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The Complete Guide To Google Ads Lead Forms Extensions

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The Complete Guide To Google Ads Lead Forms Extensions

In the past 12 months, mobile web traffic has surpassed desktop traffic.

As consumers use multiple devices to browse the internet, they expect a seamless experience across devices.

That’s why focusing on user experience is crucial to any business’s success.

Google originally announced its lead form assets (formerly known as extensions) in 2019 – and today, they are available for many campaign.

How can you make the most of the opportunities and benefits that Google Ads lead forms provide?

Read on to learn how lead forms work, the pros and cons of using them, what you need to get started, how to set them up, and more.

What Are Google Lead Form Assets?

Per Google’s definition, “Lead forms help you generate leads by letting people submit their information in a form directly in your ad.”

A lead form asset can be created in your current Google Ads account, attaching it to the desired campaign.

When your audience interacts with your ad that contains the ad asset, they are prompted to input their information in the form instead of being directed to your company website.

Who Should Use Google Lead Form Assets?

Lead form assets can benefit most B2B companies or any business that is looking to generate leads.

Additionally, if your company does not have the resources (time, expertise, money) to improve the website experience, Google lead form assets may be for you.

Lead form assets are available for the following campaign types:

  • Search.
  • Discovery.
  • Display.
  • Video (currently in beta).

Google lead form assets work in different ways depending on the campaign type.

  • Search: Lead forms can appear on mobile and desktop devices.
  • Discovery: At least one Discovery image ad is required for lead forms to serve. They are not compatible with carousel ads.
  • Display: Lead forms can appear on both mobile and desktop devices. At least one responsive display ad is required for lead forms to serve.
  • Video: Lead forms are only available on mobile Android devices at this time. If a campaign is targeting iOS and desktop users, the campaign won’t serve those users.

Pros And Cons Of Lead Form Assets

As with every tool or feature, it’s important to weigh the benefits and drawbacks. Let’s take a look at lead form assets specifically.

Pros Of Lead Form Assets

  • Easy to set up.
  • Ability to download leads directly from Google Ads.
  • Great way to gain first-party data.
  • Easier user experience if the company’s mobile site is less than stellar.
  • Available for campaign types at all areas of the customer funnel.

Cons Of Lead Form Assets

  • Harder to automate lead sharing with customer relationship management (CRM).
  • Traffic does not lead to your website.
  • Attribution can be difficult.
  • Must spend more than $50,000 over the lifetime of the ad account to qualify.
  • Lead form assets work differently for each campaign type.

Lead Form Asset Requirements

Currently, lead form assets are allowed on Search, Display, and Discovery ad types. They are currently in beta for Video ads.

To get whitelisted for the Video ad type beta, please contact your Google rep.

There are a few requirements in order to qualify for using this asset type:

  • A good history of compliance policy with Google.
  • Be in an eligible vertical or sub-vertical.
  • A privacy policy for your business.
  • Over $50k lifetime spend in Google Ads (for lead forms in Discovery, Display, or Video campaigns).

Google lead form assets are not allowed in all verticals. Some vertical exclusions include:

  • Sensitive verticals (such as sexual content).
  • Sub-verticals of sensitive verticals.
  • Affiliate networks. Only first-party advertisers or third-party agencies are permitted to run lead form assets.

Lead form assets are only eligible to serve in specific countries. If an ad is served to an audience in an ineligible country, they will not be able to view the lead form.

Currently, lead form assets are available in the following countries:

How To Set Up Lead Form Assets

Creating a new lead form asset doesn’t require a ton of extra time or effort.

You have the option to create a new asset at the account level, within an existing campaign, or while creating a new one.

For existing campaigns, click into the campaign and then Ads & Assets on the left-hand side. Select Lead form within the asset section. Click the blue “+” sign to create a new lead form asset.

Where to find lead form asset creation in Google Ads.

The next step is to add a headline, description, and business name. These fields are required.

Input headline, business name, and description in lead form creation.

From there, you can now choose the questions you’d like the user to answer in your form. You will need to select at least one option to continue.

Don’t forget the required privacy policy URL to link to!

Questions on lead form

Qualifying questionsScreenshots taken by author, Google Ads, June 2023

Google also provides qualifying questions in many verticals to gain as much information as you need for qualified leads. These qualifiers are broken down by:

  • Auto.
  • Business.
  • Education.
  • General.
  • Insurance.
  • Jobs.
  • Real estate.
  • Retail.
  • Technology.
  • New questions.

