If you haven’t been fortunate enough to be provisioned with access to the new Google beta, you will be soon. There isn’t any doubt that this new extension will be rolled out sooner rather than later as it provides those running Campaigns to capture customer information right in the search results through the use of a drop-down form.
Google is currently beta testing a new ad extension for advertisers looking to capture leads from their text ad campaigns. Users who are searching Google can submit their contact information directly through the new Lead Capture extension.
How does it work?
The lead extension looks similar to the Promotion extension, displaying a call out box with an icon - Lead Extension uses a clipboard icon to set it apart. After you select the Campaigns, you choose the call-to-action and enter extension text which can be up to 30 characters. This is what displays with the ad, as shown below.
Next, you’ll need to create the lead form as shown at the top of this article. The form includes a headline business name and a description that can be up to 200 characters long.
The information you can collect is fairly limited at this stage. It’s limited to Name, email, telephone number and postal code.
You can add a header image to help customise the layout/appearance. You’ll also need to include a link to your privacy policy. Advertisers must also agree to Google’s terms of service.
You can customise the submission completion page that users will see after they submit the form with a description and call-to-action of either ‘visit website’ or ‘download’.
The collected Lead information can be delivered via a webhook to your customer data management or CRM system to directly receive your collected leads in real-time. This should be a huge win for those running their sales operations intelligently.
What’s the big deal?
The Lead Capture extension is simple to introduce but more importantly, it’s really simple for users to understand and navigate. This will improve conversion rates across the board for a lot of businesses but because it’s so simple, you may find that it reduces the quality of the leads. If you’re running adverts, you’ll want to keep a keen eye on the quality to ensure the leads you generate are also being closed.
This is not really the first time Google has attempted to offer up a service to help advertisers collect customer details. In 2010, Google floated what it called Contact form extensions. Leads collected through this version were emailed directly to the advertiser (rather than synced directly with CRM/ERP systems). This version never made it out of beta. In 2011, it also tried again with a cost-per-lead ad type that let users submit their phone number or email in from the ad to request for more information. This also never came out of beta.
Some advertisers with complex campaigns may balk at the limited amount of data that can be currently captured through the beta extension but the integration of webhooks should help reduce the friction of transferring the lead data to sales systems and the new option is designed for mobile experiences. We’re sure that when this does exit beta, the options will be opened so that these lead forms will be designed to capture more information from the user and make it more inline with the type of lead submission forms we’ve all got used to on our websites/landing pages.
