We often get the question from clients: Which is better—collecting leads through LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads or from a form on your landing page/website?

The answer is a resounding “it depends.”

It depends on whether your goal is quality or quantity.

Let’s weigh the pros and cons of both options.

LINKEDIN LEAD GEN FORM ADS

LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads are a popular choice among advertisers.

The way they work is that they can be attached to many different ad formats. You can have a Lead Gen Form on a Single Image, Video, or Conversation Ad, for example.

When someone clicks the CTA on your ad, the Lead Gen Form pops up directly in your LinkedIn feed. Most form fields auto-populate with information made available in a user’s LinkedIn profile, as well.

Keeping users on the platform and reducing the amount of time required to actually fill out the form make for a pretty seamless experience.

The low amount of friction makes Lead Gen Form Ads a great option for optimizing towards lead volume.

The downside with this is that, because LinkedIn makes it so easy, many users forget that they submitted one.

This can result in a high volume of leads, yes, but many of them still come on very cold.

This isn’t always the case, but is something to be aware of, if you’re interested in running with this option.

LANDING PAGE / WEBSITE FORMS

With a form on your landing page or website, you’re likely going to get fewer leads than if you were to run LinkedIn Lead Gen Form Ads because it’s not as seamless of an experience (users need to fill out the form themselves and it takes them away from whatever they were doing on  the platform).

That said, we typically see the quality of leads coming from a landing page or website to be much higher in comparison.

That’s because users are likely more interested and committed to converting, if they’re willing to get sidetracked from what they were previously doing on LinkedIn and if they’re filling out your form on their own.

Leading to a landing page or website also allows you to expose users to your brand a bit longer than if they were to submit a Lead Gen Form on LinkedIn, which makes for a greater chance of brand recall later.

Aside from higher quality leads, another benefit to leading to your website or landing page, as opposed to using a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form, is that you can also retarget website traffic across platforms.

With Lead Gen Form Ads, you can retarget those who opened or submitted a form, but you’re limited to targeting these people only on the LinkedIn platform.

Whereas, you can retarget LinkedIn traffic to your website from Google, Facebook, Instagram, and more.

As a tip, make sure the landing page or webpage you’re sending traffic to loads fast enough so that you don’t have users dropping too soon waiting for the page to load.

HOW TO IMPROVE QUALITY OF LINKEDIN LEAD GEN FORM LEADS

Now, if you’re thinking, “Well, I really want high lead volume, but I’m worried about LinkedIn Lead Gen Form quality”, here are a couple things you can try to improve lead quality:

1/ Make ads more memorable.

If you especially want to increase your chances of brand recall, create more brand recognition by establishing an emotional connection through your ads or telling a story.

Your Lead Gen Form will still be easy for users to submit, but they’re more likely to remember having taken action if they remember the ad that preceded it.

2/ Qualify leads through your Lead Gen Form.

Make it a little more difficult for your users to submit the form.

This includes adding more free-form fields that aren’t auto-populated.

LinkedIn allows you to add at least 3 custom questions to your Lead Gen Form.

This is especially helpful if you want to collect information about a user that isn’t made available in LinkedIn’s field options (such as Net Worth or Credit Score).

But if you want to ask basic questions like First Name, Last Name, and Email Address, just make them custom questions rather than using LinkedIn’s auto-populating fields.

Adding an extra layer of friction to your form can help sift between those who are truly interested in your offer and those who aren’t.

3/ Ask for Work Email

A lot of advertisers feel that personal email addresses decrease the quality of a prospect.

For a while, when LinkedIn auto-populated the Work Email field, it would just take whatever email address was in a user’s personal profile, even if it was a personal email address.

However, LinkedIn recently changed the Work Email field so that it validates an email address first before auto-populating.

If the user only has a personal email address listed in their profile, the field won’t auto-populate and the user will be required to submit their work email manually.

QUALITY VS QUANTITY

When deciding whether or not to use LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Form Ads or direct users to a form on your landing page or website, consider first your goal: Do you want a higher quantity of leads or higher quality of leads?

Figuring this out first will better help you decide which fits your goals best.

Which method do you prefer? Have you ever optimized for both quality and quantity? What did you do to achieve that? Comment below!

PS: I love to see B2B marketers thrive and I believe they can with the right tools.

So we use audience micro-segmentation strategy (a data-driven approach) to optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads. We’ll execute and manage it all for you.

Book a discovery call to get started today!

Written by Eric Jones

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