my hypothesis: Instant Forms will produce more leads at a lower cost, but website leads will be of a higher quality. I believe that the additional quality will override the negatives of less volume to make them more valuable and cost effective.

Defining Quality Leads

This is a step that seems elementary until we consider the variables, particularly related to volume, costs, and time.

Volume: We need enough volume for the results to be meaningful. If a very small percentage of the original leads is considered “quality” based on our definition, more raw leads are needed to complete the test. Ideally, I’m hoping to generate at least 100 quality leads to make this test meaningful.

For that to be possible, it’s not reasonable (for my funnel, at least) to define a quality lead as someone who makes a purchase. It needs to be a far more prevalent action.

Costs: This could also get out of hand if we insist on generating a high volume of very high quality leads in order to get meaningful results. I’m willing to spend $2k or so on this, but I’d rather not go beyond that.

Time: Defining quality can’t be concluded immediately upon collecting the lead. We need the leads themselves to define it by making an important action. That could be completed within a day or it may take weeks (or more).

I decided that the easiest way to balance these variables that is consistent with my own goals and funnel was to weed out the “dead leads.” These are people who aren’t reachable.

We could technically focus only on email deliverability, but I wanted to take it a step further. Something that is important to me is that my emails drive consistent traffic to my website. This is critical for three primary reasons:

1. Deep Engagement. By clicking links in my emails, this tells me that a lead is finding value in my content.

2. Website Traffic. This is an important factor for the growth of my business. I need people engaged on my website, sharing my content, and sending signals to search engines.

3. Potential to Buy. If you’re getting value from my website, you are much more likely to buy from me. That could mean setting up a one-on-one session, joining my private membership, or purchasing a course.

To make this decision even easier, I already track whether people click links in my emails as a way of segmenting my most engaged leads. I put tags on all important external links. When clicked, it sends users through a timed automation which gives them a Lead Score.

So, let’s summarize…

Quality Lead = Clicked a link in one of my emails.

The lead magnet in this test includes a series of educational emails that provide links for further reading. They may also receive other emails related to blog posts. These leads will have plenty of opportunities to open, click, or ignore my emails.

Time: Once the campaigns are complete, I will give the leads at least two weeks to click a link before declaring them “dead” (or dead until proven otherwise) — knowing that some of these leads may still “come back to life” at some point.

The Test

The vehicle for this test is a lead magnet for beginner advertisers. I actually tried to use other lead magnets, but this one provides the most volume for the lowest cost, which makes it the best candidate to generate adequate volume for a test. It also sends out several emails with links in them, which makes it a good candidate for measuring quality.

I created two different ad sets and ads that are identical in the following ways…

Targeting: Advantage+ Audience, offering suggestions of people who are in the top 25% of time spent on my website during the past 30 days and those who have performed the VideoWatched custom event (watched an embedded YouTube video on my website). Geography focused only on people in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

I excluded all people who subscribed to what I was promoting via website custom audience, email custom audience, and lead form custom audience.

Placements: Advantage+ Placements.

Ad Copy and Creative: One ad with three different text variations (same for both versions). The only difference is that one drove people to a website landing page and one to an Instant Form.

Tagging and Segmentation: It’s critical that I keep these leads separate. All leads who came through the Instant Form were given a unique tag in my CRM. I created a separate landing page with a unique form for the website lead version and I gave people who were directed to this page and form a different tag. This allowed me to easily track the leads who came in from each source.

Tracking Quality: I alluded to this above, but I add a tag in my CRM to specific links in my emails. This includes important links from the eight-email sequence that came directly from this lead magnet. It also includes other emails I send from my newsletter and other broadcasts, since these people could subscribe to other offerings.

This tagging results in a Lead Score. If you never click a link, you won’t have a Lead Score. When you click, you’re sent through a timed automation. For the first seven days, you’ll have a Lead Score of 5. If you never click again, that score will drop from 4 on down to 1 as time passes. But it will never drop back to 0.

SIDE NOTE: I strongly encourage marketers to use a similar approach to segmenting your email list to isolate those who are most engaged. This has allowed me to implement a strategy to send more emails to those who are engaged, which increases the amount of traffic to my website while not driving up opt-outs.

Results: Costs

I generated a total of 630 leads from this test. I spent about $100 more on the website leads because the volume was lagging and I wanted it to get a bit closer to the leads generated from the Instant Forms.

Instant Forms: $801.26 spent for 392 leads ($2.04 per lead)
Website Leads: $897.78 spent for 238 leads ($3.77 per lead)

Ads Manager and my CRM didn’t match up perfectly (they were close), but my CRM is the ultimate source of generated leads. The number can’t be higher or lower than what my CRM says. I don’t care if some leads came in organically (very few did). And Ads Manager is the ultimate source for the amount spent.

In my original hypothesis, I expected that leads from Instant Forms may be less expensive. But, I’ve also seen that CPM costs can be higher with Instant Forms, so I was a bit surprised by how much cheaper these leads were. They were nearly half the cost.

Results: Quality

This is the most important part. Recall that I assumed that lead quality from Instant Forms would be lower due to the fact that they are easier to complete. While it was possible that overall Cost Per Quality Lead might even out, I still expected to get more quality leads from website forms.

Well, that was not the case…

Instant Forms: 114 of 392 leads were definitively “Quality” (29.1% and $7.03 per Quality Lead)
Website Leads: 69 of 238 leads were definitively “Quality” (29.0% and $13.01 per Quality Lead)

The percentage of definitively “Quality” leads is nearly identical for both Instant Forms and website forms. Note that these percentages will only increase with time, as more people could conceivably click on links in my emails. I was originally going to wait at least a month to write this post, but the changes were so small from week-to-week that any movement from here won’t be significant enough to alter my evaluation.

Of course, the percentage of quality leads isn’t the bottom line here. Instant Forms generated nearly twice as many leads (at nearly half the cost), which means that they produced quality leads at nearly half the cost of website forms.

I was certainly not expecting that.

Deliverability

I wasn’t planning on using this as a factor, but mentioning it above gave me the idea to run a check.

If I am unable to deliver an email to someone, there is no coming back from that “dead lead” designation. Lack of deliverability is typically due to either a bad email address (intentional or not) or an unsubscribe.

Is one method more prone to deliverability issues than the other?

Instant Forms: 328 of 392 leads were deliverable (83.7%)
Website Leads: 220 of 238 leads were deliverable (92.4%)

This is interesting, but not shocking. Something I learned during this process was that there were people subscribing from Instant Forms who were not getting my emails (they commented or messaged that they weren’t receiving them). The reason for this is that they were on my email list years ago and unsubscribed. If they don’t resubscribe from my CRM’s forms (which would be the issue with Instant Forms), it needs to be done manually.

In other words, the results from Instant Forms are even more startling. Despite having to overcome an additional 8.7% that weren’t deliverable, Instant Forms were still able to generate the same percentage of engaged (“quality”) leads.

Learnings and Potential Adjustments

It’s difficult to argue with these results. There is enough volume to learn something from them. At the very least, it’s evidence that Instant Forms may be just as effective as website forms at generating quality leads.

Beyond that, I was a bit disappointed in the overall percentage of quality leads. Obviously, this applies to both the Instant Forms and website forms, since those percentages were about the same.

But, that’s something that has a long list of potential explanations. These are things that I can tweak…

1. The Lead Magnet. One of the reasons I didn’t love the idea of using the Beginners product as my lead magnet is that I don’t think these people align with my content all that well. They’re good to get in the door. But, this lead magnet served the purpose of generating more volume. I may have been able to use a different lead magnet to generate higher quality leads overall, but the costs may have been twice as high.

So, I still think this was the right choice for the test. But, going forward, it’s worth trying other lead magnets that better align with my more advanced content.

2. Targeting. I can’t say that this was a mistake, but only that it’s a potential factor. I firmly contend that you should use Advantage+ Audience for sales, but you should avoid it for the top of the funnel. Middle of the funnel is where it gets a bit hazy. There’s the potential for quality to be a problem.

What’s nice about Advantage+ Audience is that the suggestions you make shouldn’t be all that impactful, which limits the variance in results depending on what you use for inputs.

That becomes far more variable when using original audiences. It’s possible I could get better results on a smaller scale using interests or custom audiences or maybe even lookalike audiences. But those results will likely fall off eventually.

I could potentially use these same custom audiences with Advantage Custom Audience, but I suspect the results would be mostly the same. It still could be worth testing.

Increasing Quality

It’s also important to point out that there are endless ways to increase the quality of your leads. The fact that I’m at a shade under 30% is absolutely correctable. Beyond the type of lead magnet and targeting, there are some other rather obvious solutions…

1. More Questions. Whether it’s an Instant Form or website form, there’s a clear correlation between quality and quantity. If you want more volume, ask fewer questions. If you want higher quality leads, ask more questions.

2. Custom Questions. This is particularly the case for Instant Forms, that pre-fill answers for basic information that can be pulled from a lead’s profile. I can ask custom questions that require people to put thought into their answers.

3. Conversion Leads Optimization. This is something I’ve been setting up for the past few months, and I’ll be able to optimize for very soon. When running ads to Instant Forms, you have the ability to optimize for Leads or Conversion Leads.

To get anything out of Conversion Leads, you first need to go through a multi-month setup process to help Meta understand your CRM funnel. I’ve been doing that using leads from Instant Forms and sending events when people click my links. The process is 95% complete, so I hope to begin optimizing for Conversion Leads soon.

In all of these cases, it will be more expensive to get the lead. This is part of that balance we keep discussing. We already know that Quality Leads cost me between $7 and $13. Will Conversion Leads help decrease that cost? We won’t know until we try it.

Test Your Assumptions

This was a fun test, and I encourage you to always test your assumptions like this. Especially if you’ve been doing this for a long time, it’s easy to fall into complacency where you just assume that, through all of the changes of Meta’s products and systems, everything will work the way it always has.

It doesn’t mean that my test definitively proves that Instant Forms generate more quality leads at a lower cost than website leads. Far too many factors contribute to that determination to make such a statement.

But, my results were certainly eye-opening enough for me to take a step back and reassess what I previously believed to be true.

Your Turn

What kinds of results have you seen from Instant Forms vs. website forms?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Results: Testing Quality Leads from Instant Forms vs. Website appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

One of the most common complaints among Meta advertisers is regarding low-quality results. They get results that appear good on the surface. Scratch a bit, and they realize that they’re getting very little for their money.

This is most often found with leads or top-of-the-funnel actions (link clicks, landing page views, post engagement, or ThruPlay). You realize you’re getting empty actions and feel like you’ve been robbed.

Once you understand how everything works, it makes sense why this happens. You’ll see the weaknesses and the specific steps you’ll need to take to make high-quality results more likely.

In this post, I’m going to focus on six of the steps that you can take to control the quality of advertising results.

1. Performance Goal

If I could make this step 1 through 6, I would. It’s simply that important. It explains why this problem happens and how it helps you fix it.

The performance goal is what defines success. It is, quite literally, your goal for measuring performance of your ads.

Example: If your performance goal is “Maximize Link Clicks,” the entire focus for optimization of ad delivery will be on getting you the most link clicks within your budget. There is zero concern for what people do after clicking. Meta isn’t trying to get you “quality” link clicks. The assumption is that you simply want link clicks.

Let’s provide a few examples of how using performance goals can improve result quality, based on what you’re trying to accomplish…

Purchases

Even when optimizing for conversions where the conversion event is a purchase, you can run into this problem. It’s not so much that you’re getting “low quality” results, but they may be low value. Why? The algorithm is literally focused on maximizing your number of purchases.

But you can impact that by changing your performance goal to maximize value instead. The focus then will be on higher value purchases. That may result in fewer conversions, but will likely lead to more revenue.

Leads

Possibly the most common quality results problem of all is related to leads. We’ll address it multiple times in this post. But there are a couple of things you can try from a performance goal perspective.

The problem happens because your performance goal is “Leads.” But that’s not really your goal. Your goal is to increase the number of people who are likely to buy from you. Meta doesn’t know that.

Unless, of course, you optimize for Conversion Leads when using instant forms.

The conversion lead setup process is a long, and potentially frustrating, one. But it can be worth it. It allows you to define your funnel for Meta so that your leads can be followed from registration to an end goal. The algorithm’s focus will be on the eventual purchase, not the initial lead.

If you run ads for website leads, there are things you can try, too. You could optimize for an action that happens after the lead submission. That could be as simple as setting the conversion event as something related to an action that can be taken on the confirmation page (watch a video, click a button, etc.).

I recorded a video once about a creative way to improve the quality of webinar signups. The main thing is to be flexible and strategic.

Traffic

This is the worst one of all. If your performance goal is to maximize link clicks or landing page views, prepare to be disappointed. Unless you significantly restrict your audience, you’re likely to get incredibly low-quality results. Just empty clicks.

But that’s partly your fault. As far as Meta knows, you want landing page views. The algorithm delivered landing page views. The fact that you actually wanted or expected these people to do something else after landing on your website is something that you need to clarify.

It could mean optimizing for a standard event of some kind instead of link clicks or landing page views. Something else I’ve done is optimize for custom events I’ve created that are designed to define quality traffic behavior.

It would be helpful if Meta offered an easier way to optimize delivery for quality traffic and other top-of-the-funnel actions. Absent of that, custom events are your best alternative.

2. Lead Forms

My suggestions related to adjusting the performance goal to improve lead quality may not be reasonable if you’re budget conscious. The reason is that optimizing for conversion leads or some other event that happens after the initial submission will significantly impact volume. And when that happens, a higher budget is a necessity.

If you’re hoping to improve lead quality while continuing to optimize for a basic lead, not all hope is lost. There are several other steps that you can take.

Ask More Questions

This is Lead Generation 101. If you want more leads, ask fewer questions. If you want better (but fewer) leads, ask more questions. By making the form completion more difficult, it will kick out those who weren’t that interested after all. People often become wary about providing too much information. Those who actually complete a form that asks more questions are likely to be better leads.

Ask Custom Questions

Along similar lines as asking more questions, but you could technically ask questions that are all pre-filled using instant forms. Whether you use instant forms or a form on a website, consider asking a question that requires more thought to answer.

This could be sentence or paragraph answers that provide examples or detailed explanations. Those who aren’t that interested won’t bother.

Lead Filtering

This may be the best solution of all. Lead filtering will only allow people to complete your instant form if they answer your questions the way you want them answered.

Once again, it’s all about defining for the algorithm what you want. If only qualified leads are able to complete the form, Meta learns from those completions. This can help optimize to reach more people who are likely to complete it, too.

Avoid “More Volume” Form Type

If you use instant forms, the default form type is “More Volume.” It’s the simplest to complete.

“Higher Intent” takes you through multiple steps, including a confirmation. It may not make a huge difference, but it can help improve quality.

Try Rich Content

Another form type. Rich Content (previously called “Custom”) allows you to create an instant form with up to four sections. The additional information and steps can help improve the quality of your leads.

3. Copy and Creative

This can easily be missed. I’m not the first one to say it, but copy and creative does much of your targeting now — especially in this new world of audience expansion and broad targeting.

If your ideal customer is a specific type of person, craft your copy and creative to speak directly to that person. Appeal to their needs, desires, and pain points.

Craft generic copy and creative that appeals to everyone and expect to attract generic people.

4. Improve Your Offer

This relates to a situation where you offer something of value in exchange for contact information. It can have a huge impact on lead quality.

Make sure that your offer attracts your ideal lead. If you try to build leads by having an iPad giveaway sweepstakes, don’t be surprised when none of your leads buy from you — unless you sell iPads and related devices.

If you are collecting contact information in exchange for something of value, make sure that the something of value is especially desirable to your ideal lead. In fact, make it boring to anyone else.

5. Audience Inputs

I’m placing this way down the list because it’s less important than ever before. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t have an impact.

Sure, if you use Advantage+ Audience, your audience suggestions will likely have very little impact on the quality of your leads. The same can be said if you use original audiences and those inputs are expanded to reach a broader audience.

But, audience expansion can absolutely lead to low-quality results — especially if the result you want isn’t a purchase. When that’s the case, restricting your audience is one of your options.

Of course, your ability to restrict the audience will depend upon the performance goal. Otherwise, take an old school approach by using custom audiences.

Keep in mind that this approach does not scale well, but if your goal is to attract a high quality audience without breaking the bank, this is the way.

6. Manual Placements (Sometimes)

One of the biggest traps for low-quality results is related to weaknesses in placements. It’s actually one of the primary reasons you’ll get misleading results when optimizing for link clicks and landing page views.

Audience Network is notorious for attracting accidental clicks, bots, and click fraud (before it’s detected). If you optimize for link clicks or landing page views, the algorithm will go straight to this placement to get those clicks because the assumption is that’s what you want. You’ll get lots of them, and they’ll be cheap.

You’ll run into something similar if you optimize for ThruPlay. Meta will spend most of your budget in the Audience Network Rewarded Video placement, and you’ll get results that seem too good to be true.

They seem too good to be true because they are. These people are incentivized to watch your video to get something of value in exchange. Apps monetize themselves with this placement. So, game players may be asked to watch a video to get access to virtual currency. You’ll find these people never do anything beyond watching your video.

The reaction may be to simply remove Audience Network in all cases. But that’s not necessarily the solution either. The reason you should remove it is directly related to your performance goal and whether there are weaknesses in that placement that would be exploited to get that result.

Otherwise, you should generally use Advantage+ Placements when optimizing for any type of conversion. Remove a placement that you know is the direct source of low-quality results.

Of course, that’s not a great solution either because there’s typically a bigger issue at play. Removing these placements may help, but it won’t eliminate it entirely.

You could use News Feed only. If your performance goal is link clicks or landing page views, you’re still going to get cheap, low-quality traffic. It just won’t be as terrible as if you kept Audience Network.

You Have Control

Ultimately, it’s easy to blame Meta for getting you low-quality results. But it’s much less likely to happen if you take the proper steps to prevent it.

Set the performance goal that actually defines what you want — don’t assume that one action will naturally lead to another. Create ads and offers that attract your target customer.

After that, simply know how ad distribution works, it’s strengths and weaknesses. You’ll be better equipped to avoid, detect, and fix problems related to low-quality results.

Your Turn

What steps do you take to improve the quality of your results?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 6 Ways to Fix Low-Quality Advertising Results appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

In June of 2023, Meta announced the Instant Form Browser Add-On for website conversion ads. It’s another way to collect leads with the help of Meta advertising. What the heck is it?

In this post, we’ll walk through…

• What it is
• How to set it up
• How it works
• How you might use it
• Potential issues

It’s a tool with potential, though it seems to have some glaring issues for now. But these things can be fixed.

Let’s go…

What It Is

The Instant Form Browser Add-On will allow you to send users to a page of your website with an ad. While there, a persistent button for an Instant Form will appear at the bottom. It’s mobile-only since it makes use of the Facebook browser to pull off the add-on.

This essentially combines two different approaches when it comes to collecting leads with Meta ads:

1. Your website
2. Instant Forms

I know, this sounds confusing. Instant forms are for collecting leads without leaving Facebook or Instagram. When you send people to your website, you collect leads with your own embedded form.

It took me a while to grasp this, too. Hang with me.

How to Set It Up

First, you’ll need to utilize the Leads objective.

Select the Website conversion location.

You’ll need to set your performance goal. In the example below, I’ve used “Maximum number of conversions.” I then selected my pixel and a conversion event for a 1 minute page view using a custom event.

This step is actually confusing. You want to collect leads. But remember, we’re going to use the Instant Form to do that. So, it wouldn’t make any sense to use the Lead or CompleteRegistration conversion events since those web events won’t be happening here.

We’re going to get back to this later, trust me.

Create your ad as a single image ad. The CTA button you select will be important.

This will be used both on your ad and in the persistent button. We’ll get to how that may be a problem later.

Then provide a URL destination and select the Instant Form Browser Add-On within the Destination section.

You may be familiar with another of the browser add-ons that I’ve covered before, which is the Call Extension.

You can either select an instant form that you’ve used before or create a new one.

How It Works

If you’ve had technical issues with this, you aren’t alone. I delayed writing this post because I wasn’t even sure it worked. I couldn’t get any of the ways to view or preview the ad to display. But that’s a known bug that has at least been partially addressed to the point where I can share some screenshots with you.

First, your ad will look like a typical lead ad in the news feed.

When you click it, the Facebook browser will open to the link you provided in your ad. At the bottom, you’ll see the “Learn More” button that will open the Instant Form.

That form opens as soon as you touch the phone screen (recall it’s mobile-only) or within a couple of seconds. Here’s what it looks like…

There’s only one more screen, which is the Terms and Conditions. Hit submit.

That’s it!

How You Might Use It

There are a couple of primary use cases that I can think of related to the Instant Form Browser Add-On.

1. Sales page for a high-priced product.

This may be something like a car or real estate that can’t be purchased online. The page will give you information about the product, but you’ll need to provide your contact information so that a salesperson can reach you to discuss it.

2. Blog post and newsletter subscription.

This probably isn’t how Meta intends we use it, but I immediately thought of ways it could help my unique situation. I could send someone to a blog post that includes a button to subscribe to my newsletter.

I’m sure there are plenty of other ways you could take advantage of this, too. Use your imagination!

Potential Issues

There’s a lot of potential for this feature. But, holy cow. There are so many examples of how it’s less than ideal in its current form.

Let’s go down the list…

1. Performance goal makes no sense.

Is your goal that people complete your form? If so, that should be reflected in the performance goal. The performance goal impacts how your ad is delivered. The way this is set up, it sure seems like the algorithm will ignore form completions as a goal.

This is supported by the fact that the Results column reflects the number of actions you set as your performance goal. Recall that I selected a custom event for 1-minute page views.

If Meta ultimately determines success based on instant form completions, that should be reflected here. Regardless, it should be an option.

2. There should be two CTA buttons.

Maybe this is a difference between how Meta wants us to use this and ways I think we can use it. But you’ll recall that you set a single CTA button when creating your ad. But truthfully, there should be two.

The first CTA should be to get people to click your ad to view the web page. You may be sending people to a product page in most cases. “Subscribe” or “Sign Up” wouldn’t make any sense here. “Learn More” might be a better fit.

But the persistent button at the bottom of the page shouldn’t also read “Learn More.” That’s not reflective of what the form does. It would be helpful to be able to customize exactly what that says.

In the case of the sales page, you may want it to say “Set Up Appointment” so that a salesperson calls you. If it’s a blog post, a button for “Subscribe to Newsletter” would be great.

“Learn More” is pointless here, just as “Subscribe” probably doesn’t make sense on the ad.

3. “Form on Facebook” in the ad.

If you look at the initial image of the ad in your news feed, you’ll notice “Form on Facebook” above the headline. That’s incredibly misleading.

This is usually where the “Display Link” field appears. When I created this, I added “jonloomer.com” but it does not appear. This is not a lead ad. It will not immediately open a form. It will first go to a website.

That should be reflected there.

4. The form loads automatically.

This was the most disappointing part for me. Whether you’re reading a blog post or a product page, you came to the website for information. But the form immediately loads and takes up the screen. This doesn’t really make sense.

You sent this person to your website to get more information. Hopefully that information inspires them to click the persistent button to complete the form. But the form isn’t the star here. It’s the content.

Yes, you can close the form and go back to the content. But if you’ve never experienced this browser add-on before, it just looks like a form and no content. I imagine most people will close the whole thing out.

5. The form is too basic.

I don’t understand why this form includes nothing at all other than contact fields. I even selected an Instant Form that I’ve used before that includes images and details. All of that is stripped out.

How does the user know why they’re providing their contact information? Putting it in the page copy doesn’t make sense because this may be a page of your website that you use independently of this ad. And putting it in the ad doesn’t make a ton of sense since the whole point of this browser add-on is that the user is first getting more information on your website.

So much of this feels backwards.

Your Turn

Have you experimented with the Instant Form Browser Add-On yet? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Instant Form Browser Add-On for Website Conversion Ads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

One of the biggest challenges that Meta advertisers face is running ads that build quality leads that are likely to buy. The wide variation in costs and conversion rate by country is a primary source of this frustration. But there is a solution.

