Best Ways to Drive Lead/Customer Volume: Link Clicks vs Lead Forms?

Best Ways to Drive Lead Volume: Link Clicks vs Lead Forms?

There’s an expression that I have heard related to Amazon. It’s the buyers marketplace. People are literally there to buy. That’s how and why Amazon ads can usually, if done well yield a positive ROI.

How about other channels? That’s where the discussion about what ad type, platform/channel and a host of other questions naturally arise.

For businesses that find it hard to close customers to a sale straight away, often the best way, or first step, in the customer journey is to generate a lead. A lead, while defined by different people in different ways, is often loosely based on a person or companies first expression of interest, a handraiser, a show of interest. Later on, the lead can be qualified and nurtured, until at some point in the future converted into a customer/sale. The journey to sale is dependant on the size of business, products or services sold, LTV and a bunch of other factors which I won’t bore you with now.

Marketing. How do we drive more leads? I hear the business say. We need more leads, I hear Sales say. Can we increase results? I hear the CMO say. We can drive more leads, yes, we say.

There are different platforms that allow targeting in different ways. Prospecting, and retargeting, lookalikes. But all platforms fall into broad definitions. Allowing bidding on either clicks, impressions or leads (via lead forms), and sometimes more than one option. The clicks and impressions, are for ads that generally drive to the client’s website or app. The business pays for the right to send traffic or views, to the client’s assets, in most cases clicks to websites or apps, but in some cases to views of an ad ( in programmatic or the display land). Lead forms might seem similar, but they are very different.

With lead forms, you bypass your site. You don’t need it to drive lead growth. The potential customer sees your ad, and when they click it, a lead gen form pops up. They then make the instant decision, should I sign up to this? If they do, awesome. You’ve got yourself a lead, right there, right then.

The platforms (notably Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn & Google - at the time of writing), allow you to drive lead volume into a csv, spreadsheet. Which, if you’re techy enough can be ported via API into your CRM. If you’re a small business, small agency, you can share the data with the client in a spreadsheet, or Gsheet.

The other difference, especially if you’re an agency, is you can see the leads. You might get an inkling to lead quality. You can do better lead qual reports. You may be able to estimate, in some cases expected revenues, and expected LTV based on the lead quality and volume, and with this, expected ROAS.

So this begs the question, which works better - link clicks or lead forms?

In my experience, as in most cases, it really depends. For larger firms, where landing page testing is slow ( big ships take ages to turn), lead forms offer a fast way to drive lead volume up. They also work very well when conversion rates on landing pages (you do not own), are shite. Bypass the middle-people and get straight to what you want, leadgrowth and business growth.

For smaller firms, with hopefully bright teams who are testing things and learning fast, you might want to test things out. When I worked at an FX firm, I managed to boost page conversion rates from 1% to 5% conversion rates, across all our web pages, both landing pages and the website, all sources of traffic (barring display which had 2% conversion rates). I’m not sure lead forms were a thing in mid 2010s, but I might have tested and found they underperformed my other campaigns.

If you control the web environment, can do landing page testing ( I built my own landing page testing tool, well before the SaaS start ups), then you in theory could get great conversion rates. If you haven’t the time n/or inclination, lead forms could be worth a test.

There are obvious upsides to Leadforms. If done well they can drive up lead volumes and you can in some cases get great high quality leads. I’ve driven C level leads from the largest companies in the world. (Clevel = CEO, CMO, CTO etc) .These types of leads are pretty hard to generate via link clicks, unless you are remarketing to them or working them via a partner. Getting to Clevels pure prospecting is going to be very very hard. Lead forms can help there. But you really need to know what you are doing. It’s quite easy to bink the budget on useless leads. You’ve been warned.

How do you avoid binking the budget on bad leads? Go back to good ol' Marketing principles. Targeting. Messaging. Bidding. Ad type. You know the drill.

Another warning. Google Lead Gen Forms aren’t as good as LinkedIn, especially for B2B. LinkedIn, at the time of writing, is the only place to get reliable Clevel leads from 500+ firms ( at any volume). Facebook Lead Forms can be good, depending on vertical and product/service, especially for high profit margin/high LTV products/services. Ensure you do your forecasts before any testing, as you normally would to see how things may go and to win more testing budgets. Who doesn’t like bigger budgets? Right, no one.

What about statistically significant testing between link clicks and lead forms? Probably possible if you spend tens of millions. Otherwise, the clicks you get on lead forms are more expensive than link clicks. (I’ve never got to that spend level, even after spending millions on lead form ads at some firms.) Especially if you’re doing other tests like content tests, or location testing or language testing. So stat sig comparisons and analysis are much harder, in most cases useless. Caveat is, if you hate testing, you might get enough results for statistical significance. For example running one or two large campaigns. But how useful is that if you haven’t tested other variables??Exactly.

Lead forms work particularly well when you’re products/services are 1) known as good 2) are good (but maybe not known), 3) are fairly easy to understand/ hook people.

Lead forms are great for intuitive marketers, who ‘get’ marketing. They’re generally more expensive than link clicks, so there’s also less room to be wrong. But when you’re right, wow. They are truly awesome. You’ll get people talking, and results can be super awesome, driving meaningful revenues, sometimes fast - even for digital marketing.

If/when you implement them, let me know how it goes.

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