How Facebook Lead Generation Ads Work

Facebook Lead ads are one of the most powerful ways of generating leads from people on mobile devices that I’ve come across in my 20 years of working in the online space.

If you’re not familiar with the basics of how Facebook Lead Ads work and why they’re so powerful, here’s a quick explaining what they look like and how they work.

Little has changed since then, but to take you through the basics of how they work and why their such a powerful lead generation tool, here’s a step by step guide.

Step 1: Your ad gets shown to your target audience

Firstly, Facebook’s knowledge of the users on their platform make it the most powerful advertising tool out there. You can use Facebook ad manager to discover your target audience, then displayed your ad to them via the Facebook news feed and Instagram, predominantly on mobile devices.

Step 2: Your audience sees your ad and clicks on it

In the example above, the call to action is “Download”. Clicking on the add, your audience is then presented with a form.

Now pay attention, here’s the powerful bit…

The form gets pre-filled with the person’s data from in their Facebook profile.

PRE-FILLED. That means they don’t have to use two fat fingers or thumbs to try to enter their details.

This makes submitting a form on a mobile device as simple as clicking a button.

For us marketers, that’s brilliant!

At the most basic, you might just request their email address.

But you can request a heap of other info depending on how qualified you want your leads to be and how you intend on following up once they’ve sent you their info.

Crazy huh!? Notice in that list you can ask, among other things Short Answers? So you can make up as creepier question as you want (*within Facebook’s advertising policy rules or course).

Step 3: Confirm & Submit Detail

You’re audience is asked to confirm and submit their details. Then they are shown a confirmation screen. At this point you can prompt them to visit your website, Download something you’ve promised them in your ad (as per this example), or even call your business.

Step 4: Download Your Leads

BOOM!! Your lead’s details are submitted to Facebook where you can download them as a CSV (Excel type) file.

Step 5: Lead forwarding & notifications

Yes, step 4 is a slightly antiquated and very much annoying step in getting your grubby little sales hands on your leads. That’s why we built LeadSync.

LeadSync will send Facebook leads ad alerts to your email inbox. But if you have a more fancy sales funnel with a CRM for example, LeadSync can send leads there too.

So hopefully now you can see what a powerful advertising format Facebook Lead ads are for generating.

Next Step: Build your first Facebook Lead Ad Campaign.