In this post, we’ll discuss the dilemma before I lay out my approach to help you run Meta ads for leads that effectively distribute your budget to countries that are likely to convert.

Problem #1: Cost Variation by Country

First, let’s accurately define the problem so that you understand what we are attempting to solve here.

Most advertisers understand that when running Meta ads to build leads that you should not target worldwide (all countries). While this is generally accepted, it’s important to understand the factors that can make global targeting problematic. Then, we’ll cover some solutions to counter these problems.

There’s a wide variation in costs to reach people by country.

The CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) can be under $1 for some countries and 30 times that or more in others. The ultimate CPM, of course, will depend on many factors. But the difference between reaching people in the US and India, for example, is significant.

The rate of engagement or lead completion often has a narrow range by country.

The difference in costs isn’t a problem in and of itself. The problem begins because that same disparity doesn’t exist in level of engagement or rate of lead completion. The result of this is that if you optimize for a lead, the algorithm will do all it can to get you the most leads at the lowest cost. And since Meta thinks any lead is a good lead, you can bet that the vast majority of your budget will be spent on the cheapest countries if you target worldwide since that’s the easiest way to get the most leads.

The rate of conversion from lead to paying customer by country is imbalanced.

In theory, getting all of your leads from the cheapest countries to reach isn’t an issue either. Instead, that could be an efficient way to find new customers. That is, of course, if leads convert to paying customers at a similar rate regardless of country.

But that’s not the case. You will likely find that leads will have a wide variance in conversion rate to paying customer depending on the country (among other factors). Some of the most expensive countries to reach are often the countries most likely to convert.

Problem #2: Narrow Focus on Potential Customers

Problem #1 is why many advertisers will focus their budgets on a core group of countries (like the US, UK, Canada, and Australia). While these are generally some of the most expensive countries to reach, they also tend to be more likely to become paying customers.

This approach, though, generates a couple of more issues…

First, that increased cost makes the profitability of lead building far more challenging. You will spend more per lead, and it’s more important that you get a good rate of conversion from the leads that you get.

Second, this assumes that you will only get paying customers from these four countries. That’s often not the case. In an attempt to make your ads more effective, you’ve abandoned countries that have potential to lead to paying customers.

Now that you understand the problems, let’s get to a multi-step solution that you can apply…

1. Research Where Your Paying Customers Live

This is important, especially if you’re an established brand with a history of paying customers to pull from. Actually go through your database, and you might be surprised by what you find.

I ran reports, and I have paying customers in about 100 countries. It’s actually pretty amazing!

Of course, it’s probably best not to commit to targeting a country that only has one or two paying customers, especially if you’ve been running a business for while like I have.

There’s no rule to this, but I made a cutoff at about 20 paying customers. This is my minimum for dedicating budget in a country to build leads.

This left me with 40 countries in all that I can target.

2. Uncover General Costs Per Country

You’ll understand why this is important in a minute. But we need to get a general idea of how much it will cost you to reach each country.

This is going to be imperfect, but it doesn’t need to be perfect. You need a general idea. There are undoubtedly benchmark reports that you can use for this, but I decided to do some manual work on my own.

The first thing I did was I ran a custom ad report for my ad account using the Country breakdown. Note that I did this within the custom ad reports instead of Ads Manager since it allows you to view this across your entire account instead of focusing on a single campaign.

Of course, this is imperfect since it relies on your data and the CPM costs may vary depending on objective and other factors. But I still find this valuable.

I also used the approach of creating a draft ad set with a $100 daily budget and selecting one country at a time to see how Meta projects impressions.

This will again be imperfect, as you can see from the wide range of impressions. But I used the top of the range for each country to have a consistent point of comparison.

You now have an account-specific CPM and projected impressions per $100 spent to give you an idea of costs to reach a country. If one number feels particularly off, go with the one that seems more accurate.

3. Group Countries by Projected CPM

Now that we have a couple of data points per country, let’s start grouping them together. Our main goal is to prevent wide variations in costs so that the algorithm doesn’t prefer one country over another for the CPM reason alone.

I created five groups in all. Since about half of my customers come from the US, I decided to make it one of my groups by itself.

Here’s an example of the second group…

These are the other most expensive countries to reach (beyond the US) of potential paying customers, according to my imperfect research.

4. Create an Ad Set for Each Group

This progression of steps should start to make sense. We are grouping countries together by similar CPM costs so that the algorithm won’t prefer one country over the other. While we don’t demand equal distribution within an ad set, we still want each country to have a chance.

Here are my five ad sets…

By the name, you can see what my approach is here. I actually used website custom audiences and engagement custom audiences, but I also turned on Advantage Custom Audience to allow the algorithm to expand beyond those groups. This is actually the first time I’ve used Advantage Custom Audiences. In most cases, I go completely broad for something like this.

Otherwise, everything is pretty straight-forward here. All placements, no manual bidding.

5. Establish Ad Set Budgets

The goal here should be to get the same number of leads per ad set (or it can be your goal). Of course, that wouldn’t mean using the same budget for every ad set since the costs will vary widely by country group.

Look at it this way… I projected that I can reach about 17 times more people when targeting Group 5 than when targeting the US. I set a $40 daily budget for the US, thinking that should get me to at least 50 leads per week. In theory, I only need to spend about $2.35 to get the same number of leads from Group 5.

I went with $3 for Group 5 because even that seems insane. But I can tell you that, incredibly, that’s enough to produce the number of leads I’m wanting from that group.

You can use a formula, but remember that the numbers we’re using for CPM are rough estimations. So feel free to use a bit of your gut here, too.

Here’s what I’m rolling with…

6. Monitor Distribution and Adjust if Necessary

Because these groups are based on some rough projections, it’s quite likely that we’ll run into an issue with imbalanced distribution. Again, we don’t want distribution among countries to be equal within an ad set. We just want to make sure that every country has a chance. Due to population and rate of goal completion, distribution will vary regardless.

What we want to watch for is a country that’s getting nearly all or barely any of the budget. If that happens, check the CPM to see if that may be the cause. We do that by using the breakdown by country in Ads Manager.

I wouldn’t overreact to small sample size results. Allow your ad sets to run for at least a week before making any changes to the composition of countries. When you do make those changes, the learning phase will restart.

If a country isn’t getting enough budget to bring you any leads, consider moving it to the next cheapest country group. On the flip side, if a country is eating up an ad set budget and the CPM is the lowest within the group, consider moving it to the next most expensive ad set.

But I wouldn’t micromanage this. The main thing is that every country is at least generating some leads. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you demand distribution be equal. If that’s the case, just set up an ad set for each country (which I’d only consider with much higher budgets).

A Simplified Version

If the above approach confuses you, let’s consider a much simpler variation.

Assume that instead of 40 countries, you have paying customers in five. For argument’s sake, those five countries have vastly different CPMs. Let’s use this example of countries:

• United States ($15)
• Ireland ($11)
• Brazil ($8)
• Philippines ($5)
• India ($2)

Quite the collection of countries! The CPMs are entirely hypothetical to prove a point.

Since these CPMs are across the board, you probably shouldn’t put them into the same ad set, or the majority of your budget will be spent in India. While India has generated paying customers, you may want to be sure that you also get leads from the United States and other countries on the list.

To accomplish this, you’ll create multiple ad sets. The budget you use for each ad set should be somewhat proportionate to the differences in CPM. With a goal in mind of generating 50 leads per week per ad set and an assumed cost of $5 per lead in the US, we would start with a daily budget of $50 for the United States (this is a starting point with no math behind it).

We can then assemble our other budgets.

• United States: $50
• Ireland: $37
• Brazil: $27
• Philippines: $17
• India: $7

In theory, this could help us get approximately the same number of leads per week from each of these countries that are sources of paying customers.

Find What Works for You

This is all a bit of an experiment for me, so I’m by no means an expert on this approach. But I can tell you that the early returns have been exciting. It’s a nice balance of high-volume cheap leads and lower-volume expensive leads, but they all have the potential to lead to paying customers.

It’s possible that you have far fewer than 40 countries to target. Don’t feel like this needs to be a long list. I only included 40 because I have data showing I should.

It’s also possible that you have a very high budget and you can create more groups. At the extreme, you’d create one ad set per country. Since you’d need an adequate budget to exit the learning phase for every country, that’s going to cost much more than grouping similar countries.

How you do this is up to you. But, experiment and have fun with it!

Your Turn

Have you tried out a similar approach to grouping countries? What do you do differently?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Strategically Target Countries for Quality Leads with Meta Ads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

If you’ve selected the Leads objective in Meta Ads Manager recently, you may have seen an immediate prompt for a Tailored Leads Campaign. It looks like this…

Meta has been testing and rolling out Tailored Leads since November of 2022, if not earlier. And if you’ve experimented with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, you’ve certainly spotted similarities.

Is there a clear benefit to using Tailored Leads Campaigns? Do Tailored Leads provide unique features and optimizations compared to manual leads campaigns, similar to the way Advantage+ Shopping does compared to manual sales campaigns?

Let’s explore…

Defining Tailored Leads

Let’s go back to that initial definition of a Tailored Leads Campaign:

Create your campaign in fewer steps using the tailored leads campaign. It’s preset with built-in best practices to help you get more leads at the best value.

So far, nothing jumps out as a unique benefit. Meta defines it as “preset with built-in best practices.” That doesn’t inspire excitement. It doesn’t sound unique.

Let’s go through the setup process…

Campaign Setup

First, you won’t be able to utilize A/B testing or Advantage Campaign Budget directly from campaign creation. Those options aren’t there.

The campaign and ad set are completed in one shorter step. This is a streamlined process.

One big difference is that the Tailored Leads Campaign only includes four conversion location options: Instant Forms, Messenger, Instagram, and Calls.

It’s missing Website, Instant Forms and Messenger (combined), and App. Here’s the conversion location section when setting this up manually…

This is a big deal, especially if you like to collect leads from your website. You won’t be using Tailored Leads.

There also isn’t an option to use manual bidding with Tailored Leads. This is stripped down.

Presets

Some of the missing features aren’t actually missing. You just won’t be able to change them, so Meta put them out of view. There are several presets that you aren’t able to customize.

Now we see that the bid strategy is set at Highest Volume. You won’t be able to change that.

Advantage+ Placements is automatically on, and you won’t be able to remove placements if you prefer.

Finally, you’ll be optimizing for Leads, which sorta explains why the Website conversion location is missing. When you utilize the website conversion location, you then go through the steps of selecting your pixel and the optimization event of your choice.

Added Features?

Advantage+ Shopping also streamlines the campaign creation process by locking in presets. But what makes it especially unique is that it offers features related to defining your current customers and some added machine learning to drive sales.

Unless I’m missing something, I see none of that here. Tailored Leads Campaigns simply appear to be a Boost button for leads in Ads Manager. It simplifies things for newer advertisers to prevent them from modifying settings that will make their results worse.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think Tailored Leads Campaigns offer anything that is unique, special, or powerful. All indications are that you could easily recreate a Tailored Leads Campaign by creating a manual leads campaign that utilizes the same settings.

You could not say the same of Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns. You can’t completely recreate it with a manual campaign (mainly due to the current customer features and machine learning).

Should You Use It?

Sure, knock yourself out. I’d love to be proven wrong and hear that results from Tailored Leads Campaigns are incredible and can’t be duplicated with manual campaigns. But I have serious doubts.

If you are overwhelmed and are unsure about the best way to set up your campaigns, Tailored Leads is a good starting point.

Your Turn

What do you think of Tailored Leads Campaigns? Have you tested them out?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Should You Create a Tailored Leads Campaign Over the Manual Setup? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

There is a simple setting that most Meta advertisers don’t even realize exists, and it may be limiting the number of leads you get from lead ads forms.

It’s so simple. Yet, it’s annoyingly easy to miss. Even if you know about it (I’m writing this and I still forget nearly half the time).

Let me show you…

Restricted or Open?

When you create a Meta lead form, you will go through the steps of your form type, intro, questions, privacy policy, message for leads, and maybe more (depending on the form type).

You created the perfect form. Asked all of the right questions. Displayed all of the most valuable information.

Except, you forgot something…

There’s a tab at the very top of that form creation screen for “Settings.”

After Language is a setting for Sharing…

By default, only the people who are delivered your ad “directly” (you paid to reach them) will be able to open, see, and complete the form.

In other words, the form is restricted.

I find this odd. It’s not that there shouldn’t be an option for restricting your form. You may have very good reasons for doing so. But lead forms are the only example of when Meta restricts you by default.

Let me explain. When you run an ad that promotes your product, a person you paid to reach might share your ad with their audience or a friend. When they do so, that person can click it and buy your product. There is no restriction.

The same would be the case if a person you paid to reach shared an ad that directs the user to a page of your website to complete a form. Anyone can complete it.

But lead forms, for whatever reason, are different. You can change your lead forms to “Open.” But, by default, they will be restricted.

Viewing Organic Leads

Let’s assume that you changed this setting to “Open.” You’ll see more leads in Ads Manager, right?

Nope. Keep in mind that Ads Manager only reports on impressions and actions that result from a person you paid to reach. Organic activity will not appear there (I previously covered why this is a huge hole that needs to be addressed).

Organic leads will still get sent just like paid leads, of course. There are two primary ways to see when this happens.

1. Lead Export.

At the Ads level in Ads Manager, there’s a link under the total number of leads for “On-Facebook Leads” in the Results column.

If you click that, you can download a spreadsheet with all of your leads, paid and organic, for that ad.

There’s a column for “is_organic.”

If a lead is organic, it will show “True” here.

2. Leads Library.

This should be found in your Business Suite, though it seems that Meta keeps moving it.

There’s a column for “Source.” You can also filter by it.

Filter by “Organic” to view how many leads you get that way.

Why Might Organic Leads Be Common?

First, organic leads would only be possible, of course, if you change your form to “Open.” But, beyond that, there are some things to consider…

1. Publish Your Ad.

You can publish ad posts to your Facebook page. When you do this, it appears organically in the feeds of your followers. Obviously, you’d want that form to be open or no one would be able to complete it.

This would likely drive a bunch of organic leads.

2. High Engagement.

You can make all of your forms open, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get a bunch of (or any) organic leads. The more engagement you get and more budget you spend, the more likely you’ll get organic leads.

Something to watch would be the number of times your ads are getting shared, which will help drive this viral element.

Should You Restrict Your Leads?

While I’ve spent this entire post talking about how you’re leaving leads on the table if you restrict your form, that doesn’t mean you should always change it to open.

There are two primary examples of why restrictions would be necessary: Age and location. Maybe your product or service is only relevant or legal in a particular state or country, or for a particular age. At that point, the hard restriction is important.

But what I wouldn’t worry too much about is reaching people beyond your detailed targeting or lookalike audience selections. They just aren’t refined and perfect enough to insist that you only get leads from that targeted group.

One other reason to restrict leads, though, would be if you only want a unique group of current customers to get access to this lead form. In this case, you’d use a custom audience to reach this group to offer an exclusive.

Watch Video

I recorded a video about this, too. Check it out below…

Your Turn

Do you make your forms open, or do you leave them restricted?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Are You Restricting Your Meta Ads Lead Forms? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Recently, I’ve been hearing from people who are trying to build an Instant Form for Facebook lead ads using the Custom form type. But, it’s nowhere to be found…

This is weird since the feature has only been around for five or six months, and it’s actually pretty useful.

Well, I don’t think it’s time to panic. Here’s what I think happened…

Custom Form Type is Now Rich Creative

Once I heard that the Custom form type was missing, I immediately checked to see if I had it. Well, I don’t. Or I do. It’s just been changed…

In place of Custom, I’m seeing Rich Creative. And I can tell you with certainty that this provides the exact same functionality as the Custom form type. The name has simply been changed.

So, what’s going on? Why don’t some people have anything?

I’m no technical genius, but I assume this has something to do with how Meta rolls out changes. They could have just changed the name of “Custom” to “Rich Creative.” It seems that instead, the “Custom” form type was first removed. Now, the new “Rich Creative” form type is rolling out.

So, if you don’t see anything there, I’m guessing you’re in that middle ground. It kinda sucks. But you may need to wait.

I can’t imagine that this would impact any ads currently utilizing the Custom form type.

Is It Useful?

As I said at the top, I was surprised that this had disappeared because it was such a new feature and it’s actually incredibly useful.

I won’t completely rewrite the tutorial for the Custom form type here, but Rich Creative allows you to add a color scheme…

Include benefits…

And build your story with up to four new sections…

Here’s a video of how the final product looks…

When Should You Use This?

Whether it’s Custom or Rich Creative, this shouldn’t necessarily be used in all cases, as useful as it may be. Most leads collected in exchange for a freebie should use either More Volume or Higher Intent.

Rich Creative is great for improving the quality of your leads because it adds so much more context and potentially several extra steps. You may not need or want that when offering a free ebook, for example.

In my opinion, this is ideal for big-ticket items — especially if you will have a salesperson contact your leads. Immediately, auto sales and real estate come to mind for me, but I’m sure there are many examples of when this could be useful.

Watch Video

I recorded a video about this, too. Watch it below…

Your Turn

Do you have the Custom form type? Do you have Rich Creative?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post What Happened to the Custom Form Type for Facebook Lead Ads? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook lead ads have a reputation for generating low-quality leads. In many cases, they’ve deserved that reputation. But, there are several steps that you can take to help improve the quality of your leads from Facebook lead ads.

I often have people ask me whether they should use Facebook lead ads or send people to a landing page on their website. The truth is that either approach can work. And both approaches have their own built-in advantages and disadvantages.

Don’t avoid Facebook lead ads due to presumed lower-quality leads. Make these forms work for you.

Use this as a guide…

Quality Lead-Building 101

In theory, it makes sense that the default Facebook lead form would produce lower-quality leads than the typical landing page. It’s not all that difficult to explain. It’s truly Quality Lead-Building 101.

It doesn’t matter what approach you use to build leads. The easier you make the process, the more leads you should expect. But that ease of completion comes at the cost of quality.

If you create an extremely simple landing page with a brief explanation and a form that only requests an email address, you can expect to get more leads than a long landing page with a form that requests a first name, last name, and additional details about your business in addition to the email address.

Facebook lead forms have an advantage related to volume because of two things:

1. They keep potential leads on Facebook
2. They prefill basic contact information

These factors result in less friction. Less friction will lead to greater volume. And again, that will almost always lead to less quality (a trade that can be worthwhile).

Do we just throw Facebook lead ads away as a result? Of course not. Keeping people on Facebook (or Instagram) is still valuable. You don’t have to worry about the website experience or page load. Pre-filled fields can be beneficial, too.

If you want to increase the quality of the leads generated from these forms, the answer is simple: Add more friction.

Here are some simple ways to add more friction without making your forms difficult to use, with the goal of improving the quality of leads you generate.

1. Do Not Use ‘More Volume’ Form Type

When you create a lead form, the first step is to choose a form type. By default, “More Volume” will be selected.

You should know by now that this may not lead to the highest quality leads. The form will be simpler with fewer steps. The goal, from Meta’s point of view, will be to make the form as streamlined as possible to get you the most leads.

Since this is the default selection, you’ll need to make that change from the start. “Higher Intent” is a good option. It adds a review step to prevent accidental submissions.

But you can do better than that.

2. Use ‘Custom’ Form Type

A rather recent addition is the Custom form type. You can read more about this form type in my tutorial here.

When you select the Custom form type, you can add more information and context to your form. This not only provides friction, but it will give the potential lead a clearer idea of whether they should complete the form.

The Custom form provides some stylistic enhancements like a color scheme.

The intro section allows you to highlight a few benefits of your product or service.

And then you can add up to four sections to build the story of your brand or product.

Here’s an example of what the final product looks like…

3. Add More Questions

The more information you demand, the fewer leads you should expect. But, of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

This added friction could result in a potential low-quality lead abandoning your form. But you may also ask questions that are important to you that may help that potential lead realize that they aren’t the right fit.

While you can ask more questions that will pre-fill answers from a user’s profile (like first name, last name, and email address), a better option is a question that requires a typed answer.

When adding questions, consider short-answer.

4. Use Lead Filtering

You have one more option, which might just be the best way to control the quality of your leads: Multiple Choice with Lead Filtering.

If you ask a multiple-choice question, you can turn lead filtering on.

Once you do, a column for “Lead Filter” will appear.

Depending on the user’s answer, you can determine whether they are a “lead” or “not a lead.”

If they are “not a lead,” the form will send them directly to a message for non-leads.

They will not complete the form, which means you will not receive that person’s contact information.

Find the Right Mix

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should do all of these things. Sure, if you create a Custom lead form with the maximum number of steps, eight short answer questions, and a lead filtering question, whatever leads you get are likely to be high quality.

And you’re also not going to get many leads.

There’s a balance here between quality, volume, costs, and lead value. If all you’re doing is collecting leads for your newsletter, there’s no reason to increase friction and cut down on volume.

But if a quality lead is extremely valuable and you’ll assign a sales team to call them, you’ll want to do all you can to make sure that the sales team is focused on quality leads and not wasting their time.

You may want to start with less friction and see what you get from it related to volume and quality. Then make adjustments accordingly.

Watch Video

I recorded a video about this, too. Watch it below…

Your Turn

What do you do to increase the quality of leads generated from Facebook lead forms?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Get High Quality Leads from Facebook Lead Ads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Meta has started rolling out a big update to lead forms for Facebook ads. Advertisers will have the ability to tell a story by displaying benefits, product imagery, testimonials, and more.

This is the most significant update to Facebook lead ads in years. Let’s go through what is new (see “Final Product”).

I include a video near the bottom that walks through what this looks like when you’re done.

Form Type

When you create a lead form, you will know that you have this update if you have the “Custom” form type.

If you don’t see it, you don’t have it. Get in line, I guess.

Intro

Once you select the Custom form type, the big changes will be found within the Intro section.

You’ll first need to provide a 1200×1750 image and a headline (no more than 38 characters).

Once you upload the image, the form will automatically extract a color scheme. You can’t manually change that scheme, so it will depend on the colors found in the image.

Truthfully, this could be the only way that you use this update and you’d see improvements. The color scheme, for example, will apply to buttons, text, and the form generally throughout.

Next, provide the overview and benefits related to this form…

Build Your Story

You have the option of adding up to four other sections.

Keep in mind that you will need to turn on at least one of these. That’s somewhat unfortunate since you may not have a need for these sections and may just want to turn on the color scheme.

But, you should be able to find a creative way to use one of these. If you had to choose one, the Incentive section is a good place to start.

How it Works

This is the first section you can optionally turn on.

Know that for each of these sections, you will have options for the header. Instead of “How It Works,” for example…

The purpose of this section could be drastically different depending on the header you select. But, you can add multiple steps of text that all include a title and description.

Products

Next, you can highlight your products…

Or it could be your services, courses, and other things…

Regardless, you can provide a 1200×803 image, title, description, and up to three benefits for each item, and it’ll be displayed as a carousel.

Social Proof

This section highlights what people are saying about your business.

Other options for the section header…

Visually, this is a lot like the Products section. You’ll have an image carousel showcasing what each source is saying.

Incentives

Finally, what should motivate someone to complete this form?

Provide whatever incentives you can here. This is all textual, and there aren’t any options for the header.

Final Product

Here is what this section of the form looks like when you’re all done…

Who is This For?

These updates are ideally for a situation where a lead is someone expressing interest in a product. For example, complete this form if you’re interested in buying a car, house, or signing up for a bathroom remodel. The updates allow you to showcase more about your company and products to incentivize the lead.

This may not be ideal for a generic lead that is in exchange for some freebie like an ebook or webinar registration. You could still find ways to make that work, of course.

Watch Video

I also recorded a video about these updates. You can watch it here…

Your Turn

What do you think of these updates? Will you use them?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Big Update to Facebook Ads Lead Forms appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Meta originally made mention of Gated Content in a May of 2022 announcement about a series of new features for Lead Ads. One of those features is Gated Content, and it is very useful.

Let’s talk about what Gated Content is, how to set it up, and when you might use it.

