Is the Lead Form Asset Worth Your Time as an Advertiser?

A lead form asset is an ad extension that allows you to collect potential customer information directly within the ad as an advertiser. Users don’t need to visit your site to submit their information, which means it’s saving everyone a few steps in the process.

But the question is whether this is necessarily a good thing? Is it even possible to get leads from users this way? And what about the quality of these leads compared to the “hassles” of setting up lead form assets?

But let’s first take a closer look at what a lead form extension is:

A lead form extension lets you collect information like name, phone number, email, city, postal code, state, country, etc. from potential customers. Additionally, work-related information such as company, job title, work email, and phone number can be collected. You can also ask users to confirm if they are over a certain age if it’s relevant to the product you’re selling.

You can choose whether to optimize your lead asset to collect as many leads as possible or to gather leads of the highest quality. Quality here means leads that are more likely to become customers. Depending on what you’re collecting leads for, there may be cases where volume is more important than quality.

Advantages: 

1. It can help drive leads that can result in sales.
2. It can help get more users into your conversion flow.
3. It makes it easy for users who want to contact your business.
4. You only pay when a user clicks “submit” on their information.

Where it appears and how to get it 

The lead form extension can be seen in these campaign types: Search, Video, Performance Max, and Display campaigns – making it useful for many advertisers.

Even though the lead form asset is a quick and smart way to generate leads, you should be mindful of GDPR-legislation and take the correct measures when collecting the lead information. Since this information can be accessed directly in Google Ads, it means others could get their hands on the users’ data too. Naturally, we want to avoid this at all costs.

Luckily, you can use something called a “webhook” to send user data directly into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, ensuring that everything is GDPR compliant.

However, you may experience that this is not always as straightforward to implement as you’d like, since integrations with CRM systems might be hidden behind a paywall. Using a webhook also requires updates to the privacy policy. But this won’t be problematic for everyone, as it depends on the advertiser’s CRM setup.

So, even though the setup-steps in Google Ads are pretty straightforward, there is an extra layer added with the so-called “webhoo”k that demands more from you as an advertiser. Nevertheless, if you can set up a webhook, it is possible to start using the lead form asset effectively.

Can work for any advertiser, but perhaps not for the any user 

In theory, lead forms can be used by any advertiser that wants to collect information. They can be a great option if you’re selling products, services, etc. that involve a longer buying process and require dialogue with a potential customer. In that case, the customer would likely want to contact your business as part of the buying process. You also have the option of applying an upper-funnel focus, collecting leads for your conversion flow with the aim of achieving other KPIs than direct sales.

In other words, lead ad formats can easily work for you as an advertiser. But the question is, if a potential customer would be willing to share their information without even having visited your website? It might be, that they don’t know your brand or aren’t familiar with your products. And if they do decide to share their information, how invested are they if they haven’t visited your website? Would you be willing to share your information with a company and let them contact you without visiting their website?

In theory, the lead form asset is a smart feature that makes it “easy” to collect leads. But it is worth bearing in mind the challenges of collecting data in CRM systems with a webhook and the question of the quality of the leads – and whether any leads will come in at all. So, as an advertiser, you should consider whether lead form assets are worth the effort. If the conditions around your brand, products and KPIs are right, however, it might be a clever way to collect quick leads.

Would you like to explore the opportunities within lead form assets? Then reach out to Mette Nørgaard Gregersen, Senior SEA Strategy Specialist at GroupM Nexus at [email protected]