Remember when the only option available used to be landing pages to capture leads?
We all know digital marketing is about testing and trying to find what works for your target audience. You need to run a couple of tests, with a couple of options, different creatives and then decide on what and where to spend your limited marketing budget.
The A/B test for landing pages is facilitated by many DIY landing page builders that appeared on the market in recent years however this was not enough. The process was not simple enough for a marketer to create a successful campaign and measure the ROI.
Fortunately, the social media giants understood well the problem and introduced social media Lead Generation forms. First, was Facebook with their simple and customizable Lead Ads and then LinkedIn followed the trend and added the same functionality using InMail.
Ultimately, generating leads has gotten easier with these tactics, but you have to ask yourself if you’re sacrificing quality? Only you and your company can answer that question. The lead gen forms now give you an opportunity to get a larger volume of leads and it’s up to you to solve the problem around the quality of those leads and how to manage that.
Just yesterday, Google confirmed it is rolling out Lead Form Extensions in Google Ads. Now, you’re able to capture leads with your text Ad campaigns through a new lead form extension. Extensions in text ads have opened up a new world allowing us to add more data, now we can use those extensions to capture leads, a la Facebook Lead Ads.
How lead extensions will work
The lead gen ads will look just like a promotion extension and will be displayed in a call-out box with an icon. First, you select the campaign then you choose the call to action button, write the text that can take up to 30 characters and create a lead form. The form can include a headline, business name and description. The character limitation for the form is 200.
Here is how to attach a lead form extension to a search ad:
- Login to Google Ads
- In the page menu, find Ads and Extensions, click on the field and then on the top of the page find Extensions and click again.
- Now, you can add the Lead form extension by clicking on the plus button.
- After doing that you will need to accept the terms of service and then create the lead form extension.
- Next, you can select on which campaigns you would like to attach your lead form extension, and you are done.
You can select the type of fields you will use or what type of information you will collect with your form. Currently, the fields are limited to name, email, phone, and postal code.
Compared to Facebook, this is a limited set of fields. On Facebook, you can add personal questions, demographic questions, work information you can even add the national ID number for some countries. Some of these fields can be pre-filled with the data available on a public profile, therefore the process of collecting data can be simplified. Pre-filling the data on Google is not available, thus the limited fields on the form.
Other than that, the rest of the process is similar. On the lead ads, you can add a header image and you need to include a link to your privacy policy. In the end, you must also agree with Google’s terms of service. After completing the form you will be redirected to a completion page where you will have a chance to redirect people to “visit website” or “download”.
Customization on the completion page is allowed on the summary text and the call to action button. The delivery of the data is possible via webhook to your customer data management or directly to your CRM where you can receive your data in real-time.
Why Lead Extensions are important
Lead Extensions are important because Digital Marketers now have the opportunity to capture more leads (in terms of volume) via Search Ads directly. This should be a much easier process overall and give marketers the ability to increase volume while working on improving the quality over time.
In the past, Google tried a couple of times to capture lead data from search ads. Unfortunately, all of the attempts were unsuccessful. Back in 2010, Google introduced contact form extensions, where leads were delivered via email, but this idea never came out of beta. Google had another attempt in 2011 with cost per lead ads, allowing users to submit their data from the ad, however that never came out of beta either.
Hopefully this time we see a wider adoption and Google will finally help us with the lead generation process by catching Search Ads up to the Social Ads space in terms of lead generation.
If you need help with Google Ads and Pay Per Click or Facebook Ads Management to increase lead generation, contact us today!