What is Gated Content?

The normal process of collecting leads with Facebook lead ads when offering a digital product (like an ebook) goes like this:

1. Complete the form, providing your email address
2. Advertiser connects your email address to their CRM
3. Details regarding that digital product are sent via email

It’s not an immediate process. And, thanks to spam folders and deliverability issues, the lead may never receive the thing they requested.

Gated Content helps solve this. You (the advertiser) can allow Facebook to host the PDF, JPEG, or PNG file. Once the user completes the form, they can immediately download the file without leaving.

Set it Up

Create a Facebook Lead Ad as you normally would. If using ODAX, use the Leads objective and choose the “Instant Forms” conversion location from the ad set.

From the ad level, create a new form.

Create your form as you normally would. The difference will be the final step, “Message for Leads.”

This is where you’d normally provide a thank-you message and CTA that sends people back to your website. There’s one difference, though. Now you can select “View File.”

Once selected, you need to provide the PDF, PNG, or JPEG file and CTA button text.

That’s it!

Managing Leads

Keep in mind that leads will be managed the same way as typical Facebook lead ads. They will be held by Facebook for up to 90 days and can be found within your Lead Center. You may also use third-party software that syncs these leads to your CRM.

Who is This For?

There are a few groups that could benefit most from Gated Content.

First, obviously, any brand offering a digital file in exchange for an email address could benefit. With the lower barrier, it is more likely that the lead will actually receive the thing that they wanted. If you do a good job of messaging in that document, you may end up with more leads that become buyers.

A second group that benefits is those who don’t have a website — or an effective website. Typically, you would need to provide a URL to your website for the final step. That is no longer required for Gated Content.

The final group is brands who have less technical expertise. Normally, if you’d want a lead to receive their document quickily, you’d need to utilize a third-party tool to sync to your CRM and campaign within your CRM that would deliver the document.

That’s why I think this is most beneficial for brands that don’t have a fully functioning CRM and don’t want to spend money on a tool that helps deliver these documents. It can all be handled within the form now.

Potential Drawbacks?

Of course, there is one potential drawback to Gated Content. If someone can immediately unlock a file in exchange for contact information, they don’t technically need to provide valid info. While the form would auto-fill from a user’s profile, a lead could change the info to something they do not use.

Normally, there would be no motivation for this since they would need to provide a valid email address in order to receive the file. Now that it’s no longer a requirement, it also may be less likely that you get valid email addresses.

I should add that Gated Content forms do look slightly different. They feature “Unlock Exclusive Content” text and imagery.

If leads catch on that this means that they don’t need to provide a valid email address, it will become more likely that your lead quality will drop. In the meantime, it’s also quite possible most people won’t realize that they will get the document at the end of the form.

Do the positives outweigh the negatives? You’ll need to find out. Test it and see what happens!

My Experiment

I’m actually trying this out. I created an lead ad that offers a PDF that explains the steps of creating lead ads with Gated Content!

You can try it out here.

You can try it out because I also published the ad to my page. So, it will collect leads both organically and via the ad itself.

Keep in mind that while a lead can immediately download the PDF, I am also still syncing these leads to my CRM and emailing the PDF to them. Part of the reason for this is that there’s no guarantee that people who fill out the form know that they can immediately download the file. We’ve been conditioned to wait on the email.

There’s also the matter of bugs. And based on what I’ve heard so far, there are some bugs! It seems that not everyone is able to download the file cleanly, so the email as a backup is still a good idea, assuming you’re able to do it.

Watch Video

Your Turn

Will you use the Gated Content feature?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Lead Ads Gated Content: Download a File Directly From a Form appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Meta announced several new features to improve Lead Ads back in May. One of those features is Lead Filtering, which can improve the quality of your leads.

Not everyone has the feature yet, but I do. So, let’s walk through what Lead Filtering is and how you might use it.

What is Lead Filtering?

One of the biggest issues advertisers have with Meta Lead Ads is the quality of leads. It’s incredibly easy to complete a lead form, which can be great for volume but not so great for quality.

Lead Filtering allows you to ask a qualifying multiple-choice question at the top of your lead form. If a favorable answer is provided, the user will be able to complete the form. Otherwise, the user will not be able to submit it.

This is particularly useful for leads that go to a sales team. If you find that your team is wasting time attempting to contact potential leads that aren’t your target customer, Lead Filtering can help.

How to Set Up a Lead Filtering Question

First, you’ll need to collect leads using Instant Forms (selected within the ad set).

At the ad level, click to create a new form.

Complete the Form Type and Intro sections as you normally would. Then expand the Questions section. You might see a message about saving time on follow-ups (this is Lead Filtering).

Add a multiple-choice question.

On the right, you’ll see a toggle for Lead Filtering. Toggle that on.

Now, enter a custom question with at least two potential answers.

There’s a column for “Lead Filter” so that you can designate an answer as “Lead” or “Not a Lead.”

Completion Screens

You will now see separate sections within your form for “Message for Leads” and “Message for Non-Leads.”

Here’s an example of a message for leads…

And here’s an example of a message for non-leads…

How it Looks

The lead form itself will look something like this…

Notice that this qualifying question is asked before a user can submit their contact information. If I select “Within the next three months,” I am taken to the questions to collect my contact info. If I select “Beyond the next three months,” I’m taken to this screen…

I am not able to complete the form. If I clicked this answer by mistake, of course, I can go back and change my answer.

Your Turn

Is Lead Filtering a feature that you find useful? How might you apply it?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How Lead Filtering Can Improve the Quality of Meta Lead Ads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Meta recently announced several new features and enhancements that are coming to lead ads and messaging. I wrote about Marketing Messages from Meta Business Suite yesterday.

Today, let’s cover the new features related to lead ads. Admittedly, Meta doesn’t provide a ton of details with most of these, but we’ll cover what we know.

1. Lead Filtering

Regardless of whether you’ve used lead ads before, the struggle with lead quality is real. You can collect a bunch of leads, but you need these people to actually buy something.

Historically, the low quality of leads has been a knock on Facebook lead ads. Because it’s so easy to complete an instant form (basic contact information can be auto-populated from the user’s profile), users sometimes don’t even recall opting in.

This update could help. Meta says that you’ll soon be able to use responses to a multiple-choice question to help filter leads.

Now, we don’t have any other details beyond that. You may be familiar with Conditional Answers with lead ads, and this sounds a lot like that (following is an example of Conditional Answers, not Lead Filtering).

According to the way Lead Filtering is being presented, it’s a completely new feature that isn’t yet available — and may not even be getting tested right now.

With so little info to go off of, there’s plenty that we could speculate on here. But we’ll hold off for now.

2. Gated Content

Another feature that is coming to lead ads is Gated Content. Meta says that businesses will be able to offer exclusive content for people who complete a lead form. The example that they give is downloading a brochure or product pricing for a car.

The key here is that the download would happen directly from the lead form, rather than redirecting to your website. This is a key distinction because this otherwise doesn’t sound unique.

Yes, you can currently use a “Download” CTA button on the completion screen when someone completes your lead form. But, that button cannot instantly start a download or direct to a PDF or image file.

Right now, it must direct to a page on your website where the subscriber would then execute such a download, presumably.

The way this new feature reads, it sounds like Meta would host the file and someone who opts in could immediately download it without going to your website.

Of course, there could be pluses and negatives to Meta hosting the file. On the positive side, the user gets what they wanted right away — that could be good, at least for user experience. On the negative side, you may prefer to send the thing that users wanted via email. That way, someone can’t get that free thing by providing a fake or inactive email address.

Still, there could be value from this feature in the right situation. And there is still so much unknown about how it will work that we’ll need to hold off on making too much of these concerns for now.

3. Creative Flexibility

The final feature that’s coming to lead ads is Creative Flexibility.

It sounds like Meta is testing a more flexible and personalized lead form that will allow you to add more visuals to it. Right now, there are limited options for adding visuals to your form.

Once again, I haven’t seen this yet in the wild, so we’ll just have to wait.

Your Turn

All of these features have some potential, but there’s still so much that we don’t know.

Do you have access to any of these yet? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Lead Filtering, Gated Content, and Creative Flexibility Coming to Facebook Lead Forms appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

One of the biggest negative results related to iOS 14+ and browser restrictions that have gone into place during the past year is a drop in targeting effectiveness.

The Facebook pixel has become less dependable. We should expect it to get less effective as more and more browsers and devices move towards less tracking. These restrictions negatively impact reporting, but also the ability to target people based on their website actions.

That doesn’t mean you should abandon the pixel or targeting built off of pixel events. But, you should consider building and targeting the audiences that aren’t impacted by these restrictions.

In this post, we’ll provide a list of options that you still have available to you that haven’t been impacted.

A Clarification

The important thing to remember here is that impact is isolated to activity across websites and apps. However, Facebook is still able to update audiences based on activity within the Facebook and Instagram apps themselves.

1. Lead Form Custom Audiences

USE IN ADDITION TO: Link ads for website leads

Facebook lead ads leverage forms that are easy to complete. They can pre-fill contact info like name and email address from a user’s profile. They are super fast and, most importantly, they keep people on Facebook. As a result, these audiences will remain complete.

Lead Form Custom Audiences allow you to create audiences of people who:

• Opened your form
• Opened and submitted your form
• Opened your form but didn’t submit

Audiences include people for up to 90 days at a time.

Beyond having the advantage over the pixel, the “opened and submitted” audience will also be more complete and accurate than a customer file custom audience, which relies on the email address matching up to a user’s Facebook profile.

2. Video View Custom Audiences

USE IN ADDITION TO: Custom audiences based on embedded YouTube video views

Facebook videos (videos that you upload to Facebook) have many benefits. First, they are engaging for the user since they auto-play and can be watched directly from the news feed. Second, engagement with these videos gives advertisers retargeting capabilities.

You can create a video view custom audience of people who viewed one or multiple videos for as little as three seconds or for up to 95% of the video.

The greater engagement rates can give advertisers targeting capabilities to reach people who provided clear buying signals based on watching a product video, for example.

One of the nice things about these and Engagement Custom Audiences (next on this list) is that people can remain in the audience for up to 365 days.

3. Facebook Engagement Custom Audiences

Facebook Engagement Custom Audiences give advertisers the ability to target Facebook users for many types of interaction:

• People who currently like or follow your page
• Everyone who engaged with your page
• Anyone who visited your page
• People who engaged with any post or ad
• People who clicked any call-to-action button
• People who sent a message to your page
• People who saved any post

The “People who currently like or follow your page” audience replaces the prior method of targeting your followers using Connections.

Targeting “everyone who engaged with your page” gives you the largest possible audience of people who engaged with you. Many of the other audiences are likely to be small, depending on your audience size and level of activity.

While these are all solid audiences to use, Facebook has an opportunity to provide more granularity here. I’ve previously written about how Facebook could very easily allow advertisers the ability to target people based on more granular interactions with Facebook content.

4. Instagram Account Custom Audiences

Instagram Account Custom Audiences work much in the same way as Facebook Page Engagement Custom Audiences, but with your Instagram business account (it needs to be connected to your Business Manager).

You can create audiences of people based on the following levels of engagement with your Instagram business account:

• Everyone who engaged with your account
• Anyone who visited your profile
• People who engaged with any post or ad
• People who sent a message to your account
• People who saved any post or ad

If you have an active Instagram account, you should take advantage of these options.

5. Instant Experience Custom Audiences

USE IN ADDITION TO: Website custom audiences based on traffic sent to a landing page

Instant Experiences are like custom landing pages created within Facebook. Combine text, videos, photos, buttons, and other components to build an immersive experience.

In the news feed, an ad that links to an Instant Experience may look mostly like a typical link ad. When it’s clicked, the Instant Experience appears.

Of course, advertisers can create audiences based on engagement with Instant Experiences, including:

• People who opened the Instant Experience
• People who opened and clicked any link within the Instant Experience

One reason to use Instant Experiences could be to replace the targeting lost due to iOS 14+ opt-outs. Let’s assume someone opted out of tracking. If they click on your ad, you will not be able to create an audience of that user’s activity on your website. You won’t be able to retarget or exclude them based on clicking the ad.

If you create an Instant Experience to showcase your product, you could still have a link that goes out to purchase the product on your website. But, you could first create an audience of the person for opening the Instant Experience in the first place. And then you could create an audience for clicking the link within that Instant Experience that goes out to your website — even though they won’t be included in the website custom audience!

6. Facebook Event Custom Audiences

USE IN ADDITION TO: Website custom audiences for events sold on your website

Facebook has enhanced the Events product during the past few years, now integrating Facebook payments. That provides more targeting opportunities when creating Facebook Event Custom Audiences.

You can now create audiences based on the following engagement types with your events:

• People who responded Going or Interested
• People who have responded Going
• People who have responded Interested
• People who have visited the event page
• People who have engaged
• People who entered the ticket purchase flow
• People who have purchased tickets
• People who abandoned the ticket purchase flow

Many of these audiences would be the equivalent of targeting and remarketing that could be done with website custom audiences related to the purchase funnel.

7. Shopping and On-Facebook Listing Custom Audiences

If you sell products on Facebook or Instagram using a Shop or Facebook Commerce Catalog, you can create audiences of people based on their engagement with those products.

First, there are several targeting options based on engagement with your Facebook Shop:

• People who viewed products
• People who viewed products and navigated to website
• People who saved products
• People who viewed Shops page
• People who viewed Shops collection
• People who added any products to their cart
• People who intiated checkout for any products
• People who purchased any products

These audiences can be based on engagement with either your Facebook or Instagram Shop.

If you sell products within Marketplace using a Marketplace Catalog, you can also create audiences of engagement with your products there.

On-Facebook Listing Custom Audiences you can create include:

• People who viewed products in my catalog
• People who messaged about products in my catalog

The one problem with all of these is that there isn’t granularity based on the specific product viewed or purchased.

8. Interests, Demographics, and Behaviors

All of the first seven audiences are “warm” based on engagement with you on Facebook or Instagram. Of course, most cold audiences won’t be impacted by iOS or browser restrictions.

Age, gender, location, interests, behaviors, and language are mostly or completely unaffected by these changes.

9. Lookalike Audiences

Finally, advertisers can find users who are similar to those who have engaged with them before by creating Lookalike Audiences.

The only potential negative impact to Lookalike Audiences is because your source audience may be based on a website custom audience that is incomplete. The quality of the Lookalike Audience depends upon the quality of the source audience.

Your Turn

These are all targeting options that you should consider adding to your advertising mix if you haven’t already. It doesn’t mean that you should replace website custom audiences or app engagement custom audiences entirely — that’s crazy! But using these more could give you more complete targeting overall.

Have you started using these audiences? Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Ads Audiences That Aren’t Impacted by iOS and Browser Restrictions appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The most important characteristic of a successful Facebook advertiser is the willingness to experiment. It is your experimentation with Facebook ads that will lead to knowledge, solutions, and success.

Instead of asking, “Should I…” related to a basic Facebook ads strategy, know that there is very little black and white (outside of the rules themselves). What works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. If you want to know if something will work, try it!

It’s really easy to get stuck in your ways, too. As someone who has been running my own business with Facebook ads for a decade now, I fully appreciate how quickly you can rely solely on tried and true methods. It’s so easy to end up with a templated approach.

The problem, of course, is that while your approach remains unchanged, the advertising environment is evolving quickly. It’s all so much different today than it even was a year ago. Fail to evolve your strategies, and you can expect to get buried in frustration.

You should experiment often. It’s what keeps me sharp and helps me uncover things that I’d never know without trying something new. I’m working on an experiment right now that I’ll explain in more detail at the bottom of this post.

For now, let’s cover the primary buckets of experimentation opportunities you should be taking with your Facebook advertising…

1. A/B Testing

If you’re trying to figure out whether one thing works better than another, Facebook’s built-in A/B testing tool is the only way to get a true, scientific test without overlap. This is the best way to determine the best strategies based on things like image, video, text, targeting, and more.

A/B testing isn’t something you should be doing for the long term. It’s a short-term test (1-30 days) to help you understand what works best going forward.

You don’t need to use A/B testing in all scenarios. Maybe you’re fine without a true, scientific test and just want to run separate ad sets to different audiences or separate ads with different creative options. All of that is fine. Facebook’s optimization will also help focus on what is working best in those cases.

Here is some additional documentation on A/B testing:

• A/B Tests Types Available on Facebook
• Best Practices for A/B Testing

2. Campaign Budget Optimization

Should you create multiple ad sets with their own, separate budgets, or should you utilize Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO)?

If you turn on CBO, Facebook will distribute your budget “optimally” between ad sets to get the most results. So, you could set a $50 daily budget with CBO using two ad sets, and Facebook will move budget between those ad sets based on the results each one generates.

If you don’t use CBO, you would set individual budgets at the ad set level. Here, of course, you are given more control. Maybe you are okay spending more per action for a particular audience. Maybe you don’t trust Facebook’s optimization.

I prefer the control, but I will occasionally experiment with CBO, particularly if the audiences are similar in size.

3. Budgeting

I understand that this is a tough one to test. Either you have the budget available or you don’t.

But keep in mind that volume drives Facebook ad optimization. If you struggle to generate enough volume at $10 per day to exit the learning phase, Facebook may struggle to get you the results that you want. Maybe spending $50 or $100 per day will get that volume, and everything will change.

Or maybe it won’t? Bottom line is that it’s nice to be able to try it and find out.

4. Daily vs. Lifetime

This is one that I can confidently say I am stuck in my ways. I have always used Daily budgeting.

It’s not because I get better results with Daily budgets. It’s just that I feel like I have a far better understanding of what is happening and can easily adjust. Getting great results? Maybe I spend a little more per day. Results are dropping? Maybe I slow it down.

I’ve always felt that Lifetime budget is best in cases where you (or a client) have a rigid budget to work with. You know that you want to spend $500 during the month, and that’s it.

The rumor is that Facebook ad reps recommend Lifetime budgeting. Does it actually work better? If you care, test it out!

5. Dayparting

If you aren’t familiar with Dayparting, it is only available when using Lifetime budgets. It allows you to schedule your ads so that they only run during certain times or on certain days of the week.

A few years back, I was determined to make dayparting work. I researched which specific times of day gave me the best results for a certain objective over a six-month period. Then, I focused only on those times.

The result? Costs actually went up.

Maybe you can get dayparting to work for you. I’ve never heard of anyone who has seen better results by using it. Maybe you want to use it because you need to have staff on hand during certain times. That may be the best argument for it.

6. Small Audiences vs. Large Audiences

If you ever ask Facebook advertisers whether it’s better to use small audiences or large audiences, you’re going to get a very wide range of answers. The best answer: It depends.

Facebook says you should use large audiences (in the millions) to create a large pool for optimization. Some advertisers absolutely swear by using the largest audiences possible. They even say removing any filtering at all and going with an entire region works best.

But, context likely matters. How large is the country? Is the brand well-known? How large is the brand’s built-in audience? Are there repeat customers? How are you optimizing?

I’ve found that optimization with large audiences for top-of-the-funnel actions produces garbage results. Actually, those results are good in the eyes of Facebook, but they aren’t quality results that lead to purchases (read this post about the problems with optimization).

I love micro-targeting my audience for those who have performed a specific action. Remarketing to tiny audiences of people who abandoned cart, too, often works well.

There is a place for large and small audiences. Feel free to experiment with both!

7. Lookalike Audiences vs. Interests and Behaviors

What’s more effective, targeting people based on interests or using Lookalike Audiences? And if you use Lookalike Audiences, what should be the source? And should you use 1% or 10%? Or something else? Should you layer interests on top of Lookalike Audiences and combine them?

So many questions, right? The problem is that there isn’t a universal answer. “It depends” is doing overtime here.

The performance of your interest targeting depends upon the quality of the interests you use. The quality of interests you have available to you often depends upon the industry you’re in.

Lookalike Audiences, too, will vary greatly in performance depending upon the quality of the source audience and how Facebook assembled it. Whether you use 1% or 10% is also greatly impacted by the countries used (and you may not need to debate this one anymore due to Lookalike Expansion).

There is no universal answer here because the factors involved will drastically impact the answer. My primary suggestion is that you explore both interests and Lookalike Audience targeting for top-of-the-funnel, knowing that this is their first exposure to your brand. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

But which interests and Lookalike Audiences should you use? Test, test, and test some more. This is where using the A/B Test option may prove valuable.

8. Country Targeting

If you’re a local brick-and-mortar business, this is easy. You probably only want to reach people within driving distance of your building.

But, if you create virtual products or ship globally, everything changes. Then the question becomes, “Which countries should you target?”

This gets really complicated. The CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) costs vary widely depending on the country. But that’s also at least partially related to the quality and competition within those countries.

Some countries are much more prone to spam, bots, and people who can’t afford your products. Does that mean you shouldn’t target them? Maybe. Maybe not.

If you’ve been in business for a while, I encourage you to research where your paying customers come from. That should at least be a starting point.

Be careful, though. Let’s say that you have paying customers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and India. If you include all five countries in the same ad set, Facebook may dedicate more of your budget to India (particularly if you aren’t selling a product). The reason is that the CPMs are much lower there than in the other four countries.

You may want some control over that. This is where creating multiple ad sets for similarly priced countries may be a good idea.

Have proper perspective here. Targeting globally all of the time using all objectives is probably a bad idea. Refusing to target certain countries may also limit your opportunities. Know the risks and know how to mitigate those risks.

9. All Placements vs. Select Placements

Look, I have a very strong opinion about one Facebook placement in particular. I have seen really bad stuff from Audience Network. It’s where the most click fraud and accidental clicks happen. The Audience Network is often the source of “too-good-to-be-true” results (because they are).

At least in the case of traffic and engagement campaigns. Leave that placement on and be prepared to throw some money away. And hope you catch it before it’s too late.

But, is that a hard-and-fast rule for everyone? Of course not. If you get sales from Audience Network, use it. There are a lot of placements these days. Find what works for you and what doesn’t.

Facebook recommends using “All Placements.” I can see that being fine when optimizing for a purchase. Otherwise, scrutinize your results, do a lot of testing, and figure out what works best for you.

10. Optimization Options

This is one of those areas that provides a wide variety of possibilities.

Should you optimize for conversions? Maybe. If you can get results. You may not have the budget to generate enough results to properly optimize. In that case, you may need to optimize for something else.

Does that mean optimizing for link clicks or Landing Page Views? Or Engagement? Maybe. But be wary of the results you get there (as discussed before).

When I micro-target, I don’t want Facebook to optimize for an event. I want to reach everyone within that tiny audience. In that case, I’ll optimize for Reach (or you could even use Daily Unique Reach).

You have a ton of options. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. The main thing is to understand how optimization works and what Facebook needs to properly optimize. Make sure it fits your goals. Know the potential weaknesses of optimizing for a specific action.

I only started optimizing for Reach because it solved a problem I had. I’ve used it in a way that isn’t even how Facebook intends it (they see it more for broad audience, awareness targeting).

Know how it works. Know what you want to accomplish. Understand the weaknesses. Then test!

11. Bidding Options

If you need a place to start, don’t screw around with Facebook’s bidding options. Just roll with Facebook’s “Lowest Cost” defaults.

But once you’re comfortable, feel free to experiment with Cost Cap, Bid Cap, and Minimum ROAS bidding. They are all ways of manipulating how Facebook bids in the auction, rather than relying on Facebook to do it how they want.

Sometimes, manual bidding just leads to frustration and a lack of delivery. It’s not magical. You can’t mysteriously tell Facebook you want $1 conversions and get $1 conversions. If you under-bid, you just won’t get any results.

Once you understand how it works, though, put bidding on your list of things to experiment with.

12. Attribution Setting

Oh, how attribution has changed…

Attribution, or how Facebook gives credit to an ad for a conversion, has evolved quite a bit over the years. The main thing to know is that the default Attribution Setting is now 7-day click and 1-day view.

This is determined within the ad set.

Not only is this how Facebook will optimize your conversions, but it’s how Facebook will report on them. If you change the Attribution Setting, it will change how Facebook selects your audience. It could also impact how many conversions are reported in your results.

