Facebook’s runaway success is something that is quite frequently difficult to conceptualize. With over 1.86 billion active users, its market share is approximately one quarter of the entire world population, with each member spending an average of 20 minutes per day on its platform.
For businesses, the size and reach of Facebook has made marketing on the site a necessity, as enterprises that refuse to are consequently reducing the size their potential consumer-base greatly. Among the myriad of methods for marketing that exist on Facebook, one of the newest and most effective technologies to emerge is the existence of lead ads.
Lead ads are a publically available service by Facebook in which individuals (or businesses) pay in order for an advertisement to be plastered in a user’s newsfeed. Fundamentally though, what are the advantages to using lead ads, and why are so many businesses interested?
Speed and Ease of Use
The user accessibility of lead ads is one of the primary reasons it has become such an effective marketing tool. Traditionally, when users were to click on a website ad they were inundated with an abundance of personal data fields which they are required to provide. This process is exacerbated on mobile devices, where the duration of these actions on average increase up to 40 percent. As Facebook already possesses key user information, (such as email and phone numbers) registration is a considerably more streamlined process as the data is immediately entered without any user input. The reduction in laboriousness of the procedure provides extra incentive for users to use lead ads over traditional web ads, as the transaction is considerably less painful.
This advantage is further compounded when you take into account the connection between mobile and desktop devices. For traditional Internet ads, mobile conversion rates make up roughly 34 percent of the totality, in spite of being 64 percent of total ad clicks. This is partly due to the increased difficulty of entering fields of data on miniature mobile screens. Though as these data requirements are already available through lead ads, the process is rendered remarkably simpler. As a result, a recent analysis showed that 54 percent of total conversion rates of lead ads occur through mobile devices.
Furthermore, conversion rates are shown to be more than twice as prevalent in lead ads than conventional banner ads. This was also in part due to the fact that lead ads do not direct to an external landing page. All data entry is done within the format of Facebook itself. Consequently users, being more familiar with Facebook’s layout, are more likely to enter their information rather than through an unfamiliar website. This also results in less work for campaigns; as exorbitant amounts of designers and developers needed to create external websites are superfluous when the requisite information is integrated into the very Facebook format.
This streamlined UI is not just limited to potential customers, but businesses too, which leads into my next point; the use of targeted marketing.
Targeted marketing
When businesses begin to utilize lead ads, they are asked to choose from a range of objectives that they wish to achieve. The principal effect of this is that the advertisers in question can engage in a form of targeted marketing. Advertisers are asked to distinguish the location, age demographics, interests and Facebook behaviors of potential clients so they can narrow down their audience to a small portion of Facebook’s 1.86 billion users.
Facebook, being a multi-national, multi-billion dollar company has employed some of the most talented social scientists and engineers available. The sheer depth of expertise under Facebook’s employ is simply on a level to which most businesses can’t achieve. Thus deferring to Facebook when it comes to targeted marketing is an advantage to most businesses, as the technology effectively carry out this goal is simply unavailable to the vast majority of corporations.
Furthermore, as the nature of Facebook requires user interaction, lead ads can be tailored more effectively to user interest than more conventional Internet ads. Beyond the preliminary data like age, location and nationality (information which is unavailable to most advertisers) Facebook keeps a record of the information detailing what groups individuals belong to, and what articles and content they like. The repository of all of this information allows advertisers to more accurately cater to audiences, as it provides them an opportunity to be more specific as to the type of users to which they want to target, allowing for more effective marketing.
Customization for Advertisers
Beyond the specificity to which they target users, lead ads have shown themselves to be very malleable to change by the advertisers themselves. Lead ads offer companies six different “call-to-action” buttons, which include Sign up, Subscribe, Learn more, Apply now, Get Quote, and Download. This malleability in ad construction allows businesses to pursue multiple avenues of advertising, and when coupled with native signup flow, it is consequently more likely to lead to better conversion rates for campaigns.
Beyond the offered variability in CTA buttons is also variability in fields of data capture. Lead ads offer 18 different fields of entry to ask potential users. This, when amalgamated with the aforementioned features gives businesses multiple avenues for further long-term advertising.
The Necessity
For much of its history, Facebook had refused to pursue traditional modes of advertising. The internal philosophy was that an inundation with advertisements would hamper potential user growth of the platform, and it needed a period of gestation before it could be successfully monetized. Now that its requisite user base has been formed, Facebook has seamlessly integrated advertisements into its platform with lead ads, and for most businesses, its use may be necessary when attempting to increase their reach.
