Have you tried using Meta Lead Ads in your advertising mix? Not convinced? Here are 4 proven tips for generating qualified Meta leads in 2024!
A lead (inquiry) refers to a potential customer who has expressed interest in becoming a paying customer. For a lead to be qualified, it must meet the necessary criteria indicating suitability for the product or service.
Meta Lead Ads are often associated with collecting leads of below-average quality—low-quality leads. This is a valid and normal occurrence. In practice, it’s quite common for two-thirds of leads generated from Meta ads to be irrelevant, for various reasons.
For example, if a person who expressed interest in a product or service:
- forgot or doesn’t realize they filled out a form,
- chose a different brand—your competitor,
- is genuinely interested but does not meet all the qualification criteria.
1. Targeting
Classic targeting in Meta Ads (selecting target demographics, locations, custom audiences, and interests) is now supplemented by so-called Advantage+ targeting. This is the opposite of classic audience creation and a step toward automating targeting by using signals for a broad target audience.
The table below lists the situations in which each audience type is appropriate. For example, if you have created a new advertising account that includes a new Pixel with limited data, I recommend using the standard method for creating audiences.
What has been my experience? With the few exceptions mentioned above, I most often use the Advantage+ targeting method. I’ve always been frustrated when, after creating a targeting campaign, the tool displayed this message:
Even if the targeting worked and the suggestion tool was wrong, the cost per lead skyrocketed after the campaign launched (my small audience had already been reached by the ad, and Meta was testing additional ad rounds on the same users, hoping someone might be caught a second time). You’ll avoid this problem with Advantage+.
On the other hand, when using it, you’ll have to more or less say goodbye to evaluating performance at the level of segmented target groups within ad sets. It’s very likely that audiences will overlap when using a similar approach with Adv+ targeting.
2. Clear and Compelling Creative
Imagine you’re driving. It’s summer, and on the road outside a village, a woman is sitting under a parasol selling fruit. She has it displayed so people can see what she’s offering and catch the attention of passing drivers. In the car, you have only a fraction of a second to notice the vendor and what she’s selling.
You have a similarly short amount of time to capture a potential customer’s attention in their social media feed with your ad, especially when collecting leads.
If your creative doesn’t make it clear at first glance what service or product you’re offering, your campaign may yield not only irrelevant leads but also fewer of them. People simply won’t understand it.
An example of this is directly communicating benefits without introducing the product or service, or including a large amount of chaotically arranged information about the product or service in the ad copy.
It’s best to choose a few separate messages that you’ll test against each other. In the example below, we selected one clear message from the billing benefits of using an OMV fuel card, which became the campaign’s key visual—“Fuel up conveniently on your bill.”
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“Fill up conveniently on account.”
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3. Form Customization
Meta currently offers a choice of 3 form types:
- Volume-focused form (More volume) – this is the fastest to fill out and consists of custom and predefined questions.
- Higher intent – same as the volume-focused form. However, it includes a verification step for the entered data before submission.
- Rich creative – the newest form type, which adds the option to introduce a product, service, or company at the beginning, include testimonials, or offer a reward for completing the form (discount, free trial, etc.).
As a general rule, the simpler the form you create, the more leads you can expect from the ad. However, keep in mind that a higher volume of leads may lower their quality. This is not ideal, especially if you’re trying to generate leads through a sophisticated qualification process.
TIP: Set form sharing to “open.” A person who sees the ad can share it with someone else for whom it is relevant.
Form Questions
Meta automatically populates predefined questions based on the data available in your profile. However, this creates an opportunity for various fake profiles and bots to easily fill out your ad form, resulting in irrelevant leads.
You can eliminate fake inquiries by adding custom questions that the user must either fill out manually or choose from several options.
Custom questions can be elevated to an even higher level—filter questions. Based on the user’s response, you can set up logic that identifies whether a lead is relevant as soon as they fill out the custom question.
Example: You’re running a lead generation campaign focused on attracting job seekers only in the Bratislava area. Despite precise targeting of the Bratislava region, there will be people who don’t understand the ad or are simply looking for work in another region and fill out the form. By adding a filtering question about place of residence, you can prevent people outside Bratislava from submitting the form.
Relevance scale
Sometimes a lead may fall somewhere on the borderline of relevance—it doesn’t fully meet all the criteria for a qualified lead, but the person has shown interest, perhaps they’re just considering it and want to buy later, or they’re interested in the product/service and want to learn more about it.
Filtering questions doesn’t have to yield a black-and-white conclusion; based on the form responses, you can create a relevance scale.
Example of a simple relevance scale:
- #1 Relevant lead – interest in purchasing the product/service; after filling out the form, the prospect receives a message stating they will be contacted (within a specific timeframe).
- #2 (Still) relevant lead – does not meet the criteria for inclusion in group #1 (e.g., does not have a sufficient budget to use your services), but wants to know more; there is potential for a future purchase. After filling out the form, the prospect is given the option to schedule a paid consultation and subscribe to the newsletter.
- #3 Irrelevant lead – the prospect does not meet the criteria for Group #1 or #2, is not interested in, and is not considering purchasing the product/service. After filling out the form, they receive this information and may be redirected to the website where they can view other products/services.
4. Lead collection and evaluation
To ensure the process of collecting and evaluating leads from Meta ads is fast and seamless, you can easily improve it with the following steps:
Automating notifications for new leads
When collecting a large number of leads, it is time-consuming for the campaign manager to check several times a day how many leads have been acquired or to prepare an export of leads from the ad account for the client.
You can save time by automating this process. There are several useful tools that can handle these tasks for you, such as Zapier.
Zapier allows you to set up a multi-step automated process for recording leads in a clear spreadsheet and can also notify the client, for example via Gmail.
You can prepare a simple email template with essential information for the person who processes the leads.
You have just reduced not only the time you spend sending leads to the client, but also the time it takes for the lead to be contacted. Now it is up to the person evaluating the leads to make use of the time saved. However, they must be sufficiently informed about this.
Client Preparation
If an acquired lead isn’t contacted in a timely manner, they may lose interest. This means you’re losing potential customers—that is, relevant leads. Don’t forget to agree with the client on how the evaluation process will proceed.
If you make a commitment to a potential customer that you will contact them within a certain time frame, you must keep that promise. The sooner they are contacted, the better; however, if you cannot fulfill the commitment, do not make any promises.
How detailed the evaluation of the acquired leads will be is entirely up to the agreement between you and the person evaluating the leads. Each contact should include at least the information that the lead was contacted, along with its evaluation (is it a qualified lead? yes/no).
TIP: In addition to saving time, automation can also make it easier to assess relevance. For example, by determining a company’s revenue, which is one of the most common criteria for evaluating leads. Based on the company ID you obtained through Meta Lead Ads, you can use a function in the spreadsheet to get a link to the company’s profile on Finstat. This way, the person evaluating the leads will have all the necessary information in one place in the spreadsheet.
Additional fields are optional, but they will help you with a more detailed evaluation. Based on the data you share with the person evaluating the leads, you can create metrics that indicate the success of the campaigns. For example, the target relevance percentage of acquired leads or the target cost per relevant lead.
Final tip: Test—there is no single “right” combination
Different combinations of the measures mentioned may work for different segments, products, or services. It’s up to you to test the right combination. Take advantage of the targeting and lead form customization options Meta provides, and communicate clearly and concisely—not only with customers but also with your client—to ensure your acquired leads are as relevant as possible.
If you’re unsure about lead generation or would like to discuss your campaign, don’t hesitate to contact us.