Back in the day, this was no big deal. If you used 1-day click, for example, you could add columns to your reporting to see how many conversions occurred outside of that window. That option is no longer available.

So, now? You can still make the argument that 1-day click is best for opt-ins and low-cost purchases while 7-day click and 1-day view is best for higher-cost purchases. Still, I find I’m reluctant to make that change, fearing a loss of reporting.

It’s absolutely something to test, though!

13. Website vs. On-Facebook Experience

Ever since the iOS 14+ changes related to privacy and tracking, there has been more reason to run ads that keep people on Facebook. It’s understandable. Confidence in results goes way up in those cases.

That doesn’t mean there’s no longer a place for sending traffic to your website. I still do it a ton. It depends partially on your percentage of iOS traffic (mine is low) and appetite for accuracy.

Reasons to keep people on Facebook go up if your iOS traffic is high. Or you have a client with a horrible website experience.

Consider Facebook lead ads, instant experiences, video ads, and Facebook Shops. There are plenty of ways to run your business while keeping people on Facebook.

I still love to use both. Lead ads, for example, have their strengths and weaknesses. You’ll often get more sign-ups because they’re so easy to complete. But the quality of those leads may drop for that same reason.

Don’t throw all of your eggs into one basket, as they say. Experiment with keeping people on Facebook and sending them away.

14. CTAs (or None)

All these years later, and the jury’s still out on whether you should use Facebook CTA buttons with your ads. And if you do, which ones you should use.

Some CTA options may lead to more clicks, but are they the right clicks? Some CTAs may lead to fewer clicks, but people with higher intent.

One way to test this is by using Dynamic Creative.

If you turn it on within the ad set, you can submit multiple CTA options for Facebook to test.

15. Dynamic Ads vs. Manual

It makes a lot of sense for e-commerce businesses with hundreds or thousands of products to use Dynamic Ads to showcase the right ads to the right people while doing minimal work. Create an ad template, provide a product feed, and everything is done for you.

Of course, such ads based on a template may also be less effective on some level, as well. You may get better results by crafting a very specific message based on someone’s activity on your website who is interested in a very specific product.

There is room for both. Try both.

16. Ad Formats

You have options. Single image, collection, instant experience, carousel, video. You can even mix and match, to a point.

When determining which to use, I ask a simple question: What is the benefit of this ad format?

A single image removes options and may make a click away to your website more likely.

A collection or carousel provides your audience with options.

An Instant Experience allows you to tell a story and provide more information within a single ad.

A video will encourage engagement and allow you to communicate with a potential customer in a completely different way, but it may not lead to a click.

Start with the format that is most likely to satisfy your primary goal. From there, feel free to use Facebook’s A/B testing to test what works best. You can also simply create multiple ads, each with different formats, and allow Facebook to optimize.

17. Long Copy vs. Short Copy

It’s long been debated whether long copy or short copy is best. As always, we over-simplify this.

If you take an average of the performance of all ads, you may find out that the highest-performing ads used less copy. That doesn’t mean that you should always use less copy. It just means that, for the average situation, it may be best.

Sometimes, long copy makes more sense. It’s great for the right audience. Use it for people who want to read. Use it to introduce something that people may not know about.

Short copy may be ideal in the case of an audience already knowing about your product or service. They only need to know about the deal.

This is where Dynamic Creative, Multiple Text Options, and Facebook’s A/B testing allow you to test this out.

18. Creative Types

Which image should you use? Should it include a face? Bright colors? Or should you use a video? And how long should the video be?

Oh, goodness. So many questions.

Different images appeal to different people. Know your audience.

Long videos have the benefit of educating your audience. If someone sticks around for the entire video, they are a warm lead. Short videos can get the attention of your audience quickly and get your message across.

They all have a purpose. Test them out by creating multiple ads or by using Dynamic Creative or A/B testing.

Be Mindful of Generating Meaningful Results

Look, the possibilities are endless, as you can see. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the limitless options and features.

Start simple.

Before you completely understand what you’re doing, use defaults. Facebook makes it about as easy as they can to create a campaign that might work without knowing what you’re doing. Just don’t mess with things if you don’t have to.

Also understand the importance of volume. Don’t create a whole bunch of options if you don’t spend the budget or won’t generate the volume to lead to meaningful results.

Experiment. Try new things. But create options within reason. Otherwise, you’ll only succeed at creating a messy campaign that doesn’t really tell you anything.

My Experiment

As I said at the top, I love creating experiments. I just started one last week, and it’s possible you’ve been seeing some of the ads.

The main goal of my experiment is to create ads that both reward my loyal audience and incentivize additional engagement. I’ll do this with micro-targeted audiences. I also want to see how small I can go with these audiences.

Ultimately, I want to figure out what my most engaged — and reachable — audience is. And I want to reward them with exclusive content.

For now, this is built around Reach optimization and a special type of Website Custom Audience. I’ve created audiences based on frequency of page views.

My first ad starts broad, targeting those who have viewed two pages or more of my website during the past 30 days (I eventually move to 180 days). But with each ad, I tighten up the audience. If I stick with frequency, I’ll keep climbing until Facebook no longer delivers the ads.

Of course, how I’m doing this is pretty darn complicated. Since it’s an experiment, I’m also adjusting on the fly as results come in.

How can you participate? Well, reading this blog post is a good start! The more pages of my website you view, the more likely it is you’ll see these ads.

One favor: Engage with the ads and let me know you’re seeing them! I’d love to hear what you think.

Watch Video

Your Turn

What kind of experiments do you like to run with Facebook ads?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post A Facebook Ads Experimentation Guide appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Talk about a blast from the past. Last weekend, I was notified when Amanda Bond posted the following about an old experiment that I ran:

This made me feel a bit warm, fuzzy, and nostalgic because the experiment Amanda referenced is something I’ve long been proud of. It inspired me to go back through how “The Experiment” worked and ask a simple question: Would it still work today?

The result: I’ve started a new experiment for 2021!

The Experiment: The Inspiration

It all occurred to me, one sleepless night in late 2014. Facebook ads were seen as intrusive. Annoying. A necessary evil to be able to use Facebook for free.

But… What if they provided value? What if they served exclusive content that couldn’t be found elsewhere?

What if people looked forward to seeing your ads? And, this is going to sound like a stretch, but…

What if people complained if they didn’t see your ads?

It all sounds crazy, but it’s precisely what happened when I ran The Experiment in early 2015. Ridiculous engagement rates. Low costs. And revenue without even trying to sell something.

How it Worked

Website custom audiences were the backbone of The Experiment in 2015. It all started with an “invitation” ad that went out to people connected to me as well as interests and lookalike audiences (separate ad sets).

I then created a series of Facebook ads “tips” on hidden pages of my website and promoted those tips with Facebook ads to those who participated. The first tip was shown to those who clicked the invitation ad, indicating they wanted to participate.

From there, I’d show the second tip to those who engaged with the first tip; I’d show the third tip to those who engaged with the second one; and on and on. The assumption, of course, is that the audience would steadily shrink throughout the experiment.

I also offered an “opt-out” ad. You could click it either instead of joining the experiment or throughout the experiment indicating you’re no longer interested. You would then be added to a special website custom audience that would be excluded throughout the campaigns.

When all was said and done, there were 12 tips. I then invited those who made it that far to a webinar to discuss what I did and how I did it.

The Insane Results

The results were incredible for many reasons, both measurable and immeasurable.

First, the organic distribution. When we run ads, we only get numbers in Ads Manager for those we paid to reach. But, for especially engaging content, you’ll get an organic push as well. People will like, comment, and share.

Paid reach actually made up a small percentage of distribution, even though I never published any of the tips organically to my page.

This was possible due to the high engagement rate. The following chart shows the number of people reached and the number of clicks to website per tip.

This is insane (I hope you understand how insane this is). While there was attrition (especially as early participants dropped off), people who made it to tip 3 were hyper-engaged. The percentage of people reached who clicked was typically over 90-percent!

Costs were also low. Cost per website click to promote tips was anywhere from $.01 to $.09, depending on the tip. Remember that the audience size we’re dealing with is also very small (under 1,000 people once we reached Tip 4), so we’re talking about peanuts.

But the most amazing was the cost for webinar registrations at the end, offered to those who made it to the final tip. Even though I only promoted that webinar as an ad to this small group, I received more registrations than people reached (they undoubtedly shared it!). My cost per registration was just over $.02.

The Weaknesses in 2015

The funny thing about this experiment was that the biggest weakness was an inability to guarantee I’d reach everyone who wanted to be reached. People actually complained and were frustrated when they weren’t seeing my ads. It was pretty crazy!

First, I used Daily Unique Reach to do all I could to reach everyone in that audience (this was before Reach optimization was available). Facebook’s systems aren’t perfect, so it was impossible to guarantee I’d reach everyone.

But one reason for this was due to using website custom audiences. As great as they were (especially in 2015), browser settings or clearing cookies likely contributed to the failure to add people to audiences.

Why it May Not Work Today or in the Future

First, the elephant in the room: The current environment impacting tracking, the Facebook pixel, and website custom audiences. Browser settings and now iOS 14 make tracking more difficult than it was in 2015. If I were to use website custom audiences this time around, those audiences would be less likely to be complete. I’d run into more problems than I did six years ago.

Another issue is costs and competition. I got crazy results in 2015. Getting crazy results was pretty common for me back then. It’s just harder now because it simply costs more just to reach people. My expectations need to be different.

Finally, I’ve run into more issues with small audiences these days than I did in 2015. I had no issues getting these ads to run when I conducted the initial experiment. But my biggest fear now is that a campaign simply won’t distribute ads.

It’s not due to a clear rule or guideline. When I run Reach campaigns, some small audiences simply don’t go. I need to be prepared for that possibility.

In fact, I ran my 2021 Experiment for a few days first before writing this blog post, fearing it may not run! (NOTE: It’s running!)

How to Recreate The Experiment in Current Environment

The two biggest changes I planned to make with the 2021 Experiment were related to optimization and targeting.

First, I’ll be using Reach optimization instead of Daily Unique Reach. Reach wasn’t available in 2015. While they function very similarly (Facebook attempts to show your ads to as many people within your audience as possible), the biggest difference is related to frequency capping. Daily Unique Reach automatically caps at once per day while I have full flexibility with Reach.

Second, I’m not going to use website custom audiences this time. That pains me a bit, but I think this could actually work better as a result since I don’t have to worry about cookies, browser settings, or iOS 14.

Instead, I’m going to largely keep people on Facebook and use audiences that allow me to isolate engagement with specific pieces of content. They also must allow for durations to control when ads are shown to people.

Format types I’ll be using…

Video. This one’s tricky. I don’t want to use Video View Engagement Audiences for people who only watch a few seconds of a video. That’s not useful. So I’ll need to use long-form videos and create an audience of people who watch 95% of them — assuring that I only include those who truly want to participate.

Instant Experience. With this format, I can add a button to it that, when clicked, adds the person to an audience. This would actually be more effective than website custom audiences since it happens within Facebook and I don’t need to worry about browser settings.

Lead Forms. You can create audiences of people who open or open and submit a form. While this sounds like a high barrier that is best for the end, I wanted to use it creatively. You can actually create a form that doesn’t ask for any personal information. I won’t collect the person’s info, but when submitted they’ll be added to an audience for targeting.

My NEW Experiment

Okay, so here’s how it works…

Like in 2015, it starts with an invitation. I created three different versions for this ad: 3-minute video, Instant Experience, and lead form.

That invitation goes to three different groups:

• Website visitors
• People who engage with my page
• People on my email list

I immediately exclude anyone added to an audience to participate in the experience. I also try to manage frequency by excluding those who performed a lesser action without participating yet (watched a little of the video, opened the form without submitting, or opening the Instant Experience without clicking) for a few days.

I experimented with both video and an Instant Experience for the first lesson, but I’m going to go with Instant Experience only going forward. Here’s an example of what the targeting looks like for the fourth lesson…

What does this mean? It means only those who clicked the button in the third lesson will see this ad. I’ll exclude you as soon as you click this one. And since it’s a 14-day duration, I’ll stop trying to show it to you after 14 days.

I’m using Worldwide geo-targeting because I want to include everyone who wants to participate (the initial invitation ads are more restricted by country).

I’m only using news feed placements because I’m limiting frequency to once per day (ironically, a recreation of Daily Unique Reach), so I don’t want to waste an impression on a less effective placement.

How Long Will it Go?

For now, I’m planning to keep creating lessons as long as the ad sets keep delivering and people keep clicking. That could mean just about anything. I’m up to four lessons so far.

This is limited mostly by how much I want to spend. For now, I’m spending about $200 per day on the invitation. I’ll likely pull that back eventually. But the more people who accept the invitation, the more people who participate. And the more people who participate, the longer this may go.

Bracing for Roadblocks

I fully expect delivery problems. I’ve had to hold my breath with each new lesson, which seems to take about 12-24 hours before finally delivering after the campaign gets approved.

I already have contingency plans in place if this thing suddenly falls flat and Facebook won’t deliver my ads as the audiences shrink. I can simply create a separate campaign for each tip targeting the full participating audience, excluding those who already engaged with that tip.

Of course, that kind of ruins part of the fun. I want to incentivize participation!

The Prize?

As with the 2015 experiment, I don’t have this completely mapped out yet, and it will come together as we go. Maybe I’ll do an exclusive webinar again for those who make it to the end. Maybe I’ll offer free stuff or discounts. I really don’t know.

But don’t you want to find out??

My Goal

A common question I get is what I’m trying to accomplish with this.

Honestly, it’s just an experiment. I want to try to do things differently. This is an opportunity to get creative and use ads in new and different ways.

I want to create excitement with ads again. I want to see what kind of engagement rates I can get six years later. What will costs be like? Will I be able to reach everyone who wants to participate?

I’m also curious about how we can use formats that keep users on Facebook, since that may be a greater focus in the future.

Bottom line: I want to create ads that don’t suck. I want to generate fresh ideas for how we can use them.

Want to Participate in The Experiment 2021?

So, there are three different ways you can add yourself to The Experiment (you don’t have to do all three!).

1. Watch this ENTIRE video.

2. Open this Instant Experience ON MOBILE ONLY. After opening the ad, follow the instructions and click the button at the bottom.

3. Complete this lead form. You only have to provide your job title!

Any of these three methods will add you to an audience to show you the first lesson.

IMPORTANT: If you’ve already joined The Experiment, don’t do this again. And don’t keep going back to do these things multiple times. Every time you do, it will restart the process (and you’ll be excluded if you already participated).

Fingers Crossed!

I’m really excited about this and can’t wait to see what happens. I hope to see you there!

Let me know below if you have any questions.

The post The Experiment 2021: Ads Don’t Have to Suck appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

When it comes to Facebook lead ads, their advantage is also a potential weakness. Since lead ad forms keep users on Facebook, you don’t drive traffic to your website. And if you aren’t driving traffic to your website, you’re losing the ability to create audiences and remarket to these people. Right?

Well, not entirely. Lead Form Custom Audiences help fill in the gaps. Let’s discuss…

[Tweet “You can now custom audiences to target those who opened or submitted a Facebook lead form. Here’s how…”]

The No-Landing-Page Problem

One of the inherent problems with Lead Ads — for advertisers, not users — was that they kept users on Facebook. Without a landing page, form engagement wouldn’t contribute to website traffic, which allows marketers to create Website Custom Audiences.

Why was this important? It’s helpful to know whether a user clicked to open the form but didn’t submit or clicked and submitted. These actions could help the advertiser show the user a more relevant ad.

For example, when a user clicks and submits to register, they should be excluded from seeing that ad again. Additionally, you may want to show a different ad to a user who clicked and didn’t submit. Understanding that they got close to submitting, you could surface additional benefits or remind them that time is running out on signing up.

These are all things you can do with Website Custom Audiences when driving users to a landing page. Without that landing page, though, advertisers would appear to be limited.

The Lead Ad Form Engagement Custom Audience

Enter lead ad form custom audiences. Go to Audiences within your Ads Manager and click to create a Custom Audience.

Select “Lead Form.”

How to Create a Lead Ad Custom Audience

After going through the steps above, you are then given a dialog that looks like this…

First, indicate the lead form action that you want to isolate.

Following are your options:

• Anyone who opened this form
• People who opened but didn’t submit form
• People who opened and submitted form

The first (“anyone who opened this form”) would be the largest audience, including both those who submitted and those who didn’t. This is the default. The second only includes those who didn’t submit and the third only includes those who did submit.

Select the number of days people will remain in your audience…

Note that the limit for this has always been 90 days. The tooltip contradicts this, indicating “No Time Frame Limit.” But, when I tried 120 days, I get an error…

When I click away, it defaults back to 90. For now, I’ll assume this is just a typo in documentation. But it could be a sign that this will be changing.

Let’s explain what that number means. This audience will only include someone who has engaged with your form during the past 90 days. That’s kind of annoying since Page Engagement Custom Audiences are 365 days and Website Custom Audiences use 180 days. The 90-day limit makes these audiences a bit less useful.

Once you’ve selected your page, indicate which form(s) you want this audience based on. You can select one or multiple.

Name your audience and click “Create” and you’re done! It may take several hours to build, but you should be able to start using it nearly immediately.

How to Use These Audiences

Go ahead and create each audience for each form you have. You can certainly experiment with various durations if you want (especially if you want to create an Evergreen Campaign), but otherwise stick with the 90-day maximum.

Here are examples of how you might use these…

Anyone who opened this form

Since this is a larger audience, it may be one you could use for basic remarketing. All of these people engaged with your ad, so you may want to show them content related to that registration — regardless of whether or not they opted in.

People who opened but didn’t submit form

Consider this an “abandoned shopping cart” opportunity. Why didn’t they submit? Did they simply forget? Do they need more benefits before they submit? Do they need a sense of urgency? Create an ad based on one of these profiles.

People who opened and submitted form

An obvious opportunity is for up-sell. If someone registers for my Facebook Pixel Basics free video series, I’ll want to try to get them to sign up for the full Facebook Pixel Masterclass.

There’s another way that I use it, though. I hate waste. So when I promote a product or opt-in, I want to be sure to exclude those who already purchased or registered.

You can exclude Custom Audiences in your targeting. Previously, I would exclude the Website Custom Audience for the thank you page and the Email Custom Audience for the email address registered. But both of these were imperfect when using Lead Ads. This should provide a close-to 100% match for minimal waste.

Your Turn

Do you use Facebook lead form custom audiences? How are you using them?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Create Facebook Custom Audiences for Lead Ad Form Engagement appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Back in 2015, Facebook announced Lead Ads as a way to collect leads without sending users to your website.

In this post, we’ll talk more about what Facebook lead ads are, how they work, how to set them up, and things to consider.

Let’s explore…

How it Works

Facebook lead ads look like any other link ad when presented to a user. But, once clicked, the user isn’t redirected to a website. Instead, it immediately loads an Instant Form.

The advertiser determines what information they want to collect, from standard contact information to creating custom questions. When possible, Facebook will prefill answers for the user that can be pulled from their profile (things like name and email address). The user can still edit the prefilled answers.

As a result, completing a form becomes significantly easier for the user. No web page to load. No concerns about mobile usability or poor design. The barrier is cut dramatically with prefilled answers.

Create a Campaign and Ad Set

To create Facebook lead ads, you need to utilize the Leads objective.

Within the ad set, make sure that Instant Forms is selected as your conversion location.

You’ll set up your targeting and placements the way you normally would.

Ad Creation Basics

When you create your ad, you’ll have the option of using a carousel or single image/video.

We’ll walk through this while using a single image, but make sure you understand the image dimensions and character limits.

The initial ad setup for a Facebook lead ad is nearly identical to the setup for a typical link ad.

You’ll provide an image or video, primary text, headline, description, and a call-to-action button.

You can create a new instant form or select from one you previously created.

Create an Instant Form

I wrote a detailed guide that walks you through the process of creating an instant form. Make sure you read it, because it’s dense!

A Guide to Instant Forms

There’s a whole lot covered here, including:

• Form Types: More Volume, Higher Intent, Rich Creative
• Custom Questions
• Conditional Logic
• End Screen: Go to Website, View File, Call Business, Redeem Promo Code

Collecting Leads

Once your campaign runs and you begin collecting leads, a link will appear within the ad-level reporting under “Results.”

Click that…

You’ll be able to download new leads, download leads by date, or use your Leads Center within your Facebook page. The files are XLS or CSV format. This may be sufficient for low volume, but understand that these leads just sit there unless you are using integration to automatically sync to your CRM.

Facebook has a ton of integration partners to help accomplish this.

We won’t go through all of the details here, but I use Zapier for my CRM integration with Facebook lead ads.

Potential Disadvantages

There are a few things to be aware of with Facebook lead ads.

1. CRM Integration. As just mentioned above, this isn’t as seamless as it probably should be. You need to set up a solution in most cases, particularly if you have any volume or if registrants expect an immediate response.

2. Quality Concerns. The easier you make something, the more you need to worry about low quality. If answers to your questions can be prefilled from a user’s profile, the registrant may not look to be sure that information is accurate and current. They may provide an old email address. Or, they may simply click through quickly without even realizing they submitted something.

3. Optimization Options. As mentioned earlier, you need to use the Lead Generation objective to get access to lead ads, and you can only optimize for leads. That means you can’t utilize lead ad forms while also optimizing for engagement, clicks, reach, and other options. That feels like a missed opportunity.

4. No Website Traffic. Yes, it’s nice to make things easier. But, sometimes it’s also nice having control and getting that website traffic. While the final step can send people to your website, they aren’t required to do that (they already completed the submission anyway). So, you might lose some cross-sell opportunities as a result.

While that means you can’t take advantage of website custom audiences in this case, you are able to create Lead Form Engagement custom audiences based on people who opened, submitted, or didn’t submit your form.

Additional Resources

There is plenty that can be learned about lead ads. Here are a few links for additional reading:

• A Guide to Instant Forms
• Redeem Promo Code for Lead Forms
• What is a Good Cost Per Lead?
• Use Conditional Logic to Improve Lead Quality
• Results: Testing Quality Leads from Instant Forms vs. Website
• How to Get High Quality Leads from Facebook Lead Ads

Your Turn

What do you think of Lead Ads? Are you using them? What results are you seeing?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Lead Ads: A Complete Guide appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

One of a Facebook advertiser’s primary goals is to generate quality leads. Sometimes, that’s done using lead forms and landing pages. Today, I’m going to walk through how to use Facebook Messenger ads to generate leads.

This strategy isn’t for everyone. But it’s a very good option for advertisers who struggle collecting leads the conventional ways.

Create a Messenger Ad to Generate Leads

At the campaign level, select the Messages objective.

Set up targeting and placements as you normally would.

Under Optimization, select Leads. Facebook will then show your ads to people most likely to generate leads.

Between ad setup and tracking, you’ll see a section for Messenger Setup. Make sure that the Generate Leads template is selected.

Create Your Questions

Let’s create our questions that will help qualify leads. Click the “Create Chat” button.

First, create an intro. This will be the first message that a visitor sees who opens your chat. You can personalize the message by including first name, last name, or full name.

Now, let’s create our first question. We can ask short answer and multiple-choice questions, or you can ask questions that will provide prefilled answers pulled from the user’s profile (that they can edit).

Let’s start by asking for the name of our prospect’s company. If available, an answer will prefill from the user’s Facebook profile.

We can ask a multiple-choice question using Options. Let’s find out this person’s monthly Facebook ads budget.

If you click the icon to the right of one of the options, we can make that answer a disqualifier.

Note that you could also choose to have an answer trigger sending someone straight to the Completion message (which we’ll get to in a minute).

If we want a rep to contact those who qualify, we’ll want to collect a phone number.

And for fun, let’s also ask for an email address.

Possible answers to both of these questions will be pulled from the user’s Facebook profile.

Reminders and Completion Messages

Under your final question, you can create a reminder message. This is sent to those who abandon your chat before completion. You can customize this and add personalization, as I did.

Now, provide a completion message. This is the message that someone sees after completing your chat — either by answering your final question or if a qualifying answer re-routes them to completion. Here, you should let them know what to expect next.

