HOW TO GET YOUR FACEBOOK ADS INSIGHTS ON AIRTABLE

with Zapier.com

Hera Castillo

Published in

Botlify

6 min readJun 6, 2019

originally published here.

Facebook leads ads are a great tool for getting in touch with your potential customers. Lead ads provide contact data to businesses about the users interacting with their promotional content. However, while Facebook Leads Ads are a powerful tool for collecting data, it does not allow businesses to organize and explore that data. In order to get more from your leads, third-party applications such as Airtable can be deployed to store and compare your leads data.

But, how can we transfer this information without monotonous and time-consuming copying and pasting? We can use a Zapier Zap!

In this tutorial, we will show you how to automate the storage of lead’s data into Airtable with Zapier.

To start, what is a Facebook Lead Ad?

Lots of people want to hear more from your business, but filling out forms is boring and at times difficult to do on mobile devices. Facebook Lead Ads anticipates this user tendency to not complete forms. Facebook Lead Ads are built so that users need simply to tap your ad for a form — pre-populated with the users Facebook contact information — to pop up. Whether the user finishes filling out the form, or not, the data has already been collected.

And what is Airtable?

“Airtable is a user-friendly spreadsheet app that can store information in a spreadsheet that’s visually appealing and easy-to-use, but it’s also powerful enough to act as a database that businesses can use for customer-relationship management (CRM), task management, project planning, and tracking inventory.” — Find out more at AirTable.com

In a nutshell, you can have all your business insights in one place to quickly access and cross-examine.

What is Zapier?

“Zapier is an online automation tool that connects your favorite apps. You can connect two or more apps to automate repetitive tasks without coding or relying on developers to build the integration. Move info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work.” — Find out more at Zapier.com

Let’s Get Set Up

What accounts do you need to have?

You will use Zapier to connect your Facebook Lead Ads with Airtable and creates a spreadsheet for your leads, automatically updating it with each new ad hit. Transferring Facebook Lead Ads to Airtable is a paid Zap. Find out about Zap pricing here.

Design Your Facebook Lead Ad

Let’s say you want to test a new product on your audience by doing a giveaway.

First, set your target audience. For our example we chose:

Female, from 18 -25, lives in Los Angeles, has a habit of online shopping, loves cosmetics and beauty.

Next, think about the information you want from your leads. We are interested in:

Name, phone number, email address, and which products our audience is interested in.

Now you will create your Lead Ad:

Open your Facebook and go to your Facebook Business page at https://business.facebook.com.
Choose your marketing objective and click Lead generation.

Enter your campaign name:

Configure Your Ad

Set your Audience, Budget, Schedule and Creative Asset.

Set your audience:

*Note: Unlike other campaign types, you cannot target lead ads to people under the age of 18.

2. Set your budget and ad schedule:

3. Choose your Creative Asset:

Depending on your content, your creative asset can be carousel or single Image or Video. Please note that if the proportion of text to image is too high (>20%), your ad may not reach its full audience or it would not be approved by Facebook. You can check your text on Facebook Overlay Tool

And now it’s time to edit your creative asset.

Facebook will give you a quick preview of your ad on the right and you can add your message on the left. Don’t forget to put Headlines and a CTA (Call To Action) button to your asset.

Next, let’s choose what information you want to collect from users.
Click Create New Form.

Under the Settings tab, you can choose to:

- Edit field IDs to change the column names for your data when you export your leads. This may be useful if your CRM requires specific column names to receive your leads.

- Include organic leads when you download your leads. Choose this to include leads from people who see the ad such as by being tagged in the comments.

Next, create your Airtable Spreadsheet

Don’t forget to make sure you create columns for the information you need from your leads.

Create your trigger with Zapier.

On Zapier’s front page, click Make a Zap.

Choose Facebook Lead Ads as a trigger. Select New Lead.

Name your Zap and click Continue.

Wait a few seconds so Zapier can pull a sample. Click Continue.

And now, it’s time to choose an Action app. You will choose Airtable and the action you want your Zap to do.

In this case, we will Create a Record when the Zap catches a new lead.

In this step, Zapier would ask to connect with your Airtable. Click Connect an Account and a window will pop up.

You will go to your Airtable’s account settings at https://airtable.com/account to find your API key.

Your API will look like this. Just copy and paste it on the form then click Yes, Continue.

Now we’re at the most important part of the integration. Make sure that you select the right base and table into which you want to store information on your lead. Next specify the column names in your spreadsheet such as Name, Phone, etc. by clicking the dropdown button on the right. When everything is set up, click Continue.