Using Facebook for lead generation can be extremely fruitful, but how do we control for the quality?  Facebook has its own lead gen ad unit, or you can also use Facebook ads to drive somebody to an onboarding experience on your website. The real trick is how do we get a lot of these people while also at the same time not sacrificing the value of any one of them.  First rule of thumb, lower cost leads are almost always worse.  Second rule of thumb, at some point even 100% conversion rate leads don’t come at enough volume to make business work  So the real trick is figuring out the balance.  When we’re trying to run lead gen, a very big mistake is to treat it as something different than any other Facebook ad.   Remember, leads are almost the exact same thing as an add to cart.  When someone signs up as a lead it doesn’t mean that they’re actually going to buy, just like when somebody adds to cart it’s not a guaranteed sale. We don’t really ever try to optimize a conversion Campaign to adding to cart, but far far too often people focus on getting the lead as a success of a lead gen ad.  So what are we supposed to do?  Well, we really have a couple of options…  First off, let’s make sure that Facebook knows what a good lead and a bad lead is.   We can do this by passing back to Facebook when a lead becomes a sale. Just like when Facebook knows when an add to cart becomes a purchase,   We are letting Facebook know what a high quality bit of traffic is versus a lower quality.  The second thing that we really want to do, is to make sure that we get people through the lead generation process who are most likely to actually make a purchase.  Far too often the priority is set at as many leads as possible. However, all this does is make the sales person‘s job much much harder and wastes everybody’s time and money.  So just like we don’t wanna have click bait ads that lead to a high bounce rate, we also don’t want to have leads that generate  a high rejection rate.  So in order to make a good quality lead be something that Facebook can deliver, we need to be able to track that lead’s life cycle, and also make sure the end user is of the most value.  There are many ways to do this, but the easiest and most direct way of improving the value of lead, is to make the user more informed and the process more difficult for them to actually complete the lead process.  If you look at some of the best lead gen brands in the world, the actual onboarding process is far more complicated than it could be.  If you want to see who does this extraordinarily well, go sign up for a Fabletics subscription or go check out Quip.  Take a look at the brands who sell subscription products, because for them, every initial purchase is just a lead to a long sale cycle.  The more informed, and more enthusiastic, and more self-qualified anyone is when they complete the lead process, the higher the likelihood that they’re going to turn into a quality customer.  Your job is to find the balance!