Next, we can create a Disqualification Message. This is the message a user sees if they provide an answer that disqualifies them. In our example, I want to disqualify anyone who indicates they aren’t currently running Facebook ads.

Finally, we want to provide a link to our privacy policy.

Advanced Settings

At the top of the form, you can click over to the advanced settings.

If this is a format you may use again in the future, you can save it as a template.

A user can choose to pause the questions at any time. Here, you can edit the message they see if they do so.

Finally, you can edit the field IDs to more seamlessly connect with your CRM. If the auto-generated IDs for email or phone, for example, are different than what your CRM uses, you can change them here.

When you’re done, you can preview the flow in Messenger to see what a prospect will see.

Collecting Leads

Leads are collected from Messenger ads in the same way they are collected with Facebook Lead Ads.

From the ad-level reporting, click the icon to download your leads under the Results column.

Click the button to download those leads.

This same data is also available within your page settings. Within your Publishing Tools, go to your Forms Library.

Of course, you can also automate the process of adding these leads to your CRM. If you click on Leads Setup, Facebook will step you through some ways to do that.

I use Zapier.

Who Is This For?

When I first stumbled on this feature, I made some basic assumptions. Automated questions within Messenger would be ideal to qualify leads for high-priced, high-commitment products. Great for real estate, automobile sales, enterprise software, and similar products. You want to make sure that if you have a sales rep talk to these people that you aren’t wasting your time.

While I still believe that Messenger ads to generate leads are ideal for that scenario, this isn’t limited to that purpose. Since you can have it ask the same questions you’d ask in a lead ad form, and the answers can be sent to your CRM, there’s nothing preventing you from using this for simple registrations for things like webinars, newsletters, ebooks, and more.

My approach has always been to not be too concerned with the intended purpose of a tool or feature. If you think it may help you achieve your desired goal, try it!

My Experiment

I’m actually giving this a whirl right now. Since I don’t have webinar registration open at the moment, I’m using it to simply learn more about my audience.

Here’s my experimental ad, which is targeted at those who spend the most time and view the most pages on my website…

I ask the following questions:

• How advanced do you consider yourself as an advertiser?
• What’s your monthly Facebook ads budget?
• What is your role as an advertiser?
• What is your email address?

I make it clear that providing an email address will add them to my email list.

The first three questions use the “Options” format while the final prefills from the user’s profile.

Maybe you’ll be targeted, too!

Your Turn

Have you experimented with Facebook Messenger ads to generate leads? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Use Facebook Messenger Ads to Generate Leads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Advertisers make the mistake of minimizing — if not forgetting entirely — the impact of the organic distribution of their ads. Today, let’s take a closer look at this as it relates to Facebook lead ads.

Lead Ads Distribution

When you create a Facebook lead ad form, you may be unintentionally limiting your distribution. In some cases, this may be fine — even preferred. In most cases, though, advertisers may be surprised that this is happening.

When creating your form, toggle over to the (often ignored) “Settings” tab.

As you can see in the screengrab above, Facebook limits the audience of your lead ad form to “restricted” by default. If you don’t target someone, they won’t see it and can’t complete it.

The natural impulse may be, “Well, duh,” but you’re missing an important group. What if someone you targeted shares your ad? Do you want to allow others to complete the form?

In some cases, the answer might actually be “no.” You may want to provide something to a very select group.

But in most cases, you probably want to keep it open to anyone, even if they weren’t targeted. I almost always switch this to “open.”

Ads Manager

One of the inherent weaknesses of Ads Manager is that it ONLY reports on actions and impressions that are the result of paid distribution. Here’s an example of that in action…

Ads Manager reports that a lead ad campaign resulted in 94 leads.

Keep in mind that this is the only campaign, active or inactive, using this particular form.

More than likely, you aren’t going to question these results. You’ll assume that you generated 94 leads with this campaign.

Luckily, this is something that can be easily proven (or disproven).

Publishing Tools Reporting

From your page’s publishing tools, select the forms library under Lead Ads Forms.

Hover over the “Leads Count” column for the form in question.

As you can see in the example above, there were 98 actual leads generated with this form. Of that 98, 95 were targeted and 3 were untargeted.

In all, there are 4 total leads being reported here that weren’t reported in Ads Manager (I’ll get to the discrepancy in a moment). While that’s not a huge number, this also wasn’t a particularly viral campaign. Imagine what can happen if a campaign gets an engagement push and a high number of targeted people share or tag friends.

The Discrepancy

So, you’ll recall that Ads Manager reported 94 leads while Publishing Tools reported 98 (95 targeted and 3 untargeted). We would assume that the targeted number should be 94, not 95. Assuming no delays in reporting, what’s the deal?

I have a couple of theories, but one that I think is most likely. We need an explanation for why a lead would be reported as targeted, but also not paid (and not appearing in Ads Manager).

The targeted user didn’t act on the ad, but later acted when it was shown organically.

Recall that Ads Manager only reports on paid distribution and actions. It’s possible that a person can be targeted, but not act on the ad, then act on it when someone else shares it. As a result, that lead would not appear within Ads Manager, but may still appear within Publishing Tools as “targeted.”

There would be additional explanations had this been a website conversion that required certain attribution windows to be reported. But that doesn’t apply to “on ad” leads.

The Power of Organic Distribution of Ads

This actually takes us to a whole separate conversation that I’ll reserve for another day. But let’s scrape the top of it.

Facebook is missing a golden opportunity. Ads Manager completely ignores organic distribution and actions. Even within your post Insights, you will see organic vs. paid distribution, but Facebook never displays the organic conversions.

Why?

It’s actually a question I’ve posed to Facebook. You’d think that Facebook would want us to know this info. It gives us a broader — and more accurate — view of the impact that our advertising is making.

If you’re lucky enough to have a paid campaign go viral, Ads Manager is going to report on only the paid portion of results. This really matters.

Right now, Facebook reports on the general impact you’re making with conversions across paid and organic efforts within the Facebook Attribution tool. But it’s not connected to a specific campaign or ad.

While you could use workarounds with UTM parameters and third-party tools, understand that Facebook reports conversions based on a standard attribution window: Within 1 day of viewing (and not clicking) or within 7 days of clicking an ad (or in this case, a post). Only Facebook can report that accurately (particularly view-through conversions).

Again, it’s a huge missed opportunity. And it’s something you shouldn’t forget about when determining the impact of your advertising, particularly if you know you’re getting a viral boost.

Your Turn

The nice thing about Facebook lead ads and their results is that there isn’t ambiguity about the number of leads that are produced. We don’t use attribution windows. Either someone completes the form or they don’t. That makes this exercise of separating paid and organic leads very easy.

It’s not nearly as simple with conversions. We’re going to talk about that soon.

In the meantime, have you monitored the organic impact of your ads? In particular, do you have examples when there is a huge, separate story that’s left untold by Ads Manager due to organic distribution?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Lead Ads and Organic Distribution appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Things change quickly. Usually, I have the pleasure of writing about new Facebook Advertising features. Unfortunately, this post is about the removal of a feature.

Facebook has deprecated the feature allowing for the combination of Lead Forms paired with Instant Experiences. As part of this, the advertising goals available for Lead Forms have also changed.

What Has Changed

In a help center article related to Lead Ads and Instant Experiences, Facebook has shared that all ads using Lead Forms now can only be paired with the Lead Generation objective.

Here is Facebook’s update message from the help center:

What This Means

• For all ads that utilize Lead Forms, you can only use the Lead Generation objective to create and run these ads. You can not use any other objective for these ads.
• Lead Forms can not be embedded within an Instant Experience. You can not link to a Lead Form within an Instant Experience.
• Any campaigns you have already running using this feature will stop delivering on December 13th (2019).

Why This Matters

There are cases where using other advertising objectives could be beneficial.

First, Lead Generation may not be the primary goal for an advertiser. The ability to use other objectives could be more important.

Second, an advertiser might primarily focus on a creative message (delivered through an Instant Experience). Lead generation may only be a secondary consideration.

Unfortunately, advertisers will no longer be able to optimize for other variables when using a lead form – at least not directly within Facebook’s optimization system.

Of course, an advertiser could still focus on driving a creative message in a video or image and link from that to a lead form. However, the automatic optimization that Facebook delivers will no longer consider anything other than Lead Generation.

Why Did Facebook Make this Change?

As with many recent changes, I imagine this might be due to a few advertisers messing things up. Facebook is simply implementing systems that allow their oversight to be more streamlined.

As we have seen previously, Lead Forms can be an incredibly effective feature for gathering a large amount of signups in very little time. Potentially, Facebook wants to more actively monitor the gathering of data.

It’s possible that Facebook’s forced adherence to the Lead Generation campaign objective enables more effective monitoring for these types of ads, as they would not need to consider other potential objectives when they review the usage of Lead Forms across their platform.

In any case, it would be great to see the return of this feature in the future. For now, advertisers will need to adjust their campaign structures accordingly.

Are There Any Other Options?

As far as I’ve seen, there are no ways to circumvent this requirement, as Facebook has fully deprecated the feature. The bottom line: if you are using a Lead Form, you can only use the Lead Generation objective to run an ad associated with the form.

In testing, I attempted to create a Brand Awareness objective campaign, using an existing post that utilized a Lead Form. I received an error message like this:

Additionally, when selecting the Lead Generation objective, I’m only seeing the option to optimize for Leads:

What Now?

While the integration with Instant Experiences is no longer available, there are still opportunities to continue improving the effectiveness of Lead Ads. In particular, we’ve seen advertisers report success when adding Instagram as a placement for Lead Generation campaigns (in addition to many other campaign types!)

Your Turn

What are some creative ways you have used Lead Forms, or any other advertising options on Facebook or Instagram, to build your customer lists?

Let us know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Lead Forms No Longer Available with Instant Experience appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

One of my favorite things to do is solve problems by using a tool in ways it wasn’t meant to be used. In this post, I will outline how I did that by using Facebook lead ads to create a quiz.

First, credit goes to Lucas Elliott of our team. A few weeks ago, I talked about using quizzes as a lead magnet. Lucas suggested creating a quiz with a Facebook lead ad. I balked, knowing that it wouldn’t be as dynamic as what I wanted to do.

A few weeks later, I was inspired to try it out. Now I feel crazy for not trying it sooner.

Ultimately, I warmed to the idea because this would be one of a few strategies involving quizzes. While the Facebook lead ad may not function the way a quiz would on my website, the benefits of experimenting with this would be huge.

So, let’s take a closer look at the thought process, creation, and results. Why quizzes in the first place? How did I set this up? What kinds of results am I seeing?

Background: Why Quizzes?

My email list is the backbone of my business. When it comes to generating revenue, it’s my list that is responsible for much of it.

In many ways, I use Facebook ads backwards compared to most advertisers. I spend most of my budget promoting content (building a remarketing audience) and growing my email list. While I do run ads to promote products, my email marketing is then mostly responsible for the heavy lifting.

During the past couple of years, my primary list builder has been a monthly webinar. But even if the content is largely the same from month-to-month, it takes a great deal of effort to do this.

That’s why I stopped my monthly webinar after April’s edition. As a result, the growth of my list — though you could still register generally to my newsletter — lurched to a stop.

And that, of course, is a problem. I need a fresh, active list to help drive revenue. When list growth stops, revenue is at risk.

And so, I finally restarted my monthly webinar, albeit temporarily, in November. I’ll run it at least one more time, if not two. In the meantime, I’m on a mission to find a more manageable replacement.

I’ve thought of turning my webinar content into a video series. But I also decided I’d experiment with quizzes.

I learned a year ago with my 30-question quiz how engaging they can be. But what if I had more than one quiz? What if they were all 5-10 questions? And on a specific topic? I could create dozens of them.

So, the first thing I did was find a quiz software (I chose TypeForm). I would use a single quiz to invite people in. If you wanted access to the (eventual) quiz library, you’d need to register.

Here’s that quiz…

Strategy: Lead Ads and Quizzes

Okay, so what do quizzes have to do with Facebook lead ads? Can I use them to drive registrations to the quiz library? Or could I create a quiz directly within a lead ad form?

Why not both?

Lead ad forms allow the flexibility of creating custom questions. I can, then, add my questions to the form itself. And if you want to see the answers — and participate in future quizzes — you provide your contact information to subscribe.

The hope is that this form will be engaging enough to get people through a nine-question quiz (I’d use nine of the 10 questions from the embedded quiz above, removing one with long answers).

My Facebook Lead Ad Quiz

To kick off this experiment, I created a VERY simple ad. I find that simple is the key to any experiment since it limits or eliminates delays.

If you click on my ad, the form opens. You can scroll through all nine questions before entering your contact info and submitting (click the image to get a close-up view)…

After submitting, you are presented with a thank-you screen within the form…

If you close the form, you’ll still receive an email from me with your answers as well as the correct answers (more on that later). If you want, you can click on the “See the Answers” button and you’ll be redirected to a page on my website with an explanation of all 10 answers.

Set Up a Lead Ads Quiz: Campaign

So, let’s walk through, step-by-step, how I did this — and how you might be able to do something similar.

First, make sure to use the Lead Generation campaign objective…

Set Up a Lead Ads Quiz: Ad

Create the copy with text, headline, and news feed description. You can now use a square image to take up more vertical real estate in the news feed. Facebook recommends a 1080x1080px image.

For the call-to-action button, there aren’t great options for a quiz, unfortunately. I went with “Learn More.”

Set Up a Lead Ads Quiz: Form

When creating the form, I used the “More Volume” form type.

I don’t know that it matters much in this case given anyone who submits the quiz will have to go to a lot of effort. But feel free to experiment.

I added an intro that included a shorter (1200x628px) image and a prompt to provide contact info at the bottom so that I can send the answers.

Within the “Questions” area, first I added a simple headline (“Ready? Let’s go…”) and selected the contact info I would need. In this case, I asked for first name, last name, and email address.

Next, I created custom questions. These would be the actual questions for the quiz. I chose to use multiple choice questions.

Here’s how it looks as I added my questions…

After updating the privacy policy, I created a thank-you screen.

Note that I have given people the option of viewing all of the answers on a new page I created on my website. You can send people wherever you want here.

Targeting

Whom you target with these ads is completely up to you. But something that can apply universally is how you exclude.

In my initial test, I targeted people who are in the top 5% of those who spent the most time on my website during the past 180 days.

After a successful initial test in the US, I created new ad sets for audiences in other countries. Another day later, I would create ad sets targeting lookalike audiences.

But again, you shouldn’t necessarily copy that targeting approach. The people you target depends on the resources available to you.

Exclusions

What is mostly universal, though, is the group of people you should consider excluding.

In my case, I am excluding the following groups of people:

• Subscribed to Quiz Library (Website Custom Audience thank-you page)
• Subscribed to Quiz Library (Email Custom Audience)
• Subscribed to Quiz Library (Submitted Lead Ad Form)
• Opened (but may not have submitted) form within past 14 days

Some explanations may be in order…

Notice that I’ve excluded the people who have subscribed to my quiz library in three different ways. The reason for this is that no one way will capture everyone.

Recall that some people could register via the form on my website while others do from the lead ad form. By excluding all three methods, there’s a better chance that I avoid targeting people who are already registered (though never guaranteed).

Finally, I have excluded those who simply OPENED the form during the past 14 days. This way, I cut out those who poked around but maybe didn’t submit — at least for the time being. I’ll hit them again in a couple of weeks. This is a way to control frequency to a point.

Another approach I like to take, but didn’t here, is using video instead of a static image. If you do that, I would also consider creating an audience of people who already watched the video (or a portion of the video) and exclude those people (either using the 14-day method or longer). Once again, this is a way to manage frequency.

My Quiz Automation

First, know that people who complete your Facebook lead ad forms aren’t automatically added to your email list without some third-party automation. I use Zapier for this (not an affiliate link).

I create a Zap with a trigger of those who submitted my lead ad form.

I use Infusionsoft as my CRM. The first action, then, is to tag the new contact in Infusionsoft.

I then create another action of sending a Zapier email.

While I can also just rely on my email campaign in Infusionsoft, there’s a special trick that you can pull off in this Zapier email. Since it’s connected to your lead ad form, you can pull in the exact answers. That can allow you to craft a more personal email.

For mine, I list out the question, the answer you provided, and my explanation of the answer. Here is what it looks like through the first couple of questions…

I’m sure there are ways to feed this info into your Infusionsoft contact and then craft a personalized email from there as well. But again, I opted for simplicity (Infusionsoft is always a beast).

And that’s it!

Early Returns

I’ve been pretty amazed by the early results. For the first four days of this campaign, I generated 61 leads at $.66 per lead. Keep in mind that the audience I was targeting was very small (top 5% of website visitors from the US who spent the most time on my website during the past 180 days).

There are a couple of reasons why this cost per lead is impressive. First, all of the registrants are in the United States, typically the most costly country for a lead. These results aren’t being puffed up by a cheap country.

Second, it takes a significant amount of work to complete this form. Normally, we’re told to limit the amount of information we request in a form. The more form questions, the higher the quality of the lead — though more costly.

So, this is certainly a good start. I then created two more ad sets…

• Ad Set #2: WCA Top 5% Time on Website (UK, Canada, Australia)
• Ad Set #3: WCA Top 5% Time on Website (Tier 2 Countries with higher CPM)

I combine countries in this case due to budget and sample size. For more info on how I determine countries to target and the budget, check out this recent blog post.

The results? So far, another 61 leads for $.36 per lead.

Look, these are small sample size results, and the costs are bound to increase in the coming days as I exhaust my audiences. But this is seriously encouraging stuff given 1) The typical cost per lead, and 2) The amount of effort that goes into completing this form.

I created three more ad sets today based on the same countries but using lookalike audiences. It’s still very early, of course. While the costs are higher (not surprisingly when targeting a cold audience), we’re still looking at cost per lead from $.72 to $2.40, depending on the ad set.

Not bad!

Your Turn

This is one of many examples of using tools in ways that may not have been intended. I’m encouraged by the results so far.

Have you ever used Facebook lead ads in this way? What types of results have you seen?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How I Used Facebook Lead Ads to Create a Quiz appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

There is a need to sometimes limit the audience of people who see your Facebook posts (or page!). While it’s counter to the standard “more reach, please” attitude of most Facebook marketers, occasionally there are circumstances that require you to restrict your Facebook audience.

Let’s review three ways to apply audience restrictions on Facebook. We’ll look at an example of Page-Level Restrictions, Post-Level Restrictions, and a special case involving Lead Forms.

Restrict Your Facebook Audience at the Page-Level

To limit the visibility of your entire Facebook page to certain audience groups, you can adjust the page settings by following these steps:

First, access the admin panel for your Facebook page. If you use Business Manager, you may need to log in to your Business Manager account.

Click Settings on the top right of the panel:

Make sure you are on the General tab:

At the Page Level, you have two restriction options. You can limit the audience to specific countries as well as set minimum age restrictions.

For Country Restrictions, you can choose to either set specific countries where the page will be visible or choose regions where you want to hide the page:

For Age Restrictions, you can select a minimum age for users to see the page:

If there is not already a minimum age selected and you select one of the options to set a minimum age, you may see a warning message from Facebook. This warning reminds you that fans who have already liked your page from outside your minimum age will automatically unlike the page, so be careful with this. There is also a message indicating that age-restricted pages cannot be linked to groups:

As the warning message indicates, people outside the specified aged group will not be able to see your page. They’ll simply see a content unavailable notification, like this:

Restrict Your Facebook Audience at the Post-Level

You can limit the audience of specific posts on your page.

Similar to how we approached this with Page-Level targeting above, begin with the General tab of your page’s Settings section.

Beside the option “Audience Optimization for Posts”, click Edit. From here, select to enable the “Audience Optimization for Posts”, if the box is not already checked:

By updating this setting, you will now have an option to add audience restrictions when you create a post.

With this setting enabled, you have two options to add restrictions to a post.

To add restrictions to a post created directly on the page, select the targeting drop down:

*Facebook recently changed the way this looks, so it’s possible your targeting selector may appear different from this screenshot.

Select the option for Restricted Audience:

You can specify your audience restrictions here, and then save the changes:

You may have noticed that alongside the Restricted Audience option, there is an option for News Feed Targeting. If you’re interested in this functionality, check out this write-up from Jon on Facebook Audience Optimization.

To apply post-level audience restrictions for a post created via the Publishing Tools interface, click on the globe icon at the bottom of the post:

Select the option to Limit Audience By Demographics:

From here, you can specify the demographic parameters you’d like to use as limitations for your audience:

Location targeting at the Post-Level offers a few more options than location targeting at the Page-Level. In particular, at the Post-Level, you can target specific countries, states/regions, cities, or postal codes — even congressional districts. But at the Page-Level, you can only restrict the audience by country.

Lead Forms Audience Restrictions

Facebook Lead Forms have their own special options for audience restrictions. These are set during the form creation process. This feature is easy to miss, and you may even find that your Lead Forms already defaulted to a restricted audience in the past.

To set restrictions on Lead Forms, click on the Settings tab during the form creation process:

If you want to change the audience to Open, simply select that option.

As defined by Facebook (when you hover over the small ‘i’ beside the “Sharing” indicator):

By default, only people who are delivered your ad directly will be able to see and submit this form. Select “Open” to let people share this form with friends and allow submissions from people tagged in the comments.

Note that the restriction applies to the Lead Form itself, not to the associated post. This means users outside the specified audience could see the copy and creative of the post, but if they click to open the form, the Lead Form would not appear.

Generally speaking, I recommend changing Lead Forms to Open. Why? You may have users who want to share the form with their friends. If those friends are not in the audience you are using for the Lead Ad associated with the form, they will not be able to see the form even though they can view the post. This can be frustrating to your audience, and damage their perception of your brand or business.

That said, there may be certain scenarios where you only want people in the ad audience to be able to enter the form. Having this option available may be helpful to you.

The Restricted Facebook Audience Roll-Up

• You can restrict the audience on Facebook at the Page Level and at the Post Level.
• Page-Level restrictions apply to all posts that come from the page.
• Post-Level restrictions apply only to individual posts.
• Post-Level restrictions have some added location targeting functionality that Page-Level lack.
• Lead Ads/Lead Forms have their own restricted audience capabilities. They may have defaulted to restricted audiences without your realizing it!

Your Turn

Do you have a need for restricting your audience on Facebook?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Three Ways to Restrict Your Facebook Audience appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Last week, I provided you with a step-by-step for how to create a Facebook Canvas contact form. But once you create these ads, how do you collect the leads? And how do you target those who engage with these forms?

If you’ve created Facebook lead ads before, you’re familiar with the process of collecting those leads. You have to manually download a file consisting of your leads, unless you use a third-party tool to sync them to your CRM. This will be similar, though not the exact same process.

Today, I’ll walk you through both the manual and automated processes of collecting your leads after creating a Facebook Canvas with a contact form. After that, we’ll cover how to create audiences of those who engaged with these Canvas contact forms so that you can target or exclude them later.

1. Manually Collect Leads Through Ads Manager

Once you launch your campaign and the ads are active, you will be able to view the number of leads that have resulted from it within Ads Manager. When viewing the “Ads” tab, there should be a column for “Leads (Form).”

If you can’t find this column within the “Ads” tab, click to customize columns…

Then run a search for “leads (form)” to find that data and check the box.

That column will then be added to your report.

When viewing this column in your reports, you’ll notice a link with a download icon next to it (see the first image above). Click that, and you’ll download an XLS file of your leads.

2. Manually Collect Leads Through Publishing Tools

Typically, you’ve accessed leads from lead ad forms by going to your Publishing Tools as a Facebook page admin…

And then you’d click on “Forms Library” under “Lead Ads Forms.”

However, you won’t see your contact forms from a Facebook Canvas here. Instead, you’ll see a message…

You can either click the “Canvas Section” link in that alert or click “Canvas” on the bottom of the left-hand menu.

Here, you’ll see a list of the Canvases you’ve created. If a Canvas includes a contact form, you’ll see a button next to it with the number of collected leads.

