Lead generation – How to use Facebook Ads campaigns to collect contacts of potential customers?

One important way to acquire data of new audiences, whom we can then encourage to make specific purchasing decisions, is to collect contacts, also commonly known as leads. This is most applicable to personalized offers, or those that require the recipient to be highly engaged in the process or have prolonged exposure to the offer.

Contacts can be collected both immediately to present an offer and by enticing recipients with a reward for leaving a lead – such as a downloadable file, participation in a free event, while leaving yourself a gateway for later marketing contact to the same people through appropriate data processing consents.

When to choose a campaign under contact acquisition?

When to choose a campaign under Facebook Ads Contacts we can already choose when the lead acquisition will take place on the website, but the ad system itself provides us with additional options – using the contact form directly in the ad (i.e. Facebook Lead Ads), redirecting to a conversation on Messenger. It’s worth using these options if for some reason we can’t use the landing page, or it’s not adequately effective, and creating a dedicated page with a form is beyond our reach.

It’s also worth considering how our customers behave – how much they are willing to leave Facebook to look at an offer, and whether it’s even necessary, but whether it’s enough for them to answer a few simple questions to help prepare a tailored proposal.

Must warn you, however, that due to current privacy rules for ad actions broadcast in or from Europe, ads that take you to messages on Messenger are not available within the Contacts target – instead, you would then have to choose to optimize for link clicks, so the Traffic target would be more appropriate.

How to configure a new Facebook Ads campaign

To create a campaign under lead acquisition, in the Campaign Builder in the Ads Manager, among the 6 available Facebook Ads campaign goals, select Contacts. Already on creation, we are prompted that with such a campaign we can acquire instant forms, website conversions or phone calls.

Sensitize the use of specific ad categories – if we are promoting an offer from the credit industry, employment, real estate or social / political topics, it will be necessary to select the appropriate category at the campaign level. This cannot be avoided, the Facebook Ads system upon detecting that we have not done so, although we should – will automatically reject our ad content. The specific category also affects targeting at the ad set level – we can no longer narrow down the age or gender of the audience, the smallest supported radius from the selected location is 16 kilometers, and the available list of targeting criteria on interests is also limited.

When configuring the ad set, we also need to declare where exactly we intend to solicit customer contacts. The available options are:

• Web site – if we solicit contact form fills on our site
• Instant Forms – if we intend to acquire contacts through Facebook Lead Ads
• Messenger – in our region currently blocked for this purpose
• Simultaneous targeting on Forms and Messenger – in theory, Facebook will decide on the fly whether a person is more likely to fill out an instant form or its content displayed as a conversation on Messenger.
• Calls – when we care about calls to our business, instead of the page, we can encourage phone calls
• Application – when we want to collect contacts directly in the application

Both if we choose a website and an app as a place to collect leads, it will be necessary to implement the Facebook pixel in the website or Facebook SDK in the app beforehand and additionally measure the events of interest – already when creating the ad set, we need to indicate which exact conversion we want to optimize. In the case of a Facebook campaign with a Contacts goal, the available events are related to data acquisition or interest – for events more related to e-commerce, we need to select a Sales campaign goal.

The rest of the parameters at the campaign and ad set level are already not very different from other Facebook Ads campaign goals – we need to select the company page that will be the sender of the ad message, specify the size and type of budget, and the start and end dates. If this is our first campaign with an instant form for a given business page, Facebook will display the terms and conditions for acceptance.

The only thing left to do is configure the content of the ad on FB – if we are redirecting to a page, to an app or to connections, most of the work has already been done. The case is different for instant forms, which we still need to select when creating the ad.

How to create a new instant form

If we have decided to create an instant form for Facebook Lead Ads campaign, after clicking the „Create” button above the list of forms, a new form wizard will open for us. It’s worth taking a look at the second tab Settings even before the rest of the configuration – there we can choose the language of the form, and whether we want only those who see the ad to be able to fill out the form, or whether it can be shared, though.

