Ad tech is capable of some amazing feats. Behavioral data trackers can tell emailers who will open what kind of email when. Machine-learned platforms can predict what topics people are likely to share on social media the day after tomorrow. But the tech news that caused the most excitement in the past week had to do with the mundane task of filling out forms.
Pretty much out of the blue last week, Facebook announced the release of lead ads along with a who’s who roster of partners including Marketo, Oracle, and Salesforce. When an interested party clicks on a lead ad, that Facebook user’s contact information appears in an auto-filled form. One more click whisks the PII off to the advertiser’s database.
“We definitely think this is a big deal for marketers. One of the challenges they face is having a large enough addressable audience. Getting people to fill out that form is one of their big moments of truth,” says Chris Lynch, head of product marketing for Oracle Marketing Cloud.
Lynch’s counterpart on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Meghann York, couldn’t agree more. “Good quality leads are a huge issue among marketers. Anything that can cut down the friction in delivering them is crucial,” she says. “People engage in social media primarily on mobile phones, where filling out forms can be difficult. Lead ads will make the process so much more seamless.”
York’s point is well taken. During a session at the Direct Marketing Association’s &THEN show in Boston last week, Margot Vaughan, SVP of managed services at MasterCard, observed that up to 99% of forms initiated on mobile devices are not completed.
“Just a moderate increase in form conversion can have a huge impact on results for marketers,” Lynch says. “It’s great that they’re going to get that profile information, but it’s also great in that they can track what kind of advertising leads to people sharing that information.”
When Facebook users convert on a lead ad, their information automatically flows into an advertiser’s database if it is integrated with a lead ad partner like Salesforce or Oracle. “What we do on the marketing cloud side is create a table that we point at the Facebook table to collect the information,” says Lynch. There is no up-charge to Oracle clients for deploying the lead ad option.
Syncing with one of its platform partners, notes Facebook, is the best way for marketers to use lead ads, since customer data will flow into their CRM systems in real-time, allowing them to react quickly to the customer action. Other partners include Driftrock, Maropost, and Sailthru, and more will come on-stream in the months ahead, Facebook reports.