If you click that button, you’ll download those leads into an XLS file.

3. Automatically Sync Leads With Zapier

Of course, manually downloading these leads is a pretty major pain — especially if you collect a high volume of them. Luckily, you can implement the same automated processes that you use for Facebook lead ads to sync them to your CRM.

I personally use Zapier for this (not an affiliate link). While the process is mostly identical, there are some minor annoyances at the moment that I want to help you with.

Keep in mind that undoubtedly there are many different third-party tools that will help you sync your leads from Facebook Canvas contact forms (and lead ad forms). But I use Zapier, so we’ll start there.

When you create a Zap, you’ll first need to select Facebook Lead Ads as your trigger app…

Note that this is only available within the premium package. So if you don’t have that, you’ll need to upgrade (sorry).

For the most part, setting up this Zap is how you would sync lead ad contacts to your CRM. But there is one issue with these new contact forms associated with a Canvas: These aren’t unique forms that you name, but unique posts. And you don’t name these posts.

You’ll see what I mean when you go in to select the form to sync…

Uhhhh… So, which one is it?? I honestly have no idea. And the weird thing is that I haven’t created four of these things in the first place.

As you can see, these names are auto-generated. You don’t name them, which would make selecting the form a whole lot easier.

To find which form is which, go into Ads Manager and edit your ad. You’ll see the auto-generated name of the Canvas there.

Alert readers will notice that this name is not identical to anything that was in the drop-down within Zapier. But the key is that it is date/time stamped as 08/10/2018 at 9:27am. The first form in the Zapier drop-down was for that same date/time.

From here, you’d create an action in Zapier to sync these new leads to your CRM. We won’t cover that here, but again you can see my post on creating Zaps for lead ad contacts for more.

4. Target Leads with Engagement Custom Audiences

Another logical next question is this: Can you target those who have opened or submitted these forms, as we can with those who engage with lead ad forms?

YES!

It’s the same process. When creating a Custom Audience, select “Engagement”…

Next, select “Lead form”…

After selecting your page, you’ll have the option to create an audience of people who have opened a specific form, opened but didn’t submit a specific form, or opened and submitted a specific form.

When you search for “Get New Customers,” you should see the forms you’ve created within Facebook Canvas.

Keep in mind that you can also create an audience of those who opened or clicked a link within a specific Canvas (regardless of whether they opened a form). That’s the “Fullscreen Experience” option from above.

You’ll have the options of people who have opened a specific Canvas or people who have clicked links within a specific Canvas.

You’ll need to select a specific Canvas. Once again, search for “Get New Customers” and you should find it.

For more information on either of these types of Custom Audiences, I’ve written tutorials on Lead Ad Form Custom Audiences and Canvas Custom Audiences.

Your Turn

It’s very possible that this process will change and improve during the coming weeks and months, but this is how it works for now. Have you started collecting leads this way yet? How is it working for you?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Collect Leads from a Facebook Canvas Contact Form (and Target Them) appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Canvas provides advertisers the ability to create a fullscreen experience that keeps potential customers on Facebook (see examples here). They can then get creative by building an experience based on components of video, images, text, CTA buttons, product feeds, and more. And now they can also add a contact form.

Experienced advertisers will recognize these contact forms as being a repurposing of lead ad forms, which allow marketers to collect contact information from potential customers without leaving Facebook. The beauty of these forms is that they auto-fill (when possible) information like name and email address from a user’s Facebook profile.

Facebook is essentially combining two very powerful tools — the fullscreen experience of Canvas and ease of data collection with lead forms — into one. Let’s take a closer look at how you can set this up for yourself…

1. Choose an Objective

As I write this, it appears that the option to add a lead form to a Facebook Canvas is only available when using the Traffic objective when creating your campaign.

That can change, of course. But for now, if you want this option you’ll need to use the Traffic objective.

2. Choose Optimization

If you stick with the optimization defaults associated with the Traffic objective, you’ll likely run into the following issue when attempting to create a Facebook Canvas…

The default optimization when using the Traffic objective is Landing Page Views. If you get this error, you’ll need to change it to something else (like Link Clicks)…

Once again, this is something that may very well change. In fact, I had a brief period of time recently when using Landing Page Views was actually allowed when creating a Facebook Canvas using the Traffic objective.

3. Add a Fullscreen Experience

Now, you’ll be allowed to check the box on the ad level to “Add a Fullscreen Experience.”

Check that!

4. Use the “Get New Customers” Template

After checking that box, you’ll be presented with three Facebook Canvas templates…

As you can see from the messaging in the blue notification, the “Get New Customers” template has “the option to include a mobile-friendly form that opens instantly when someone taps your ad.” That’s what we want!

Click “Use Template” under that template.

5. Turn On the Contact Form

Next, build your Facebook Canvas the way you normally would using the creation wizard. At the very bottom, you’ll see an option to add a contact form. Turn that on…

Since it’s buried at the bottom and it’s turned off by default, this is very easy to miss.

6. Build Your Contact Form

Next, we’ll want to build our contact form. This is done the exact same way that you build a typical lead ad form.

Provide a header and then indicate what information you want to request from the user. By default, it will be email address and full name.

But you’ll be able to request other information, including custom questions.

Next, you’ll want to provide a link to your privacy policy and customize the thank you screen. This is the screen someone will see after submitting their info to you.

Note that you’ll also want to provide a link for a button the user can push to go to your website — potentially to collect whatever it is they’ve requested, if that is what you prefer.

Considerations

Here are a few things to consider when adding a contact form to your Facebook Canvas…

1. Forms within Canvas do not currently work on Instagram. This will likely change eventually, but something to remember for now.

2. The “Collect Contact Info” template is basically just a lead ad. You can select this template, too…

But there’s really nothing to customize except for the form itself. So, why not just create a lead ad?

3. The templates from the Canvas Builder don’t currently provide form options. If you click this link…

…and select the “Get New Customers” layout option…

…there is not currently a way to add a contact form. This is likely an oversight and will be fixed, but just a heads up.

4. A blank Canvas doesn’t provide a contact form component option.

If you want to create a Facebook Canvas from scratch, you won’t (currently) find an option for a contact form component.

5. You have to create a form from scratch. You’d think it would make a lot of sense to select a previously created lead ad form, but that’s not currently an option.

When Would You Use This?

Advertisers often use the fullscreen experience of Facebook Canvas to sell products. However, now there are two primary reasons why someone might want to add a contact form…

1. High-priced products. A potential customer may be interested in a high-priced product, but they’re unlikely to complete the purchase online — or at least without giving it significant thought. Including a contact form to get more information could be a great next step.

2. Feature lead-gen “free” products. Now an advertiser can use the Facebook Canvas fullscreen experience to feature things like webinars, ebooks, and more that require a name and email address. This opens up plenty of possibilities!

How to Collect Your Leads

This is a separate topic in itself, so I wrote another blog post on how to collect your leads (both manually and automatically sync) and how to target those who engage with these forms.

Your Turn

Have you started experimenting with contact forms within a Facebook Canvas yet? If not, how might you use this?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Add a Contact Form to a Facebook Canvas appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Lead Ads were launched more than two years ago, and they’ve been an important tool in my advertising toolbox. However, there’s been one minor annoyance with these ads: The thank you screen.

That annoyance is no more. Let’s take a look at what has changed…

The Old Thank You Screen

First, here’s a quick refresher of how Facebook Lead Ads work…

A Facebook Lead Ad looks like your typical link ad within the news feed.

But when you click the ad, something amazing happens. Instead of loading an external landing page, it immediately opens a form…

Facebook auto-fills the first name, last name, and email address from the user’s profile (who can edit it if they want). Just click “Submit” and you’re good to go…

Above is the “thank you” screen. The problem with that “thank you” screen is that the advertiser couldn’t customize it.

While the advertiser could link directly to the item that was being requested, the user had very little incentive to tap the button below since they wouldn’t know why that would be important.

In the old version, delivering what was requested in the lead form needed to be done through email. Since users did not consistently click that button (or know why they should), advertisers needed a third party tool to sync their lead forms with their CRM to then promptly deliver this content to the subscriber.

The New Thank You Screen

Here’s what the process for creating a Facebook lead form thank you screen looks like now…

Let’s imagine you’re delivering an ebook or something that needs to be downloaded. Previously, an email would have been sent to the subscriber with a link to download that content. While you could have used that link in the prior thank you page, there was no way to communicate to the user that they needed to click that button.

Now, we can make that clear…

The thank you screen will look like this…

View Website vs. Download

One interesting part of this update is that there is a drop-down menu to select a button type. You can select from “View Website” or “Download.”

That certainly sounds interesting. Does that mean that you can either send a user to the thank you page or have the button trigger a download? For that to work, Facebook would need to host the digital content.

Well, unfortunately, what you select here appears to make no difference whatsoever right now. If you select the “View Website” option, you could still customize the button to read “Download” and have the button direct a download from your website…

If you select the “Download” option instead, you still need to provide a URL…

Selecting the “Download” button type doesn’t appear to add any new functionality. Maybe I’m missing something. It could be an oversight on the part of Facebook. Or maybe there are plans to eventually make that “Download” button type truly functional.

You Should Still Sync Your CRM

This update allows subscribers to immediately access the content they requested. If you prefer not to sync leads to your CRM with a third party tool (it’s typically an additional expense), doing so manually is now more plausible.

However, I recommend that you continue to sync your leads with your CRM to also deliver that content promptly via email.

There’s no guarantee that the subscriber will receive your email. They may provide an address they rarely use. Maybe your message is flagged as spam or moves straight to a separate inbox. This update improves deliverability.

Your Turn

As a result of this update, I’m in the process of updating my forms. Do you have it yet? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Lead Ads Form: Customize Thank You Screen appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook lead ads are a great way for marketers to collect email addresses without sending users to an external website. This is now enhanced with conditional answers for Facebook lead ad forms.

When creating Facebook lead ad forms, you can ask for generic information that can be pulled from a user profile (first name, last name, email address, etc.)…

… or you can ask custom questions.

When creating a custom question, you now have options of short answer, multiple choice or conditional.

Let’s take a closer look at what conditional answers are, how to set them up, and ways that you can use them with your Facebook lead ad forms.

What Are Conditional Answers?

Conditional answers allow marketers to ask a series of questions that provide different answer options based on the answers given in the prior question or questions.

Note that these aren’t conditional questions. Conditional questions would be something like this…

Question 1: Do you work for an ad agency?

ANSWER: YES

Question 2: How many people work for your agency?

ANSWER: 20

In the example above, the second question wouldn’t make sense for those who answered “NO” to the first question.

For conditional answers, the questions will be the same, no matter the answers that are given. But the answer options provided will change depending on the answers provided in the prior question.

So here’s one example of using conditional answers…

Question 1: Would you like a t-shirt or a sweatshirt? (T-Shirt or Sweatshirt are options)

ANSWER: T-Shirt

Question 2: What color would you like? (Red and Yellow are options for t-shirt)

ANSWER: Red

Question 3: What size would you like? (Small, Medium and Large are options for red t-shirt)

ANSWER: Small

Another example would be if you allow people to register for a webinar but provide options for date and time.

Question 1: In what month would you like to attend this webinar? (June and July are options)

ANSWER: June

Question 2: On what day would you like to attend this webinar? (5, 9, 12, and 19 are options for June)

ANSWER: 12

Question 3: At what time (EDT) would you like to attend this webinar? (11am and 2pm are options for June 12)

ANSWER: 11am

How to Set Up Conditional Answers

Now you’re ready to set this up. Let’s use our examples above to move forward.

When you select to provide conditional answers, you’ll be asked to upload a CSV file.

This process is not intuitive. It was confusing to me at first what needed to go into that file. Understand that the file will only include the potential answers. You will provide the questions later. So you should map this out prior to creating the CSV file.

Let’s go back to the t-shirt and sweatshirt example. There are different colors and sizes available depending upon whether someone wants a t-shirt or sweatshirt. So you’ll want to create a file where there are columns of possible answers for each question you’re going to ask.

For the t-shirts and sweatshirts example, the document would look like this…

Note there are multiple rows for both “T-shirt” and “Sweatshirt” in the first column and the individual colors in the second column. This is so that you can generate each answer scenario.

For example, if you want a t-shirt, there are only red and yellow options. If you want a sweatshirt, there are only green and black options. In any case, you’ll then have options of small, medium or large.

After uploading the CSV file, you’ll then be able to enter your questions.

Let’s get a t-shirt.

Options for colors then appear. We want a red t-shirt.

After selecting the color, we can then choose from available sizes.

For reinforcement, now let’s set this up for the free webinar.

Here is what the CSV file will look like…

Different days are available, depending on the month; different times are available depending on the day.

After uploading the CSV file, we’ll be able to enter our questions…

I entered all three questions that I want to ask. Note that at this moment, you can only select an answer for the first question. The dropdowns for the other two are grayed out.

Let’s answer “June” for the first question.

Answer options will now appear for the second question. Let’s select “12” for June 12.

And now two options will appear for the webinar on June 12.

How You Might Use Conditional Answers

Admittedly, the examples above may not be the easiest to execute. If you’re selling sweatshirts and t-shirts, a lead ad may not be the best solution (it’s not ideal for e-commerce). And for the webinar, you’d need to have automation in place to sign someone up based on their answers. While likely possible, it’s complicated.

We’ll need to keep this simple. You have two or more questions that you want to ask this audience that is registering for something. The answer options you provide will depend upon the answer given to the prior question.

For me, I might want to learn more about someone’s experience level with ads and what they use it for.

Question 1: What level Facebook advertiser would you consider yourself? (Answer options: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced)

Question 2: How do you use Facebook ads? (Beginner options: I haven’t used them before, To promote my business, Other; Intermediate options: To promote my business, Other; Advanced options: To promote my business, I work for an agency, Other)

I admit that it is challenging to come up with examples where the questions will always remain the same. This is new, though, and I’m sure that use cases will be easy to find as we go.

Your Turn

What do you think of conditional answers for Facebook lead ad forms? How might you use them?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Create Conditional Answers for Facebook Lead Ad Forms appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Let’s be honest: Facebook makes a ton of freaking updates. Some are more exciting than others. But my excitement level is high for the launch of call-to-action units for Facebook Instant Articles.

If you aren’t familiar with Instant Articles, they provide a Facebook-hosted, instant loading option for users viewing on mobile. This is great for users, who don’t need to wait for the website to load. It’s also great for Facebook, who keeps the user within their app.

The response to Instant Articles from publishers has been mixed, to put it kindly. By creating Instant Articles, the publisher is handing over control. While they can make the experience look and feel somewhat like their own website, it’s not actually their own website. Facebook is getting the traffic.

I’ve come to embrace this since it means a better experience for the user — and, ultimately, more people reading my blog posts (even if they aren’t technically on my website). It means fewer people abandoning after a slower load from mobile, so there’s more potential to hook someone.

But I do understand why the bigger publisher may not have been so excited about Instant Articles. They likely already had a fast loading and optimized mobile website. They lost the ability to add pop-ups and forms to collect email addresses.

But then Facebook created call-to-action units…

What Are Call-to-Action Units?

If you’ve been clicking Instant Articles from the bigger publishers lately, you likely already saw this in a test. Call-to-action units allow publishers to inject forms into their Instant Articles. There are currently two different call-to-action units available…

Email Sign-up: Collect an email address from readers. Use this to register for a newsletter or ebook, for example.

Page Like: Get more likes to your Facebook page.

How to Create Call-to-Action Units

The menu for Instant Articles is within your page Publishing Tools. Call-to-Action Units have been added to the bottom of that menu.

Click either button to create your first call-to-action unit.

You’ll have the option (for now) of either newsletter sign-ups or page likes.

Here’s what the process looks like for creating a newsletter call-to-action unit…

You’ll need to provide the following information:

• Unit Name: For you only (this won’t be shared with users)
• Headline: The line in bold at the top
• Body Text: The text appearing below the headline
• Privacy Policy: Link to your website’s privacy policy
• Confirmation Message: Message displayed to users after submitting
• Background Color: Base color of the unit
• Font Color: Self explanatory
• Logo: Select from your logos that were previously uploaded into the Instant Articles styles tool

The logo options are actually the names of styles that you created for your Instant Articles. If you want to update or add more logo options, go to “Configuration” under Instant Articles and expand “Styles.”

When you add a style, you’ll have an option to upload a logo.

The page likes call-to-action unit is very simple. Simply name it…

Now you’ll see the call-to-action units you’ve created within your Instant Articles menu.

These units are automatically activated, but you can choose to either edit or turn them off. Note that they will only be active in all Instant Articles published in the future.

What You Need to Know

There are a few things about these call-to-action units that you need to know…

1. Only one unit per type. If you want to create two different email call-to-action units, too bad (at least for now). You’ll need to either edit or delete the one you’ve been using.

2. Users can select from multiple email addresses on their profile. I have three email addresses attached to my Facebook profile, so when I subscribe, I can choose from those three email address options.

3. Email address only. You can’t ask for first name, last name or any other information (again, at least for now). This is a little frustrating for publishers who need additional information. And it makes it mostly worthless for webinar registrations.

4. Unit only appears when it’s relevant. Once I tested this form on one of my Instant Articles, it no longer appeared again. And since I already like my own Facebook page, that unit didn’t appear either. Facebook hasn’t confirmed this behavior, but that’s how this appears to work.

5. Placement control? I didn’t see anything in Facebook’s developer documentation on call-to-action units about how to control where these units appear within your Instant Articles. It’s tough for me to tell as an admin if more than one can appear (page likes and email) since I probably shouldn’t see the page likes unit in the first place. But I can tell you that the email unit appeared at the very end of my article.

6. No native CRM integration. Yep, just like Facebook lead ad forms. Facebook generates a CSV file with all of the email addresses collected. That’s a major annoyance for publishers — and for users, who may expect to hear from you immediately.

How to Sync Leads for CTA Units

The good news is that leads generated from these call-to-action units use the same API as Facebook lead ad forms. So if you use a third party integration to sync leads from lead ad forms to your CRM, you’re in luck.

I currently use Zapier (nope, not an affiliate link) for this.

When you create a Zap, you’ll want to select Facebook Lead Ads as your trigger.

And after selecting your page, you should find your call-to-action unit within the list of lead ad forms.

To get a full tutorial on this, check out my post on syncing leads from lead ad forms to your CRM.

Of course, you don’t need to use Zapier for this. There are countless other tools that should help with this automation as well. But I use Zapier for lots of automation (not just lead syncing), so it’s a valuable tool.

View Call-to-Action Unit Insights

Want to view metrics on how these units are performing? The final column within the list of units you’ve created is for Insights.

Click “View” to see these stats. You can also find this info in Insights under a new menu item, “Instant Articles CTAs.”

You’ll get access to the following information for each unit type…

Email Newsletter Insights

• Sign-ups
• Gender and Age
• Location

Page Like Insights

• Page Likes
• Gender and Age
• Location

CTA Units Being Tested

There are only two unit types now, but Facebook is testing at least two more.

From Facebook:

• Testing Free Trial call-to-action unit: We are currently testing a quick and easy way for people to sign up for a free trial to a publisher’s digital subscription through Instant Articles with a small group of publishers.
• Testing Mobile App Install call-to-action unit: Many partners have asked for a way to drive adoption for their mobile apps. So, this week, we officially launched an alpha test of a new Mobile App Install call-to-action unit with a handful of partners.

Lots of good stuff coming. Stay tuned!

Your Turn

Have you started testing call-to-action units for Instant Articles yet? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Create Call-to-Action Units for Facebook Instant Articles appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

There are many factors that lead to success or failure of your Facebook ad campaign. But spoiler alert: Nothing is more important than targeting.

Nothing comes close.

You could craft the perfect ad with convincing copy and eye-grabbing imagery. You could lead to a super-fast landing page with laser precision and focus. The product could be so compelling that it sells itself.

But if your targeting sucks? Forget about it.

My results tend to reflect this. I don’t pride myself on insanely compelling copy and imagery. I’ve never claimed to be a great salesperson. My ads themselves tend to be… fine. But they aren’t why I get results.

There is no better example of this than a couple of campaigns I started running on Monday. I wanted to share them with you along with the results.

The Campaigns

Beginning on Monday, I decided to finally start a couple of Facebook campaigns to promote Keys to Success: A Free Webinar for Facebook Advertisers, which occurs next Monday. While that may sound like last minute, I’ll undoubtedly need to shut off registration soon. Why? It’s going to fill up.

Part of that is because I emailed my list about it. But another reason is the insane number of signups I’m getting via the Facebook campaigns.

I created two campaigns:

1. Keys to Success Webinar – Lead Generation (using Lead Ads)
2. Keys to Success Webinar – Website Conversions (driving to a landing page)

I like to use both methods to see what works best. Little did I know that I’d get insane results from each one.

The Targeting

I created one ad set for the Lead Generation campaign and two for the Website Conversions campaign. In the second campaign, I created two so that I could test two different audiences. I could have (and maybe should have, once you see the results) created two ad sets for both. But I honestly didn’t expect what ended up happening.

While there were three total ad sets, the targeting was the same between the Lead Generation campaign and one of the ad sets in the Website Conversions campaign. So here are the two targeting approaches that I took…

1. Page Engagement Custom Audience

Targeted Audience: All Page Engagement (365 Days)

Excluded Audiences:

• Keys to Success Webinar Registrants (Data Custom Audience)
• Keys to Success Webinar Registrants (180 Day Website Custom Audience)
• Keys to Success Webinar Registrants (Lead Ad)
• Visited Keys to Success Webinar Landing Page 2+ times (180 days)

2. Most Engaged Website Visitors

Targeted Audiences:

• All Website Visitors 2+ Frequency (180 Days)
• Time on Site Top 25% (180 Days)

Excluded Audiences:

• Keys to Success Webinar Registrants (Data Custom Audience)
• Keys to Success Webinar Registrants (180 Day Website Custom Audience)
• Keys to Success Webinar Registrants (Lead Ad)
• Visited Keys to Success Webinar Landing Page 2+ times (180 days)

If you aren’t familiar with Page Engagement Custom Audiences, this is relatively new. This allows me to target anyone who engaged with my Facebook page in any way during the past 365 days.

Targeting my most engaged website visitors can be done with a couple of relatively new Website Custom Audience features as well (this and this).

I dedicated a $40 daily budget to target my engaged website visitors within the Lead Generation campaign and another $50 for that same audience and $10 for the page engagement audience in the Website Conversions campaign.

The difference in budget is due to audience sizes. My engaged website visitors audience is just under 200,000 people while I have just under 50,000 people engaged with my page.

While the groups I targeted is important, don’t overlook the exclusions. I made sure to exclude people who already registered for the webinar in three different ways (email address, thank you page website visitors, and lead form). I also excluded anyone who visited the landing page twice or more (I assume that’s enough).

This helps mitigate loss once people start converting. I don’t want to throw money away at people who already converted or who repeatedly visited the landing page without converting.

The Ads

When I shared some preliminary results to my Power Hitters Club – Elite community, one question quickly came up: What was your ad? Can you share it?

I was somewhat embarrassed to share it. I don’t consider it all that interesting (it’s really not). But here it is…

The ads for the Website Conversion campaign and Lead Generation campaign were virtually identical. More information was found within the landing page for the Website Conversion ad and within the lead ad form within the Lead Generation ad.

If you’re wondering why neither ad provides details on date and time of the webinar, it’s because I plan to make this a monthly thing. So once I start the webinar on Monday, the date and time switches. This allows me to keep the current campaign running.

Overall, though, it’s pretty disappointing, right? You were expecting to see some magic. Not really all that special. Anyone could have done it.

The Results

But that leads us here…

To build leads through Facebook ads, a good goal is to spend about $1 per email address. But it could easily cost more than that, depending on several factors. And it may or may not be worth those costs, depending on the value of a lead to your business.

So with the $1 goal in mind, here are the results for my Lead Generation campaign…

And for the Website Conversions campaign…

So as I type this, I’ve spent a grand total of $292.39 to accumulate 1,447 registrations (and counting). That’s a nifty cost per registration of 20 cents.

