What is Lead Ads?
Facebook Lead Ads creates an automatic connection between your Facebook forms and your Emarsys account, allowing you to capture new leads from any Facebook form directly into your Emarsys database. These leads are added to a contact list for each form, so you can target them with tailored welcome programs.
The only prerequisites are a working, connected Facebook Ads account and a form. You can connect to forms that are already active, or create new forms and activate them once your Lead Ads connection has been established. As soon as the form is active on Facebook and connected to a Lead Ads Subscription in Emarsys, all new registrations are passed directly to Emarsys.
Important note: Since the Facebook forms are publicly available and open for anyone to submit any contact details, new leads collected in Facebook are not automatically given an opt-in to your marketing campaigns. Therefore, the first action you should take with new registrations is to secure a double opt-in.
Creating your first new Leads Ads Subscription
Lead Ads subscriptions are created in the same way that you create new audiences. Before you start, please make sure that you have followed all the instructions in our Connecting to Facebook guide, or you may not be able to see all of the pages and forms you expect. Then, proceed as follows:
- On the Assets tab, click Create New Asset and then click Facebook Lead Ad Subscription.
- Select the Ad account, then the page where the form is hosted, and finally the form itself. The read-only Subscription name is auto-generated from the selected page and form. This name will be used for the contact list that collects the new leads from the form.
- Once you have selected your form, map the fields in the form to your Emarsys database fields.
- The fields in the Facebook form are automatically mapped to existing Emarsys database fields if they have the same name. For example, the Facebook form field Email is automatically mapped to the Emarsys database field Email.
- You have to map one of the form fields to either the Emarsys Email or Mobile field, since these are needed to detect whether a contact already exists or not. If both are mapped, the Email field has priority.
A field in the Facebook form can be mapped to any single-choice Emarsys database field (both system fields and custom fields). For more information, see: Single-choice fields and their values and Creating custom fields.
If you map a field from the form to a single-choice Emarsys field, please verify that the values from the form are the same as values of the field choices. Otherwise, the field will be skipped in the contact registration process and you will receive a notification that parts of the lead could not be registered.
- The Opt-in checkbox determines whether to automatically set the Opt-in field to
TRUEfor new leads.
Facebook forms are publicly available and open for anyone to submit any contact details, so you should use this option with extreme caution. Emarsys strongly recommends that you secure a double opt-in before you engage with the new leads in any way.
- Click Save. Your Lead Ads subscription is now displayed with this as the type in the Assets list.
- Updated - This column shows the time when the last lead came in.
- Status - If this column shows Disconnected, that means you do not have the necessary permissions for this page.
- Size - The total of all leads who have come in. If you hover your mouse cursor over it, you will see the numbers for new and existing leads.
Contact lists
Two new contact lists are created for every subscription, with the name Lead Ad Subscription: <subscription name> (Existing Leads) and (New Leads). These lists collect all contacts registering through this form, and will be visible in the Contact Lists page as soon as the first contact is added to it.
If you delete a subscription and then recreate it using the same form, as long as you continue to use the same name as the original subscription, new leads will continue to be added to the original contact lists.
The Lead Ads External Events
After the creation of your first lead ads subscription, Emarsys creates two external events for you that will be used across all of your Lead Ads subscriptions:
- CRM Ads: Existing Lead – This event triggers when a contact who already exists in your Emarsys database registers through a Lead Ads form.
- CRM Ads: New Lead – This event triggers when an unknown contact registers through a Lead Ads form.
These external events are immediately available for use in the Automation Center. See Using CRM Ads in Automated Programs below.
Emarsys uses the contact email address to identify existing contacts, so if a contact uses a different email address for their Facebook profile they will be treated as a new lead.
Editing the field mappings and Opt-in
Managing the new registrations
You can keep track of how many registrations your form has collected by checking the Size column in the Asset list. You can also check the size of the contact list with the same name as the Lead Ads subscription in the Contact Lists page. There will be one list for new contacts (leads) as well as one for already existing contacts (duplicates).