When it comes to the form content itself, at the very beginning we have to choose what kind of form we want to create. We can choose from Larger Volume – a simplified form, especially convenient for mobile devices, Stronger Intent – which introduces an additional review screen to confirm that the user definitely wants to leave their information, and a third option – Custom Form – which allows us to include additional sections of information about the company or the offer.

The form can also be used to create a custom form.

Each form begins with an introduction – that is, a headline and a description of the form in which we can outline exactly what we offer, but with the Custom Form, the introduction is much more structured. The available description is then only 81 characters long, and we can still supplement it with unique features of the offer, a step-by-step description of the process, a carousel in the form about the products (we can choose from as many as 6 headings – Products, Services, Best sellers, Plans, Courses and Programs), customer reviews, or an additional benefit of leaving data. Each section – including the basic information – users can then expand upon request – thus avoiding being overwhelmed by so much content at once.

The next screen to configure is questions to the recipient. In the settings of this form screen, we can indicate which contact details and information we want as a potential recipient – but beware – with specific ad categories, we still cannot either explicitly or through custom questions ask about those user characteristics that may contribute to discrimination.

The next screen to be configured is the audience questions.

The most frequently selected fields in the form regarding the user are email address, first name and last name – hence the default setting of these particular fields. In addition, we can select additional data, such as a phone number. If we wish, we can also change the retrieval of the full name from single-field to separate fields for first name and last name – this is especially important if we later import this data into the CRM system.

More recently, we can also filter recipients – ask them an additional question before filling out the form, and depending on the answer settings, not allow people who don’t meet our criteria to fill it out. This may increase the price of the contact, but it also increases its value.

A very legally relevant section is the Privacy Policy – another instant form screen. In the basic version, we provide a link to our privacy policy on the company’s website, but it’s worth adding a custom disclaimer. This is where we can include information about the purpose of using contacts – that is, for what matter and by what means we will communicate with them, and indicate which data processing consents are necessary for us and which are merely optional.

The final stage of the form is a thank you screen – the user has already left their data, now they can leave the form, or still go to the website or call the company at the phone number we indicated in the form. Facebook does not look favorably on direct PDF targeting and rejects such forms (the privacy policy should not be in PDF form either), but recently it has provided a third thank you option – whereby we can add such a PDF or PNG/JPEG image up to 10 MB as media directly to the form.

If in the earlier settings of the instant form we selected a narrowing question and set it as a filter (i.e., that at least one of the answers indicates that our offer does not fit the person), at the end, instead of one section, we will see two – one for people who have been qualified as contacts, the other for people whose data we will not retrieve. We can still inform them of this, and encourage them to go to the landing page to see the rest of the offer.

The rest of the form settings in the second tab are already for more advanced configurations – we can give our own names to individual response fields, describe marketing consents in shorthand for easier reading, and add additional parameters, such as the name of the investment – so that when such contacts are automatically flowed into CRM solutions, leads go exactly where they need to go.

If the CRM you use does not allow such integration – filled Facebook Lead Ads forms can still be downloaded from the relevant section of the company website by users with such access.

Subsequent forms can already be created by duplicating the previous ones and adjusting the individual fields accordingly – making the work much easier. Admittedly, an already published contact form cannot be edited, but if we want to stop the work in progress, we can save the draft version of the form and finish the creation later – of course, we can’t use it in ads until it’s finished.

The form can also be used for advertising.

Summary of Contacts Facebook Ads campaign

A campaign with the goal of Contacts is a good choice to attract leads interested in your offer, and using instant forms is an effective way to regularly modify the content of your offer with little time and skill, providing users with a convenient and quick way to leave their information, which promotes the acquisition of leads from your campaign.

If creating your own instant form seems like a major undertaking, by enlisting the support of an experienced digital marketing agency, you’ll gain confidence that the prepared form meets the right conditions and that its content takes into account industry best practices.