Facebook Lead Ads

Improving the quality of leads gathered from Facebook ads and making it easier to follow up on them.

At Underbelly, we offer not only product design from the ground up but also team augmentation for large companies. This means that an Underbelly designer acts and functions just as an internal designer would on your product team. Because our agency has over seven years of experience working with Facebook products (which keep more than 90% of our internal employees busy), we can jump into projects quickly and provide impact almost immediately. For this project, one of Facebook's designers was preparing to go on maternity leave and needed someone to take over the design needs of an already established product called Lead Ads.

Overview

Lead Ads are advertisements that focus on collecting contact information from prospective customers to close deals; these ads are for products that aren’t purchased in a single online experience, including real estate, automobiles, and enterprise software. Lead Ads has been a rapidly growing business since it launched in 2015. Today, the business generates over 2 billion dollars of annual revenue for Facebook, serving over 280k monthly active advertisers, and driving over 2 million daily lead submissions. On the functionality side, the product has grown from a simple standard form that collected contact information into a multi-facet product, powering advertisers from many different businesses with unique requirements, such as CRM integration, native dealer booking, and custom disclaimers.

As a result of this rapid growth, some challenges had emerged. For starters, the look and feel of the product needed to be updated to match the new design language of Facebook. Additionally, the business needed features like “qualifying questions” for advertisers who want to improve lead quality as well as salesforce integration, which enables users to compare how their ads are performing and effectively follow up on leads.

Qualifying Question Creation

Facebook does a great job of collecting a large number of leads, but a big priority for them is to collect higher quality leads for their advertisers. One way to do this is by implementing a “Qualifying Question”; for example, a home insurance company is advertising on Facebook and they ask their Qualifying Question: “Are you a homeowner?” If the answer is yes, then the user’s information is collected and processed as a “qualifying lead.” This helps the sales teams target more high intent leads. We worked closely with the product manager to understand the main problem and business needs and collected feedback from the internal research team about what users want. After researching competitors’ solutions, we then worked to create possible interfaces for this solution. This included providing high fidelity wireframes with annotations for both the advertiser and consumer, determining how users would choose which answers qualified the leads, and creating a space for messaging around the different outcomes. These designs were vetted through both Underbelly and Facebook design critique processes. In addition to providing assets, we collaborated with the engineering team to answer their questions and provided QA throughout the process until the product was complete.

Salesforce Integration

With established products like Lead Ads, we can enter the project at any part of the development process. As a result, it's important that we be self-directed in gathering the information needed to get up to speed. The Lead Ads team had just conducted a round of research on their salesforce integration process and received feedback that it was confusing, so they decided to start over. With the information we had collected through user research, we worked with the research and development teams to provide a new integration process so that SMBs could integrate the data they were collecting with Facebook ads with their salesforce accounts, thus enabling their sales teams to use Salesforce to follow up with leads. This involved conducting daily video chats with team members, using all the necessary internal Facebook applications and tools, getting approval for designs, and eventually providing a solution that included a full onboarding process with step-by-step instructions to help the user integrate with Salesforce. Working on this solution, we learned the value of clarity over aesthetics and how important it is to do our research before digging into the designs.

With over 1.5 billion daily active users, Facebook is the world’s largest digital platform. This massive scale comes with a lot of complexities, meaning that making even a minor tweak to one modal can require a lot of research and consideration so that it does not negatively impact other parts of the platform. Joining a team with multiple design needs mid-cycle without a lot of time to ramp up can be challenging. But with internal expertise, resources, and a dynamic team for support, we are positioned to jump into teams and hit the ground running. We are fluent in working remotely with large teams, and we know how to communicate so no detail is overlooked until your problems are solved.