You can now engage with these new registrations, for example, by adding them to a welcome program, by using the contact list directly as a recipient source.
Since many of the features in Emarsys work with dynamic segments rather that lists, we recommend that you create a segment based on this contact list. You will need to define a pair of mutually exclusive contact criteria that will ensure every new lead is in the segment, regardless of the field values they submitted, for example, email is empty OR email is not empty, as shown below:
Using Lead Ads in Automated Programs
Here are some ideas how to automate your Lead Ads subscription even further.
Welcome blueprint for new and existing contacts
The Automation Center has a blueprint called CRM Ads: Facebook Lead Ads which is specifically designed to engage with both new leads and existing contacts who have registered through Facebook.
This program is triggered by the two external events created when you created your first Lead Ads Subscription (see above). When it is active, all contacts who have registered on Facebook will enter it. You should use this blueprint once only and add a filter for every Lead Ads subscription that you have.
This blueprint works as follows:
- The contacts enter the program on one of the two paths, according to whether they are new leads or not.
- The next node is a filter node which checks which Lead Ads subscription they registered through. You should add a filter node for every subscription that you want to include in this program. In the above example, we have included two subscriptions for two different language versions of the same form.
- The next node is a welcome email.
Important: Since this is a transactional program, the first email in each path will ignore the opt-in status of the contacts. Therefore, you can use this blueprint to secure a double-opt-in with the first email, if you do not want to use the Opt-in status checkbox for all subscriptions.
- You can now add as many other nodes as you want, depending on your marketing objectives.
Important: Subsequent emails will not ignore the opt-in status of contacts, so contacts without an opt-in value of TRUE will not receive them.
Simple welcome program for new contacts only
You can also create a program yourself by using the New Contact entry point and following that with a segment node which checks the contact against the segment you created for the list:
Since the New Contact entry node behaves as a batch entry node, the first email will require the contacts to have opt-in. Therefore, you must ensure that the Opt-in checkbox is active for this subscription, otherwise, none of the new contacts will receive the welcome email.
Testing your Facebook forms
If you want to test that your Facebook form is working correctly before you push it live, you can use the Facebook Lead Ads Testing Tool:
Frequently asked questions
- What if an existing contact submits the Facebook form?
If a contact that is already in your Emarsys database submits a Lead Ads form, it will trigger the external event CRM Ads: Existing Lead (see The Lead Ads External Events above). The contact fields, even if they contain new values, are not updated.
- How does this affect my Facebook Ads budget?
It doesn’t. Lead Ads is not connected in any way to your Ads budget or bidding strategies, and there are no additional costs based on traffic or conversions.
- Do the new registrations have opt-in?
No. You should not include an opt-in in your Facebook form because these are publicly available and there is no guarantee that the email address really belongs to the person submitting the form. Your first welcome email for these new contacts should contain an opt-in confirmation link. Only after this link has been clicked should the new contact be regarded as having opted in.
- What happens if I delete a subscription and recreate it using the same form? Will the new contacts be added to the previous contact list?
Yes. As long as the list has not been deleted or renamed, Lead Ads will recognize it when it auto-generates the subscription name. All contacts previously added will stay in the contact list and new registrations will be added to it.
- Is it possible to import audiences from Facebook to Emarsys?
No, unfortunately, it is not possible.
- What if an expected Facebook page is not listed on the Create Facebook Lead Ad Subscription wizard?
If an expected Facebook page is not listed in the Facebook page drop-down on the the Create Facebook Lead Ad Subscription wizard, then make sure the Facebook user account used to connect to the Ads account has the proper permissions to access the Facebook page. It must have one of the following roles to see the Facebook page listed: Admin, Editor, Moderator, Advertiser or Analyst.
Additionally, the Facebook page needs admin rights as well.
However, an Advertiser, Analyst, Editor or Moderator will lack the permission to create a Lead Ad subscription so the Admin role is recommended for Facebook pages.
Read more about the different page roles and what can they do in the Facebook documentation.
