Whether you’re growing a start-up or running a gigantic company, lead generation is essential to moving your business forward. While there are many tactics that can help you, generating quality leads can be a challenge. One effective way of generating leads is to use ad formats that are designed to generate more leads. Lead generation ad formats are available across various advertising channels, including Google Ads, Facebook and LinkedIn. In this article, we’ll cover how to create a lead form extension on Google Ads.
Let’s start by explaining what a “lead form extension” is.
It’s a Google Ads feature that helps advertisers capture the interest from potential customers across multiple Google properties. Lead form extensions allow people to submit their information directly in your ad instead of visiting a landing page. Also, if a user is signed into their Google account, then they’ll find their contact details already pre-populated, and so they can contact your business with one click. This saves the customer time in comparison to the classic route of visiting your site. (Image source: Google)
You can create lead form extensions across multiple campaign types – the eligible ones are search, video (beta), discovery and display campaigns. However, how they look or where they appear depends on the campaign type. (Image source: Google)
Of course, there are some requirements to be eligible to create a lead form extension, such as a good history of policy compliance or not being in a sensitive vertical such as personalised health services. To read more about the requirements on Google’s support page, click here. Before you start, ensure that you have a background image (1200 x 628), and the URL of your privacy policy page.
How to create a Lead Form extension
1 – Sign in to your Google Ads account, go to all campaigns, underneath the ‘Ads & extensions’ section, click ‘Extensions’. Then click the plus sign to open the ad extensions list in your account and select ‘Lead Form Extension’.
2- Select the campaigns that you’d like to add the lead form extension.
3- Start with writing a headline, your business name and description for your lead form.
4- Then continue with the ‘Questions’ section, where you will find some generic questions that you may want to ask in the lead form, such as phone number, email address or company name.
5 – The next step is the ‘Qualifying questions’ section, where you can find industry-specific or generic questions. These questions can be designed in a way that the users can answer by selecting from multiple choice or type a short answer.
6 – Add the link to your privacy policy page. This is required information, and if you don’t have a privacy policy page yet, you need to add one to your website.
7 – Add a background image in the next step. Recommended dimensions are 1200 x 628 (an aspect ratio of 1.91:1).
8 – The next step is adding a form submission message that people can see after completing the form. Depending on the campaign type, you can also add a call to action button with a URL. The CTA button can be ‘visit site’, ‘download’, ‘learn more’ or ‘shop now’.
9 – At this point, your lead form extension is almost ready to go! Now you need to decide how you will get the information collected by this extension. The default option is to download collected leads in the ad extensions table. However, you can only download leads that have been collected within the last 30 days. There’s a more sophisticated option, though; you can implement a webhook integration to send lead form data directly to your CDM or CRM software in real-time.
10 – Lastly, you need to select the lead form type. You can choose either ‘More Volume’ or ‘More Qualified’. By default, the ‘More Volume’ option is selected, but you can go with the ‘More Qualified’ option if you want to get leads with a greater interest in your business, but, as a result, you may get a fewer number of leads.
11 – Click ‘Save’!
Bonus: You can make a search ad always open to a lead form in an existing campaign by following the below steps:
- Select an existing Search campaign and go to settings.
- In the ‘Goal’ section, select ‘Leads’.
- In the ‘Lead form setting’ section, select ‘Always show the lead form when someone interacts with my ad’. (Here, we’re assuming you already have a lead form extension.)
- Click ‘Save’.
While we hope the lead form extension outlined in this article will help you grow your leads, it’s important to remember that every business is different, so experiments and tests are crucial. Track your progress closely to figure out what works best for your company.
Also, if you’re just getting started with Google’s Lead Form extensions and looking to generate more leads, get in touch with us online or over the phone!