Are you advertising on Facebook and wondering what about the difference between a Lead Generation ad and a Conversion? I find that people often select the wrong objective and aren’t sure why it’s not working correctly.
A lot of people see “Lead Generation” and think, yes, that’s what I want – more leads! But that objective may not be what you think it is and
In this post you’ll learn when you need to choose each objective, and what you need to have in place before you choose either objective.
When you go into your Facebook Ads Manager and select Create Ad, here’s what you will see:
The Main Difference Between a Lead Generation Ad and a Conversion Ad
The biggest difference is a Lead Generation Ad happens all ON Facebook and a Conversion Ad you are sending the traffic OFF of Facebook (to your website that has your own Facebook Pixel installed on it)
If you have a “landing page” or “squeeze page” that you want the traffic to go to, then you need to select the Conversion Ad and you should make sure you have the Facebook Pixel set up correctly.
If you don’t have a landing page but want to collect leads, the Lead Generation ad is a perfect solution for you.
Here are some of the other differences between Lead Generation Ads and Conversion Ads.
| Facebook Lead Generation Ad | Facebook Conversion Ad |
|---|---|
| Gather Leads through a popup form ON Facebook | Gather Leads through an optin form on your website |
| NO website address or URL needed for this option | Direct traffic to the website or URL |
| Build a form to collect the data in Facebook | Form on your website typically comes from your email system |
| Form data goes into the Publishing Tools Section on your Facebook Page | Form data goes into your email system automatically |
| You can redirect someone to a website after they submit their form | You must redirect someone to another page on your website to register the conversion after they submit their form |
| Do not need the Facebook Pixel | Must use the Facebook Pixel |
| Facebook calculates the cost per lead based on when people submit their data in your form | Facebook calculates the cost per lead based on if they reach the Standard Event or Custom Conversion you specify in your Ad setup |
| Facebook pre-populates the form with the data that you ask for from the Facebook profile (can be easier for the user since they don’t need to type their email address) | Person must manually type in their data into your form on your website. |
| You have to manually download the data to get it into your email system (or pay for a service to automate the process) | The data is automatically added to your email system from your website optin form |
Here is my Facebook Live on the differences also:
Example of a Lead Generation Ad
If you are wondering about what a Lead Generation Ad looks like, here is an example. It looks just like a regular ad:
But when you select the “Download” button, you get a popup form:
Before You Run a Lead Generation Ad
Set up your Lead Form before you start so that you can make sure it looks the way you want. You can do this in your Publishing Tools section of your Facebook page. This is also where your Leads will be stored.
Your Lead form can have a different image from your Facebook Ad, or you can use the same image.
Before You Run a Website Conversion Ad
Before you run a Website Conversion Ad, you need to tell Facebook “what a lead looks like” for you by either adding the Standard Event code to the Thank you page or creating the Custom Conversion for your Thank you page.
So in this image, the Lead standard event has been added to the Thank you page. Then you would optimize your Ad around Leads.
Alternatively, you could create a Custom Conversion and you would name that Custom Conversion and optimize your ad specifically around that Custom Conversion.
In general, I’ve found better results with Website Conversion ads personally but you should test them and see which one works better for you.
Another point of confusion can be between a Traffic ad and a Website conversion ad. Visit my blog post here: https://www.andreavahl.com/facebook-advertising/facebook-advertising-difference-website-clicks-website-conversion-ads.php to get the details on those differences.
How about you, have you tried lead ads or conversion ads? Let me know how they worked for you in the comments below!
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