Examples of qualifying questions in the auto industry include:

  • When do you plan on purchasing a vehicle?
  • Which vehicle make are you interested in?
Choose from qualifying questions in Google Ads lead form creation.Screenshot taken by author, Google Ads, June 2023

If utilizing lead form assets for Search, you then need to provide a background image in the aspect ratio of 1.91:1.

Lastly, you’ll need to create the submission message after a user successfully fills out the form.

The Complete Guide To Google Ads Lead Forms ExtensionsScreenshot taken from author, Google Ads, June 2023

Optimizing Lead Form Assets

Now that your lead form has been created, you have the option to optimize for the following options:

  • Lead volume.
  • Lead quality
Choose from lead volume or lead quality for lead form optimization.Screenshot taken by author, Google Ads, June 2023

How do you know which option to choose? This decision should be made solely on the business goals and intention of the campaign.

If the goal is to capture as many leads as possible (top or middle of funnel), optimizing for lead volume would be your best option.

As a word of caution, this option may get you less qualified leads.

If the goal is to spend dollars as efficiently as possible to get the most qualified leads, then optimizing for more qualified should be chosen.

This option will get you better quality but at a potentially higher cost per lead (CPL) and fewer leads overall.

Using Lead Form Assets With Smart Bidding

If using Google lead form assets, campaigns must use a conversion-focused Smart Bidding strategy.

The campaign must include a Google lead form conversion goal to be optimized towards, even if the campaign is optimizing toward other types of conversions.

Reviewing Lead Form Data

This section may be the most important, as it deals with reading and analyzing your lead submission information.

Google currently gives you two options to capture your leads:

  • Manually download them from the interface.
  • Create a webhook integration to automatically import lead data into a CRM.

If manually downloading leads, keep in mind that Google only allows downloads within 30 days of submission. After that, the data is gone. For this reason, it is crucial to monitor incoming leads to ensure a prompt follow-up.

Google also provides the option to automatically export lead form data for up to 60 days to a CRM using Google Ads API.

Creating A Webhook Integration

Let’s face it – you could be spending your time more wisely than manually downloading leads every day.

This is why creating that webhook integration is recommended to import data to your CRM.

While more valuable and efficient in the long run, this option will take some integration time to set up. If your team has the ability and resources on the staff (or agency) to create the webhook, you can generate a webhook and key to pass data.

For more information on this setup, visit Google’s official support page.

The basic process looks like this:

The Complete Guide To Google Ads Lead Forms ExtensionsScreenshot from Google Developers, June 2023

Now, if you do not have the capabilities on your team to create a webhook URL and key, you still have options.

Google allows a third-party integration, Zapier, to help integrate leads seamlessly.

Zapier is a cost-effective way to take the hassle out of more complex technical solutions needed to successfully automate your lead nurturing process. To sign up for a Zapier account, visit here.

Lastly, once the webhooks have been set up, it’s time to verify the data. This step should never be skipped to ensure your automated solutions are working!

If you took the time to set up the integration, make sure that it’s working for you.

Test lead form webhook integration in Google Ads.Screenshot taken by author, Google Ads, June 2023.

Summary

If your company is struggling to see leads flow in due to a poor user experience, give Google Lead Form assets a try.

Because of the vast variety of options, such as using them in Search, Display, YouTube, or Discovery, they’re worth testing out.

By combining Smart Bidding with lead form assets, you may see higher conversion rates and more closed deals by introducing a user to this seamless experience.

More resources:


Featured Image: chaylek/Shutterstock



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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

Claravine and Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 140 marketers and agencies to better understand the impact of data standards on marketing data, and they’re ready to present their findings.

Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

In this webinar, you will:

  • Gain a better understanding of how your marketing data management compares to enterprise advertisers.
  • Get an overview of the current state of data standards and analytics, and how marketers are managing risk while improving the ROI of their programs.
  • Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

SaaS Marketing: Expert Paid Media Tips Backed By $150M In Ad Spend

Join us and learn a unique methodology for growth that has driven massive revenue at a lower cost for hundreds of SaaS brands. We’ll dive into case studies backed by real data from over $150 million in SaaS ad spend per year.

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

  • OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
  • The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
  • Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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