Dive Brief:
- Facebook has rolled out a new ad unit, Lead Ads, that ease the process of lead generation via online forms on mobile devices.
- The ads offer users a two-click process where they tap an ad and then tap again to autofill a form with name and email address, or phone number, to be sent back to the advertiser.
- Lead Ads have been in beta since June and are now available worldwide in 30 languages. Land Rover is one brand that has been testing the new ad unit.
Dive Insight:
"You know what no one’s ever said? 'I love filling out forms,'" Facebook joked in a blog post announcing the new ad product. The social network is right: getting prospects to fill out online forms for lead gen has always been a challenge, and getting them to do so on mobile devices even more so.
In answer to this dilemma, Facebook has formally launched a new ad unit called Lead Ads that turn the task into two taps for users. Facebook explained in the blog post the company is testing several versions of Lead Ads that will allow people to sign up for things such as price estimates, newsletters and follow-up calls.
"The lead ads that we’re testing use a native signup flow within Facebook. This helps avoid a lot of the pain points usually associated with filling out forms, like having to leave one app and start a form in another app, and having to enter all of their information from scratch. Just a few taps and people are done," Facebook's blog post explained.
The unit is out of beta and available globally, and Land Rover was an early beta tester, even running A/B testing to find out how the ad unit performed. Kim Kyaw, Land Rover's digital marketing and social media manager, told Adweek, "Facebook's native lead ads outperformed link ads driving [people] to the website to fill out a lead form in terms of total leads and conversion rate, while driving a [quadrupled] reduction in cost per lead compared to previous social lead generation tactics."