That’s an insanely low cost.

The Importance of Targeting (and BUILDING)

You can have some success targeting interests, behaviors and Lookalike Audiences. You can have better success targeting website visitors and (apparently) people who engage with your page. But the problem, of course, is scaling.

I could stand to increase my budgets a little more (and I will). But I will be capped and can’t spend much more, particularly for the people engaged with my page. Scaling has a very short ceiling in this case.

But that’s why building audiences is so important. If I didn’t put so much effort into content, building my list and promoting my content, I would not have a large audience to target in the first place. I wouldn’t be able to focus in on the most engaged website visitors. And I would be restricted by far smaller budgets.

But thanks to those years of hard work, I see the payoff with campaigns like these. While others are paying $1,500 – $3,000 to get that same number of registrations, I pay a small fraction.

Having a long-term plan pays off.

In Comparison

I shared my insane success, but how about something similar that has been far less successful?

A week after my Keys to Success webinar, I’ll be hosting a webinar for entrepreneurs called What Now?. It’s a new topic for me. A little experiment.

But since it’s a new topic, I don’t have a built-in audience of people I know who are interested in it. I have a website custom audience of about 10,000 people who have read my four blog posts on the topic. That’s about it.

As a result, I had to go with less precise targeting. In one ad set, I targeted those 10,000 people who read my entrepreneur posts. Obviously, a very low budget. In another, I targeted all of my website visitors who also had interests in entrepreneur-related topics.

Of course, I’m not a big believer in interest targeting. This blog post is a good example why. So targeting my audience (not necessarily entrepreneurs) and layering on entrepreneurial interests (not necessarily accurate) was not a sure-fire approach.

The ad wasn’t much different at all from what I did for the Facebook ads webinar…

The results? I’m spending more than $1 per email address in this case. Actually, about $1.50. More than I am accustomed to spending, and far more than I’m spending for a comparable webinar. If I don’t tweak it to get better results, I’ll need to stop it soon.

What’s the difference? It should be obvious by now.

It’s the targeting, stupid.

Your Turn

Are you seeing significantly better results when targeting people who are most engaged with you? Are you willing to share those results?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Example: Facebook Ad Targeting and Results appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

I thought about naming this post something like, “Why Facebook Advertisers Don’t Need a Website Anymore,” but that takes what I’m about to say too far. A website is still required. But suddenly, those without an active website are more likely to find success with Facebook remarketing than ever before.

I know. For those familiar with my strategies, this seems asinine. Blasphemous. Other big words I can’t spell without spell check. But hear me out.

While I still believe that targeting website visitors is by far the best option, I realize that not every advertiser has the volume of traffic required to get optimal results. Facebook has developed several new options during the past few months that will give these advertisers some excellent alternatives.

Let’s take a closer look at what remarketing is, why it’s important and how the definition of remarketing is evolving.

What Is Remarketing?

Remarketing has historically meant targeting those who visited a website you own with an ad — in this case, a Facebook ad. Advertisers are able to show ads related to a blog post that was read, product that was viewed, search that was made and a whole lot more.

This includes the manual creation of ads and Website Custom Audiences, but it also includes Dynamic Ads. Note that the focus for this post will be on the manual creation, since this is something that any advertiser can use.

The Importance of Remarketing

There are several factors that ultimately determine success or failure of Facebook ads, but I’d argue that there is no factor that is more important than targeting. You can create the best ad with effective copy, imagery and bidding, but you can’t expect success if it reaches the wrong people.

Most new Facebook advertisers jump in by targeting interests, or groups of people that Facebook believes align with particular topics. While this can be effective, it’s far from perfect.

By targeting an interest, you’re usually reaching a user with a cold message. In other words, these people don’t know who you are. And in most cases, the advertiser is trying to sell something or collect an email address — tasks that are more difficult when targeting a cold audience.

But thanks to remarketing, advertisers can reach warm users who have already revealed quite a bit about themselves through their actions on the advertiser’s properties. These actions give the advertiser a better idea of the user’s needs, interests and pain points to provide a more relevant ad.

And by reaching a warm audience, users are more likely to react favorably to the ad since the source is a brand with which they are familiar.

Let’s take a closer look at ways that advertisers can use remarketing to reach a warm, engaged audience…

Target Those Who Visited Your Website

As mentioned earlier, remarketing has historically been defined as targeting those who visited your website. This continues to be my preferred method.

Thanks to the Facebook pixel — a snippet of code that is unique to the advertiser and is placed on every page of a website — audiences can be generated of people based on the pages they visited and when.

Up until this year, remarketing with Website Custom Audiences was limited to the following options:

• Anyone who visited your website
• People who visit specific web pages
• People visiting specific web pages but not others
• People who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time

Make no mistake, this is all very valuable. By targeting all website visitors, you can promote content and expect to get a high response rate. By targeting people who visit specific web pages, you can reach those who read a certain blog post with a related opt-in. By targeting people who visited a specific web page but not others, you can reach those who visited a landing page but didn’t convert. By targeting those who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time, you can re-engage those who visited sometime during the past 180 days, but not recently.

Those are just generic examples, of course, and there are many other ways to remarket to website visitors. But one weakness of website remarketing was that it was difficult to isolate the highest quality website visitors from everyone else — other than based on the page they visited or when.

In other words, we couldn’t separate those who visited once during the past 180 days from those who visited 20 times; we couldn’t separate those who visited for three seconds from those who visited for hours on end.

But then Facebook added “Advanced Mode” to Custom Combination targeting…

With Advanced Mode, advertisers can create audiences of people who viewed at least 20 pages of their website during the past 180 days…

…or completed two registrations…

…or made two purchases…

…or made a purchase valued at at least $100…

…or performed a specific website search at least once…

All great. But how about targeting those who spend the most time on your website? That was solved as well…

Now you can focus on the top 5%, 10% or 25% users who spent the most time on your site…

Website Remarketing Isn’t For Everyone

I’m obsessed with the targeting methods listed above. I use them almost exclusively. But what about people who either don’t have a website (come on, you need one!) or simply have a lightly trafficked site?

It’s true, I’m privileged to be able to target large numbers of people who have visited my website. But not everyone has that option. If you get minimal traffic to your website, then what?

Up until now, I encouraged you to focus first on driving traffic to your website to increase these audiences. That’s still a good idea, but these types of businesses now have more options.

Target Those Who Viewed Your Video

This may be the cheapest way to build a remarketing audience. With this method, advertisers can target those who watched their video(s) — both organic and paid views.

As a result, brands can create a top of the funnel video that targets interests or Lookalike Audiences. Those who watch the video have expressed interest in the subject of the video with their actions. Advertisers can then remarket to that group that watched the video further down the funnel.

Advertisers can create audiences of the following people:

• Watched at least 3 seconds of your video
• Watched at least 10 seconds of your video
• Watched at least 25% of your video
• Watched at least 50% of your video
• Watched at least 75% of your video
• Watched at least 95% of your video

The beauty of this method is that you can create a remarketing audience very inexpensively. While it may cost $.20 – $.50 or more for a website click from cold traffic, video views are lighter actions. A single view may cost pennies (or a fraction of a penny).

Of course, the longer a user watches that video, the more relevant they are likely to be. So while you can create an audience of people who watched for three seconds, that may be inexpensive but the users aren’t likely to be all that relevant. Vice versa, you’ll get a much smaller and relevant audience focusing on 95%, and it will cost more to build that audience.

Another benefit of these audiences is that you can select multiple videos at once. Additionally, the duration can be as much as 365 days, providing the greatest potential for volume.

Target Those Who Opened a Lead Ad Form

Many advertisers have experimented with Lead Ads. Instead of sending users to an off-site landing page, lead ad forms keep users on Facebook with a fast and seamless experience.

With Lead Ad Custom Audiences, advertisers can create audiences of people who opened the form, opened and submitted the form or opened and didn’t submit the form.

By targeting all of those who opened the form, advertisers get a larger, general audience that showed some interest in an ad. This could be useful in place of targeting all website visitors, for example.

Advertisers can use the audience of people who submitted the form for both targeting and excluding purposes. They can target someone who registered for a free opt-in with a related product. Or they can exclude those who already opted in when promoting that opt-in.

Target Those Who Opened a Canvas

Facebook Canvas continues the theme of Lead Ads and Instant Articles: Keep people on Facebook with a fast, seamless experience.

While I recommend using Canvas in addition to sending users to your website, it can also be a temporary replacement. Canvas allows advertisers to tell a story with a collection of images, videos, links, text and even product feeds.

In the past, if someone opened a Canvas, you had no way to remarket to them unless they clicked a link to your website within it. But that changed with Canvas Custom Audiences.

Now advertisers can focus on creating Canvas ads for the top of the funnel, then remarket to those who opened those ads. Think about this as a possibility…

1. Promote a Canvas to a broad audience
2. Promote a related opt-in to those who opened the Canvas
3. Promote a related product to those who opted in

Target Those Who Engaged With Your Page

Targeting people who engage with your Page is Facebook’s latest addition to “Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences,” and it may have the most potential.

With this new option, advertisers can target people who engaged with their Page content in the following ways:

• Everyone who engaged with your Page
• Anyone who visited your Page
• People who engaged with any post or ad
• People who clicked any call-to-action button
• People who sent a message to your Page
• People who saved your Page or any post

For the biggest possible audience, target everyone who engaged with your Page. And since the duration can be as long as 365 days, the potential for volume is there, too.

In theory, a website suddenly becomes less necessary — at least for the purpose of remarketing. Advertisers can now reach a very relevant group of people who engaged with their Page or content.

I focus on all website visitors when promoting a new blog post. I’ll focus even more on the most active visitors when promoting an opt-in.

But advertisers with low traffic numbers can instead promote a blog post or opt-in to those who engaged with their Facebook Page. While it’s not as precise (it’s not based on a specific post, for example), it provides relevant volume for an advertiser who may not have had that option previously.

Your Turn

Allow me to reiterate: You still need a website. You should still strive for a highly trafficked website for optimal targeting and results.

But maybe that isn’t an option for you right now. And if it’s not, you no longer need to rely solely on interests and Lookalike Audiences. These new audiences give a larger population of advertisers hope.

What are your thoughts on the evolution of Facebook remarketing? Let me know in the comments below!

The post The Evolution of Facebook Remarketing appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

In June, I started a free webinar series for beginner, intermediate, and advanced advertisers. The goal was to segment these groups so that I could offer each registrant a more relevant product (either my Power Hitters Club for advanced marketers or one of my 4-week training programs for beginners or intermediates).

This has been a fun experiment for me, and it’s fallen mostly on the down-low for the first few months. For now, I still don’t even have a public facing landing page for my training programs. Until the kinks are worked out of my process, I’ve focused only on remarketing to the groups who sign up for these webinars.

This has become a a nifty little funnel for me. As it currently stands, I conduct all three free webinars (always live, but the content changes very little) on the final Monday of each month. I then have a week to promote the relevant training program before the four weeks of training begins the following Tuesday.

Until August 5, I relied entirely on organic methods to promote this series (as I type, ads don’t yet exist for the 4-week training programs). But after a modest start, I now commit a few hundred dollars per day to webinar promotion.

In order to do this, I need to expand my targeted audience beyond my website visitors. Those who know me realize this is uncomfortable territory. I don’t enjoy targeting people who aren’t connected to me. But I saw this as a challenge and an experiment to multiply my spend.

Early results tell me that a registration is worth $6. That’s a very conservative value given that this was prior to major promotion began and prior to the existence of landing pages for my training program products (only checkout pages).

But equipped with the framework of a $6 registration value, I knew that I could move beyond targeting only my website visitors (who routinely register for $.50 to $1.00) and venture into the uncomfortable waters of Lookalike Audiences (who will undoubtedly cost more).

I don’t have lots of faith in Lookalike Audiences, but I prefer targeting people similar to some key audiences rather than picking and choosing interests. And given the large sizes of these audiences, I also know that there is built in potential to scale, and it’s less likely to over-market even if I spend upwards of $500 per day.

I thought you may want to get a look behind the curtain at how I’m promoting my webinar series. I’m constantly tweaking and experimenting, so it’s by no means a finished process. While I’ll continue to find ways to optimize, it may provide some inspiration for your own promotions.

Let’s take a closer look…

Carousel Ads Promoting Recent Content

Facebook carousel ads can now include up to 10 images or videos. I’m able to take advantage of that for the purpose of promoting recent blog posts.

The Goal:

I know that few advertisers promote content for the purpose of driving website traffic only. I find that to be foolish and short-sighted.

I have two primary goals with this. The first is to build my most active Website Custom Audiences because I’ll be targeting them later in this process.

The second goal is to leverage Instant Article traffic driven on mobile devices. I’ve placed my own ads on my Instant Articles, which are all focused on promoting my webinars.

I may need to write an entire tutorial on customizing ads for your Instant Articles (not to mention a tutorial for setting up Instant Articles). In the meantime, read this.

Targeting:

I’m experimenting with four different audiences, three of which are my most active website visitors.

1. Visited JonLoomer.com 2-5 times during the past 180 days
2. Visited JonLoomer.com 6-19 times during the past 180 days
3. Visited JonLoomer.com 20+ times during the past 180 days
4. Collection of Lookalike Audiences

As you might imagine, the first three are very effective, but the volume I can get is limited given they include my most active visitors only. So I also wanted to expand these audiences.

The fourth ad set includes Lookalike Audiences of the following:

• JonLoomer.com Visitors – 180 Days (10+ Frequency)
• Registered to Any Facebook Advertiser Webinar – 180 Days
• Time on Site (25%) – 180 Days
• Time on Site (5%) – 180 Days

If you haven’t already, make sure you start creating Website Custom Audiences based on frequency and time on your website. They are awesome!

Promotion of Most Recent Blog Post

Goals:

The goals here are nearly identical to the ads above. In this case, though, promoting my latest blog post also happens to be part of my normal routine. I’m trying to drive traffic to build my engaged WCA traffic as well as Instant Article traffic from mobile.

Targeting:

Unlike the ads above, I focus only on my engaged audience here. With a carousel ad, I can target a broader audience, hoping that at least one post will appeal to someone who doesn’t know me.

But while promoting my latest post, I prefer to focus on warm audiences. I chose a happy medium between anyone who visited my website and those who are most active on my website here in an effort to boost the potential audience size while cutting out one-time visitors.

Here, I’m targeting anyone who visited at least twice during the past 180 days. This gives me a potential reach of 140,000 people.

Ads Promoting Facebook Ads Quiz

The Goal:

The primary goal here is to get people to take the quiz. Immediately after taking the quiz, the user will get a recommendation for one of my three webinars based on their results. Taking the quiz will lead to more people signing up for an appropriate level webinar.

Even if they don’t immediately sign up for the webinar, these people again fall into remarketing.

Targeting:

Based on testing, I’ve decided to focus only on my most active website visitors. Lookalikes simply weren’t worthwhile.

It makes sense, really. I’m not getting an email address, but I’m asking the user to do something that takes lots of effort. It needs to be a highly engaged user who knows me.

I’ve been testing three different audiences:

1. Time on Site 5% AND Frequency 3+ (10 Days)
2. Time on Site 10% AND Frequency 2 (10 Days)
3. Time on Site 25% AND Frequency 1 (10 Days)

In each case, I’m combining two different Website Custom Audiences, one based on frequency and one based on time spent. You may be surprised to know that currently the most efficient audience is the 25% + 1 frequency audience.

I use a 10-day window in an effort to avoid overmarketing the audience. My assumption is that the people who are most active on my website during the past 10 days aren’t all that likely to consistently be the most active people. I have no proof of that, but I’m hoping there isn’t a ton of overlap.

By limiting the window to 10 days, I can hope to keep this ad relatively evergreen and limit ad impression frequency. Combined with using Daily Unique Reach bidding, I’ve done reasonably well at that. Even though these are small audiences, frequency over 14 days is no more than 4.

I’m also excluding the following groups:

• Already took the quiz (Website Custom Audience)
• Registered for beginner, intermediate or advanced webinar
• Purchased beginner or intermediate 4-week program
• Member of the Power Hitters Club

I this case, I only want to pay to show the quiz to people who are new to the funnel. The exclusions I use to assure this are a bit ridiculous — and probably overkill. I exclude every possible Website Custom Audience, Email Custom Audience and Lead Ad Custom Audience associated with those groups to make sure they are cut out — a total of 54 excluded audiences.

Website Conversion Ads for the Webinars

The first set of ads created for the purpose of driving signups for my webinars are remarketing plays.

The Goal:

Not surprisingly, my goal here is to get more webinar registrations. But I also want it to be rather evergreen. You’ll notice that I don’t mention dates. That will be updated on the landing page. I do this with the second set of ads as well.

Targeting:

I took a few different approaches here.

First, I did an abandoned page, targeting those who previously visited the landing page for that webinar.

Second, I targeted anyone who registered for the beginner webinar during the past 30-60 days to promote the intermediate webinar. I also did the same thing for those who registered for the intermediate webinar for promoting the advanced one.

Here, I exclude anyone who registered for the webinar I’m promoting as well as the 4-week program for the same level. I also exclude anyone who participated in anything that is a higher level. For example, if promoting the intermediate webinar to those who attended the beginner webinar, I’ll also exclude those who attended the advanced webinar.

I could also use a carousel to promote my webinars.

The Goal:

The goal is to get webinar registrations, but this time it’s to get volume. While the approach above will lead to inexpensive registrations, potential for volume is very limited.

Targeting:

Since I need a larger group to spend more, I focus on Lookalike Audiences here:

• JonLoomer.com Visitors – 180 Days (10+ Frequency)
• Registered to Any Facebook Advertiser Webinar – 180 Days
• Time on Site (25%) – 180 Days
• Time on Site (10%) – 180 Days
• Time on Site (5%) – 180 Days

For the 10% audience, I’m also experimenting with dayparting. I researched my ad reports to find the most efficient hours of the day to get a conversion during 2016.

I’m also experimenting with an audience that knows me very well, but creating variations of the targeting. I combined those who visited 3+ times or were in the top 5% of my most active visitors during the past 10 days. In one case, I let Facebook optimize. In the other, I expand the net a bit by using Daily Unique Reach.

Lead Generation Ads for the Webinars

On the surface, this is a lot like what we did above with individual webinar ads. However, in this case, I am mentioning the date. That’s because each lead ad form is date specific, so I create special ads for them.

The Goal:

Get registrations. You know that! But I like to split test vs. sending to a landing page to make sure I’m doing it most efficiently.

Targeting:

To avoid overmarketing, I’m not doing the exact same targeting as above. The audiences and targeting are very modest for this campaign.

I’m promoting the beginner webinar to two groups while promoting the other two webinars to one each:

• Beginner Webinar: Group of Lookalikes
• Beginner Webinar: Abandoned landing page or form
• Intermediate Webinar: Registered for Beginner webinar 30-60 days ago
• Advanced Webinar: Registered for Intermediate webinar 30-60 days ago

In the first ad set, I combined the various Lookalikes instead of splitting them out this time. I also used Lookalikes only for beginners since I find that webinar to be valuable due to the potential to send them through multiple products.

As mentioned, these ads are date specific. So I’ve actually created forms and ads in preparations for future runs as well.

It’s possible I may be a bit obsessed!

Next Steps

Once the landing pages are ready for my 4-week training programs, there is a logical next step. I will then run Facebook ads promoting each program based on the webinar someone attended. These ads will make my email campaigns more effective and vice versa.

Your Turn

Keep in mind that I’m leaving a lot of details out here, but this is a good start. I should have close to 10,000 total registrations for the next webinars on Monday, and a big reason for that is these campaigns. Hopefully my process will provide some inspiration for your own campaigns.

Any other approaches you’d take? Let me know in the comments below!

The post How I’m Promoting My Webinar Series with Facebook Ads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Every Thursday, I host three one-on-one sessions, and the discussion almost always inevitably focuses on one thing: A Facebook ad campaign process that actually works.

What I’m about to outline is a process that I have worked and reworked, tweaked and refined. It’s specifically for advertisers who don’t currently have a large, built-in audience to target for leads and sales.

Let’s get to it…

[Tweet “Here is a simple, repeatable Facebook ad campaign process that actually works…”]

The Problem

The process I see from far too many advertisers is painfully simple: Target interests and Lookalike Audiences to build leads and sell stuff.

While this simplified process can be successful for a while, it doesn’t lead to long-term success. Your campaign will ultimately run out of gas.

I’ll say it over and over again, but the number one reason that advertisers fail with Facebook ads is targeting. They go straight for the jugular by targeting people who don’t know them to get the lead or sale.

Sure, this can work for a while. Cost per lead and sale will eventually creep up to the point that it is no longer viable. If you want consistent results, you need a better long-term plan.

The Solution

Instead of a simple one-step process (target one audience that doesn’t know you to build leads or sell stuff), it’s a little more complicated than that. It doesn’t need to be a lot more complicated. But I recommend focusing on three objectives at a time — all the time.

1. Build the Audience

Back in the day, most people interpreted this as increasing page likes. Or it could have meant building your email list. But I’m not talking about either one here.

If you don’t have a large, built-in audience, you need to aggressively and efficiently build an audience in volume. We’ll do this by promoting helpful articles (driving traffic and building a Website Custom Audience) and videos (building an Engagement on Facebook Custom Audience).

2. Build Your Leads

The mistake is that most advertisers start here, targeting people who don’t know them. We won’t do that. We’ll target the audiences created in Step 1 to build leads by offering them a related freebie in exchange for an email address.

This could be an ebook, webinar, video series, coupon code, you name it. But it needs to be valuable. And we’ll build these leads by both driving people to a landing page and using Facebook Lead Ads.

3. Sell Stuff

Once again, far too many advertisers start and finish here. While you could certainly target the audience generated from Step 1, you’ll undoubtedly have more success targeting those generated from Step 2.

Now let’s get to the details…

Build the Audience

I recommend two ongoing campaigns with two separate objectives to build your audience. For each objective, target the types of audiences you may have been targeting without this process. They can be Lookalike Audiences or interests. This is top of the funnel type stuff.

But the key here is that you’re not wasting your money on this entire audience trying to get them to opt-in or buy something. Lookalike Audiences and interests aren’t all that accurate. And even if they are, many of those people may not be ready to buy or even provide an email address yet.

This step helps separate those who are potential customers from those who aren’t by providing low barrier, no-strings-attached, helpful content.

1. Build a Website Custom Audience

The objective of this campaign should be Clicks to Website. Within this campaign, promote your most successful blog post. Something that helps people, solves a problem and doesn’t sell anything. Those who would be interested in the solution that this blog post offers need to be your target audience.

Alternatively or concurrently, you can also use a carousel ad to promote multiple blog posts. Again, they need to be helpful. Solve problems that your target audience would have.

For this to work, you’ll of course need the Facebook pixel on your website. Create the following Website Custom Audiences:

• Visited Your Website – 30 Days
• Viewed [Popular Blog Post] – 180 Days

For argument’s sake, let’s assume you like to target both Lookalike Audiences and interests. So create two different ad sets.

• Ad Set #1: Lookalike Audiences
• Ad Set #2: Interests

Don’t get crazy with the interests. Select a few good ones. If you need help finding relevant interests, use Audience Insights.

When promoting a single blog post, make sure to exclude those who have already read that blog post (using the second WCA you created above). We’ll also want to exclude anyone who registered or bought in the “Build Your Leads” and “Sell Stuff” steps. Details to follow.

Feel free to mostly use Facebook’s default settings in Power Editor (yes, you should use Power Editor). I prefer daily budgets over lifetime, but that’s up to you. I also prefer to be charged for the impression rather than the click, but that is also a personal preference.

Don’t do any manual bidding. Have Facebook optimize for the website click.

2. Build an Engagement on Facebook Custom Audience

Another way to quickly and efficiently build a relevant audience in volume is through video views. Create a short, helpful video that solves your target audience’s problem. Make sure to use captions because most videos are watched without sound.

