Facebook Lead Ads

Facebook Lead Ads and Automatism

What are Facebook Lead Ads?

Facebook Lead Ads enable you to create forms that collect data such as addresses, first names, last
names, etc. and call Facebook users to action, e.g. to subscribe to your newsletter. These forms are
assigned to a Facebook page and can be shown as advertisements to a large group of users.
For further information regarding Facebook Lead Ads, please refer to:
– https://www.facebook.com/business/news/lead-ads-launch or
– https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1462876307360828 (German)
 

How does automatic submission work?

Facebook allows the downloading of leads as files but in order to submit such leads to your Maileon
newsletter account automatically, Facebook relies on a system that notifies Maileon about new leads.
To protect data, Facebook only sends some of the required data in the form of abstract IDs. Maileon
must then contact Facebook, authorize and collect leads data.
To authenticate the authorization, Facebook uses a standard called OAuth. A user with administrative
privileges can log in using his private credentials and create an abstract token. With this token, a
third-party application can then contact the Facebook API and authorize API calls “in the name of”
the original user without having his username and password. The tokens can be assigned an
expiration date and can be instantly revoked by the user.
In Maileon, the generation of the aforementioned tokens is done by going to “Settings” (1) → “Lists
& Contacts: Plugins” (2) and clicking on the “Load Facebook configuration” button (3), see Image 1.

 
Once you have clicked on the button, you will be directed to a Facebook login page. If you are already
logged into your account in the same browser and there is a session saved, you do not need to log in
separately. The popup is the login mask from Facebook, created by the Facebook SDK, none of your
login data is saved within Maileon. The popup will then ask you for permissions entitled
“manage_pages” and “retrieve_leads”. While especially the option “manage_pages” may sound
critical at first glance, the naming of this permission is a bit of a poor choice for us as Maileon only
needs to list your pages and subscribe the Lead Ad app to your pages to allow Facebook to send new
leads through the app to our webhook. We DO NOT manage any pages any further and we DO NOT
collect any further data about your pages.
Once authenticated with Facebook, Maileon will generate a token that allows communication with
Facebook and connect the pages of which you are the administrator. You can remove pages from
your account at any time which coincidentally, would also unsubscribe the Lead Ad app from your
pages. Once completed, Maileon will save a long living page token for each page to be able to access
the lead details at a later point in time. The token originally created (with the “manage_pages” and
“retrieve_leads” permission) is not saved and if you want to add a new page, you would need to log
in again.
Image 2 illustrates an overview of the process of when a new lead is registered. First, Facebook sends
a notification to the Maileon webhook. The notification contains an ID for the lead and the source (ID
of the page) of the registration. Maileon then resolves the page ID to the page token and asks
Facebook for more details regarding the lead, e.g. the E-mail address, the first and last name. Per
your configuration, Maileon then creates the contact in Maileon and if properly configured, sends a
DOI mail.

 

Creating a Form

Log in into your Facebook account and open the configuration of your page by selecting it using the
dropdown on the upper right. Now select “Publishing Tools” (in German “Beitragsoptionen”) and use
the “Draft forms library” to create a new form. Either create a new form or copy an existing form.
Now you can set up the fields of your form and if you are done make sure to also set up a correct
mapping, as facebook names the fields in the “current” language, so if Maileon expects a field called
“country” and you created the form with German UI, it will be called “land” instead and Maileon will
not be able to find it as there is no mapping for all available languages.
The following table defines the valid field names. Please ensure, that the field fpr the E-Mail is called
“email” otherwise the contact cannot be created, so “e-mail”, “e-mail-address” or “e-mail-adresse”
are not valid.

 
For gender valid case insensitive values: m, male, mann, männlich, f, female, frau, w, weiblich.
 

Testing Facebook Lead Ads

Once you have set up a page, Lead Ad form and a connection to Maileon, you will then be able to
navigate to the Lead Ad testing page1
(login required). Select your page and the form you would like
to test. If you added the page in the Maileon configuration, you should now be able to see a webhook
subscription for the page with our app with ID “776876729133097”, see Image 3.

 
You are now able to directly create a contact by clicking on “create lead” with the default data (the
default E-mail is test@fb.com) or by clicking on “Preview Form” to fill in your own data. It is important
to make sure that there is no lead yet. If there is one, Facebook will inform you to click the “Delete
Lead” button first as the testing tool can only manage one test lead.
After you have created the lead, you can the select “Track Status.” This may take a few seconds and
if the process continues to lag, click on the “Track Status” option again until the status is no longer
“pending.” Image 4 depicts a successful run. It also shows that the data initially submitted to Maileon
contains no private data. Please disregard the second App, as it is just a test app and is okay if it fails,
you will not see that app in your account 😉
Now that you have confirmed that the connection functions technically, you can go to your Maileon
Account and have a look at your new contact, see Image 5. For this contact, the quick “create lead”
button with some default data was used.
 
1 https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lead-ads-testing