The objective of this campaign should be Video Views. Create two ad sets targeting the same audiences as above. You’ll also, though, want to create Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences as follows:

• Viewed [Your Video] 50% – 30 Days
• Viewed [Your Video] 50% – 365 Days

[NOTE: As I type this, not everyone has Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences. If you don’t have them yet, you can skip the video.]

What percentage you use is up to you. It depends on the length of the video. Clearly, the smaller the percentage, the larger the audience and less relevant it will be.

You’ll want to exclude the second audience within each of these two ad sets. We don’t want to keep targeting people who watched the video with this video.

We’ll also want to exclude anyone who registered or bought in the “Build Your Leads” and “Sell Stuff” steps.

Stick with the defaults on everything here. Again, it’s up to you whether you use daily or lifetime budgets. But you’ll want to optimize for the video view. Don’t do any manual bidding.

Build Your Leads

Let’s think about this. We have people who have read our helpful blog posts or watched our helpful videos. This tells us that they are in our target audience. So now let’s take them a step further and present them with a free offer that requires an email address in exchange.

Once again, I want you to create two different campaigns for this. The primary reason is to find what works best for you.

1. Drive to a Landing Page

This is the old fashioned way. I’m beginning to favor Facebook Lead Ads, but I don’t think it’s time to abandon the landing page yet.

Your objective should be Website Conversions. Before you get started, create the following Website Custom Audiences:

• Visited Opt-in Thank You Page – 30 Days
• Visited Opt-in Thank You Page – 180 Days

You are going to create two ad sets targeting the following audiences:

• Ad Set #1: Visited Your Website – 30 Days
• Ad Set #2: Viewed Your Video – 30 Days

Exclude the second WCA created for the opt-in thank you page (180 days) as well as the Lead Ad Custom Audience (90 days) that we’re about to create. Also exclude those who bought the product in the next step (we’ll get to that).

Note that you can (and probably should) also create an Email Custom Audience of those who registered. If you can, use a third party tool that keeps it synced at all times (I use DriftRock Flow), and also exclude that audience.

Optimize for conversions, and stick primarily with Facebook defaults.

2. Use Facebook Lead Ads

If you already send people to a landing page, it’s time to start experimenting with Facebook Lead Ads. They are much easier for the user, and can lead to greater volume.

Remember that the Lead Ad needs to be your landing page. So don’t use identical copy and imagery that you’d use when sending people to a landing page. Be more descriptive.

Create the following Lead Ad Custom Audiences:

• Opened and Submitted Lead Form – 30 Days
• Opened and Submitted Lead Form – 90 Days

[NOTE: Once again, these come from Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences. If you don’t have these yet, skip this step.]

The ad sets and targeting will be the same as when sending people to a landing page. Exclusions will also be the same. To recap, we’re excluding the following:

• Visited Opt-in Thank You Page – 180 Days
• Opened and Submitted Lead Form – 90 Days
• Registered (Email Custom Audience)
• Bought the product we’ll promote (Thank You Page Website Custom Audience – 180 Days)
• Bought the product we’ll promote (Email Custom Audience)

Sell Stuff

Now it’s time to sell our stuff. As you’ve probably figured out by now, the audience we’re about to target will be much smaller than what most advertisers target to sell.

The objective of your campaign should be Website Conversions. You’ll create two different ad sets targeting the following people:

• Visited Opt-in Thank You Page – 30 Days
• Opened and Submitted Lead Form – 30 Days

And we’ll exclude the following audiences:

• Bought the product we’ll promote (Thank You Page Website Custom Audience – 180 Days)
• Bought the product we’ll promote (Email Custom Audience)

For bidding, we will use Daily Unique Reach instead of sticking with the defaults.

Let’s explain why…

Normally, we’re targeting a large audience and we invite Facebook to optimize. By optimizing, Facebook finds the people within our audience most likely to perform our desired action.

But in this case, we’re targeting a much smaller, much more relevant audience. We don’t want Facebook to pick and choose whom to reach. We want them to reach as many of the people who registered as possible.

But we’re only targeting those who registered during the past 30 days. That way, if they don’t buy after a month of ads, we can stop wasting our money on them.

Don’t Forget Your Email Funnel

Part of our process is building our email list and then selling to those people. So we should concurrently email these people consistent messaging to push for the sale.

Most marketers miss this step. They tend to either run Facebook ads to those who opted in for the sale or send them emails for the sale — rarely both. The thought is that if they’re already doing it in one place, it’s a waste of money to do it in both.

Not true. The reality is that not everyone opens your emails. And even those who open your emails don’t act immediately. Additionally, not everyone who sees your ads act immediately.

By running both, you make each method more effective. Someone who saw your email but didn’t act on it may be more familiar with your offer when they see your ad and vice versa.

Your Turn

This is a simple process that anyone can use and I recommend to advertisers of all levels. Anything you’d add?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Ad Campaign Process: Build Audience, Leads and Conversions appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[NOTE: Another recent update not mentioned below is that lead ads can now be shown on desktops. When they were first released, they were only available on mobile. I did not include this update because it was not among the most recent updates Facebook announced. But it’s a big one!]

Launched in June of 2015, Facebook lead ads make the process of collecting an email address significantly easier. Using a Facebook form, advertisers can build an email list without needing to send users to their website.

In fact, much of the information requested is pre-filled from the user’s profile. It’s easy. Crazy easy. Within a matter of a couple of clicks (and no typing), someone can subscribe to your email list.

While a great tool with significant benefits, lead ads have had their weaknesses. Here are a few advertiser complaints:

• No native CRM integration
• Forms can’t be edited
• No video
• Concerns regarding quality of leads

Facebook addressed these concerns and others with some recent updates you may have missed. Let’s take a look…

[Tweet “Facebook updated lead ads to make them more powerful. Here are 6 new features you may have missed…”]

1. Zapier Integration

This is one that was buried within Facebook’s recent announcement. If you weren’t paying attention, you very likely missed it.

One of the primary complaints about lead ads is that there isn’t native CRM integration. In other words, when users subscribe, they are added to a spreadsheet that you then export — and presumably import into your CRM — manually.

This makes for a potentially terrible user experience. Typically when someone subscribes to something, they expect to get an email immediately — not a day or week later.

While several third party products have been created to solve this problem (I’ve been using DriftRock Lead Response), advertisers have complained about the cost associated with many of them.

Facebook then announced Zapier integration. Zapier is an automation tool that connects your apps, tasks and data. For example, I use Zapier to connect Infusionsoft tagging with GotoWebinar registration. If someone signs up for my Power Hitters Club membership, they are automatically registered for the PHC weekly webinar through Zapier.

Zapier is an incredibly powerful tool, and the truth is that I’m only scratching the surface. I’m not necessarily trying to sell you on Zapier here. You may already be using it. And if you are, you may not need to pay another dime to sync your leads from lead ads to your CRM.

To use this feature, you’ll need to use one of Zapier’s premium services…

Depending on your needs, you’ll need to spend between $15 and $99 per month for the service. But once again, you may already be doing that if you use Zapier for other tasks (it’s worth it!).

Let’s step through precisely how this is set up…

Create a new Zap. Select Facebook Lead Ads as your trigger.

This Zap will then trigger when a new lead is created. Click “Save + Continue.”

If this is the first time you’ve created a lead ads Zap, you’ll need to connect your Facebook account. Click “Connect a New Account.”

Click “okay”…

And “okay” again…

Now that your lead ads account is connected, click “Save + Continue.”

Select your page, which is required. You can choose to select a specific lead form, but you can also leave that blank. The only reason you’d leave it blank is if you’d send all leads from all forms to the same place (I don’t).

Next you’ll want to test that it’s connected properly. Click “Connect & Continue.”

If it is connected properly, you’ll get a confirmation message that the test was successful (if it didn’t work, fix the problem and re-test it). Then click “Continue.”

Now we’re going to tell Zapier where to send those new leads. I use Infusionsoft, but you can select from other CRM tools as well (like MailChimp). If you haven’t connected your CRM to Zapier before, you’ll likely have an extra step here.

You’ll need to tell Zapier what to do with that new contact. These contacts won’t all be new to my list (they may have subscribed to something else as well), so I select the option to create or update a contact.

Click “Save + Continue.”

The first step is the only one required: Select the field that will match up with your lead from the lead ads form (in this case, an email address). When you click in the text field, it should appear.

Optionally, you can also select an Action Set/Sequence. This is something you would have previously created within your CRM.

You can also have Zapier check for duplicates before adding the contact. I choose to search by email address. Note that if a match is found, that contact is merely updated, not skipped.

If leads are opting in to receive email from you, indicate that in the next field.

Finally, select all other fields that are completed from the lead form that will be imported into your CRM. In my case, I was only using email address and first name.

Now you’ll want to test that this connection is working. Click “Create & Continue.”

Your test is successful! Go ahead and click “Finish.”

Now, simply name your Zap and turn it on, and your leads from Facebook lead ads will begin syncing with your CRM!

If you’ve used Zapier before, this process is very straight forward.

Need more info? Here are some embeds directly from Zapier…

Email Marketing Software

CRMs

Notifications

2. Duplicate Forms

Another complaint that advertisers have had about lead ads is that you can’t edit forms. If you make a mistake with a form or simply want to make an addition or change, you can’t do it. You need to create a new form from scratch.

While Facebook hasn’t made forms editable, they did give us the next best thing: The ability to duplicate a form…

This way, you won’t need to manually recreate a form from scratch. You simply duplicate it and update what needs to change.

3. Video or Slide Show Lead Ads

Back in October, Facebook announced that advertisers would soon be able to add lead forms to video. That day is finally here!

Now you can create an informative video or slide show that asks the user to perform an action. In the past, that would mean clicking a link that took them to your website. Now you can have them quickly complete a Facebook lead form!

4. Context Cards

It’s strange, but it’s possible that the process of subscribing via lead ads may be too easy for users. Subscribing requires almost no effort at all. You have to assume that it’s even possible some people may opt-in without realizing it.

Something we know as content marketers, of course, is that the easier you make the data collection process, the more leads you will receive. However, as you add steps and required information, you may increase quality while decreasing volume.

One way to make sure people are getting what they want is by adding a context card. When creating your lead form, click the “Show Advanced Options” link on the first step and click the “Add a Context Card” box…

Now you can create an info card that will be shown immediately after a user clicks your ad — prior to submitting their contact info.

Below, you’ll see that you can edit this card with a headline, benefit text (using a paragraph or up to five bullets) and a customizable button.

Here, then, you can provide more details about what they’ll be getting as a result of providing their contact info.

When you click the customized button, it will take the user to the confirmation screen with their pre-filled contact info.

5. Edit Field IDs

Maybe you don’t want to use Zapier or any other third party tools to sync your leads. Maybe you want to continue to do it manually. But you want to make that process a bit easier.

The biggest chore with exporting the file from Facebook and then importing the data into your CRM is that the field IDs are not consistent. Facebook has a field ID for an email address (“email”) that may not be what your CRM uses. So you need to edit those before importing.

But now, you can tell Facebook to edit those field IDs for you so that you can eliminate a step. When creating a form, click “Show Advanced Options” and check the “Customizable field IDs” box.

At the end of the process, you can then edit the IDs of the fields you selected for your form.

Of course, you’ll need to check with your CRM to find out what IDs they require.

6. Available in Ad Create Tool

Finally, Facebook is making lead ads accessible to all advertisers. I’m a big fan of Power Editor, and I firmly believe that if you’re serious about Facebook advertising, you should be using it.

But if you’re not there yet, Facebook is now making lead ads available within the main ad create tool. When creating an ad there, you will now see the “Collect leads for your business” campaign objective.

Your Turn

What do you think about these updates? Do they make lead ads more powerful?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 6 Facebook Lead Ads Updates You May Have Missed appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook lead ads are an amazing opportunity for marketers. They streamline the process of collecting leads without requiring users to leave Facebook, improving the user experience and ultimately cutting the cost per lead for advertisers.

[If you haven’t signed up yet for my free workshop in November on How to Master Facebook Lead Ads, do it now!]

As great as lead ads are, there is one major flaw and annoyance: Without a third party tool, the advertiser collects the user data manually.

It’s silly, really. Advertisers need to manually export a CSV file from their page and import the data into their CRM (like Infusionsoft or MailChimp). Given that users typically expect an immediate response, this process would need to be repeated several times per day.

Luckily, Facebook has made CRM integration available through the advertising API. As a result, several smart developers are releasing products that help automate the integration between lead ad and CRM.

I am using one of those solutions, DriftRock Lead Response (aff. link). While the tool isn’t for everyone (I’ll get to that later), it’s made my life a whole lot easier.

Other solutions undoubtedly exist or are coming.

But this post is going to focus on the one tool that I’ve used and I know works well: DriftRock Lead Response. The following is an overview of precisely how it works and how I’ve been using it.

[Tweet “Here’s a guide on how to use DriftRock Lead Response to sync Facebook lead ads with your CRM…”]

1. Create a New Lead List

First, click the green “Create a new Lead List” button…

Now name this list. It should be descriptive so that you know what it is. It should be related to the form or list that you are integrating within your CRM.

Make sure to click the “Facebook lead ads” radio button and then click “Next.”

2. Select Your Lead Form

Select your page at that top. Then select the form you previously created, presumably through Power Editor.

DriftRock Lead Response also offers the ability to create a new form from their tool.

Once you’re done, click “Next.”

3. Send an Auto Responder

This part is pretty smart.

The truth is that there are limitless CRM tools. DriftRock Lead Response doesn’t integrate with all of them (but let them know if they don’t integrate with your CRM, and they may add it to the list!)

If the tool doesn’t currently integrate with your CRM, it can still save you time. You can have DriftRock send an auto-responder email from the email address of your choosing.

Why would this be valuable? Well, without it you are exporting from Facebook and importing into your CRM multiple times per day. But with this option, you can have DriftRock send the message you’d otherwise be sending anyway immediately upon opting in.

That gives you time to export and import that you otherwise wouldn’t have.

If you want DriftRock Lead Response to send an auto response, simply select the “Yes” radio button and select an email template style.

Then enter the subject, reply-to name and reply-to email address. You can then provide a header image before inserting the email copy.

This way, anyone who opts in will email get an email from you!

4. Integrate With Your CRM

Of course, if DriftRock Lead Response does integrate with your CRM, there’s little need to have them send the email for you. That would be taken care of from the CRM side.

First, you can choose whether to have notifications sent to you upon receiving new leads.

This might be good for low volume, high value leads. But otherwise, it could just be annoying!

If you want to sync with your CRM, select “Yes” next to “Automatically send my leads to my CRM/email system?”

As you can see, DriftRock Lead Response currently syncs with the following:

• Intercom
• Sparkroom
• Http basic
• Klavlyo
• Mailchimp
• Infusionsoft

I’ve synced successfully with both Mailchimp and Infusionsoft.

Select a group, tag or list that these leads should be added to and then define your CRM attributes…

This part was a bit confusing to me at first, and I assume that DriftRock will simplify the process in the future. But on the left side is what your CRM (in this case, Infusionsoft) expects for their columns while on the right are the columns from the Facebook export.

5. View Your Leads

These leads will sync throughout the day. To check on them, click the gear icon for your list on the dashboard…

You’ll then see a list of your leads. If they have synced properly, they’ll all have a checkmark to the left of them like in the screenshot below…

If there were any errors, there would be an (!) by them. By hovering over that icon, you will get details about the error.

Click the “List Performance” tab to get information on how many leads you are adding by day…

Finally, if you click on “CRM Integration Status” you’ll see if there are any issues with the syncing…

If it’s blank, you should be fine!

Pricing

This will be an issue for the smaller advertisers. DriftRock Lead Response’s monthly subscription fee is 5% of your lead ad campaigns, but with a $250 minimum.

Clearly, that doesn’t make much sense if you’re only spending $250 per month on lead ads. But if you’re spending even a few thousand, it’s absolutely worthwhile. It saves time and energy, and it makes the entire ad collection process much smoother for the user as well.

If this price is a problem, there are bound to be other options soon (if not already).

One reason I love DriftRock, though, is that they have a suite of products. In particular, I use this along with DriftRock Flow (aff. link) to sync my email Custom Audiences to Infusionsoft.

If you think that you’re a good fit for DriftRock Lead Response, go here to learn more or sign up for a demo. They’ll even give you a discount if you use my link!

Your Turn

Are you using Lead Ads yet? How are you collecting your leads?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Sync Facebook Lead Ad Contacts With Your CRM appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

I was excited when Facebook announced lead ads in June. When I received access on September 28, I was eager to give them a test drive. Lead ads have not disappointed.

Beginning today, Facebook is rolling out lead ads to Power Editor globally. Facebook also announced several enhancements that are coming that could be huge for marketers.

Let’s take a look at what lead ads are, my one-week test drive and the updates coming for this potentially powerful tool.

[Tweet “Facebook lead ads rolling out: Includes desktop, video, carousel and CRM integration!”]

What are Facebook Lead Ads?

One of the obstacles to a good user experience on Facebook is the poor load times when clicking an external link. Facebook has started testing and rolling out a series of features to help combat this, including instant articles and the “Buy” button.

Lead ads are yet another attempt to keep users on Facebook. In particular, most advertisers have seen the issues with collecting information from users while on a mobile device. While costs to reach and get engagement tends to be cheaper on mobile than on desktop, getting the conversion is usually more expensive.

There are many reasons for this, not limited to slow load times, lack of mobile responsiveness and the comparative difficulty entering contact information on mobile vs. desktop.

A lead ad looks like any other link ad with a CTA button on the surface. But when you click the link or CTA button (“Apply Now,” “Get Quote,” “Download,” “Learn More,” “Sign Up” or “Subscribe”), the user is immediately shown a form within Facebook.

Load time is vastly improved. But that’s just the start.

Facebook then pre-fills requested information like name and email address based on Facebook profile information. Users can edit this information in the form if they choose. Advertisers can ask for a long list of information (I’ll get to that in a minute) in addition to asking custom questions.

The process is streamlined to be much more efficient, and you can expect that advertisers will be seeing more leads (and lower cost per lead) as a result.

How to Create Facebook Lead Ads

Advertisers can create Facebook lead ads either through Power Editor or their Facebook Marketing Partner. I’m going to step you through how it’s done within Power Editor.

When creating a campaign within Power Editor, select the new “Lead Generation” objective.

Within the ad set, you may notice that the only option is mobile. That’s how lead ads were initially rolled out, but it is expanding to desktop (more on that later).

You will optimize for leads by default, with Facebook attempting to get you the most leads for the best price. You can also manually set the value of that lead.

You also have the option of using CPC bidding.

Much of the ad creation process is identical to what you would do when creating a typical link ad. You’ll need to provide:

• Text that goes above the image
• Link headline
• Link description
• Image (1200×628 pixels)

Note that while Facebook will pull the headline, description and image from meta data for link ads, you’ll need to provide those manually for lead ads.

You’ll also need to select a CTA button.

Advertisers have the following CTA options:

• Apply Now
• Download
• Get Quote
• Learn More
• Sign Up
• Subscribe

How to Create a Facebook Lead Form

Now you’ll need to select or create a lead form. Further down the page during ad creation, you’ll see this.

Click the button to create a new form. Then you’ll get the following view…

First name your lead form and click “Next.”

By default, Facebook will request Email and Full Name, but click the link to show more options.

Now a world of options will be opened up to you based on name, address, phone number, demographic information and work questions.

You can also add a custom question. Click “Add a question” at the bottom.

Facebook brings up requests based on automotive, education, e-commerce, B2B, professional services, health insurance, auto insurance, need help and purchase intent. For each of these, Facebook will request information (like “Choose a car brand”) and you can enter potential responses that a user can select from.

Here are all of the options…

Automotive:

• Car make
• Car model
• Trim
• Year of make
• Car dealership

Education:

• Interested field of study
• Current field of study
• Highest level of education
• When do you plan to enroll?
• Course of interest
• Campus location
• What degree are you interested in

Ecommerce:

• How often do you want to hear from us
• Select a category

B2B:

• Size of company
• Size of sales team
• Primary trade

Professional Services:

• Type of legal service

Health Insurance:

• Health insurance coverage status

Auto Insurance:

• Annual mileage

Need Help:

• Need help
• What are you looking for
• What is the problem
• Select services

Purchase Intent:

• Time to purchase
• Time to join
• Size of budget
• Waitlist

You can also choose to create up to three custom questions from scratch by clicking “Add Custom Question” at the top right.

You can either leave the answer open ended or provide options the user can select from.

When you’re ready, click “Next” and you’ll be taken to the privacy policy and disclaimer view.

Provide a link to your privacy policy. If you don’t have one, you need one on your site before getting your form and ad approved. You may want to try the Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy WordPress plugin.

If there are any disclaimers you want to add, enter it here. Otherwise, leave it blank and click “Next.”

Finally, add a link to your website. After the user has submitted your form, they will be given a link they can click.

While it would make sense for this to be a link to a landing page on your site, Facebook doesn’t allow you to customize your text for the CTA. So doing so may be confusing.

After adding the link, you’ll be prompted to preview your form.

Are you ready? You’re done! Just click “Create Form.”

How to Access Leads from Facebook Lead Ads

Once your lead ad starts running, the primary question from marketers has been, “Where do my leads go?” While it would be nice if these leads were automatically sent to your CRM (we’ll get to solutions on that in a minute), you have to collect them manually via a CSV file.

Go to your page and click “Publishing Tools” at the top right and then “Lead Ads Forms” on the left.

You should then see a list of your active forms. Click the “Download” link to export your new contacts. You’ll then need to manually import them into your CRM.

If you’re doing this as a manual process, I strongly recommend that you export and upload at least once per day — particularly if users are expecting an immediate response.

My Experiment with Facebook Lead Ads

During my experiment with this, I’ve seen some great results. I wanted to run lead ads for my main lead magnet, my 12 Tips ebook.

I’ve been promoting this ebook since the end of February, getting an average of $.71 per email address. Since it’s getting old, though, that cost has been going up — now averaging $.88 during the past 30 days.

On mobile, that cost has been a little bit higher — $.80 per lead overall and $.85 during the past 30 days. So lead ads would be a great experiment!

I created the following lead ad…

Here’s the form that comes up after clicking the image or CTA…

And here are my results…

As you can see, I’m averaging a cost of $.45 per registration, which is a little more than half of what I was getting before!

What About Lead Quality?

One of the questions I had about this was whether prefilling information from a user’s profile would make it too easy for the user. Would it pull an invalid email address? Would it attract leads from people who weren’t that interested?

In terms of invalid email addresses, a small sample test has shown no issue with this. I emailed the list of contacts that I compiled with a lead ad (at the time it was over 100) and had 100% deliverability (no bounces). The question regarding quality still remains if it isn’t a primary address, but the emails I collected were valid in all cases.

Features Coming to Facebook Lead Ads

As much as I love lead ads, they’ve had some weaknesses. Facebook is addressing those with today’s announcement, rolling out several enhancements.

CRM Integration

My biggest beef with lead ads was that you had to access your leads manually. That’s a major pain, and also a poor experience if after clicking the ad the user needs to wait for a response. CRM integration was needed!

Note, however, that this integration will not be native within Facebook. You’ll need to work with one of Facebook’s marketing partners (currently this includes Eloqua, Driftrock, Marketo, Maropost, Sailthru and Salesforce). I’m personally using DriftRock Lead Response (affiliate link). I use DriftRock for both lead ad CRM integration (with Lead Response) but also for email Custom Audience integration and syncing (with DriftRock Flow).

Desktop Placement

While lead ads are important for performance of mobile lead collection, I was disappointed that these were initially tested only on mobile. However, that’s going to change as Facebook will be bringing lead ads to desktop as well!

Lead Ads with Video

Want to collect a lead from a video ad? That will be possible soon!

Lead Ads with Carousel

This actually came up for me the other day. I have insane success with carousel ads, but what if I wanted to use one of the image links to collect a lead? Until now, that would mean sending the user to my website. In the future, lead ads will come to carousel ads as well!

Your Turn

What do you think about lead ads and these recent updates? Have you started experimenting? What are you seeing?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Lead Ads: Coming to Desktop, Carousel, Video, CRM Integration appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.