How to integrate Google Lead Ads with your own CRM ?

Here let’s look into:

1. Why is Google lead form extensions important ?
2. How to create a campaign eligible for lead form extension ?
3. How to add a lead form extension into your campaign ?
4. Setting up the webhook in GoogleAds lead form extensions.
5. Creating your own code to listen to the GoogleAds webhook.
6. Access the lead data from the payload and save it to your own CRM.
7. Use the received data to send email, sms etc.

       Google started lead forms in its own platform to enable more user engagement and increase the conversion rate. GoogleAds were giving ads to link with specific landing pages or websites to redirect the user to the marketing content. But, this needs more user interaction and the user may not submit the lead after seeing the landing page. Now, google search ads started to give its own lead form that is created simultaneously with the ads.

       This brings lead forms to Google search, allowing advertisers to capture leads directly on Google search result pages. Google lead form extensions are available in Google search results on mobile devices and appear as an extension to your regular search ads. Google lead form extensions display as a call out box containing a ‘call to action’ and an icon alongside your search ad. Once a customer clicks on the call to action they are taken directly to a fast-loading, mobile-friendly GoogleAds form. Landing pages may not load this much faster when we compare both.

       In order to collect the data on the GoogleAds lead form submissions, we’ve two ways. Either we can download the lead ads form submissions as CSV from GoogleAds campaign page or we can use webhook. You’ll need to download your leads often because they’ll only be stored for 30 days in GoogleAds.  Let us see how the google ads webhook works.

Here we’re giving a short description of how we added the GoogleAds lead form webhook to our custom CRM software.

1. Sign in to your GoogleAds account and create a new campaign. 
   
   
   
   
2. Goal of the campaign should be ‘Leads’ and the campaign type should be ‘Search’.
   
   
   
   
   
3. After filling the campaign details in the campaign settings, click the “Ads & Extensions” side menu and select the “Extensions” tab. Then, click on Plus( + ) icon and select the 'Lead Form Extension' option.
   
   
   
   Note : If you can’t see this option, your GoogleAds account isn’t permitted to use this feature. Contact us to know more.
4. Fill the details of the extension button which is what others need to see on the lead form button.
   
   
   
   
5. Create your lead form. Add the required fields in your form and the background image to see on the lead form.
   
   
   
   
6. Enter the submission message on the next field. This message is shown when a user submits the lead form.
   
   
   
   
7. Under Create form submission message, click on ‘Lead Delivery Option’. This will show the “Manage your leads with a webhook” field.
   
   
   
   
8. Enter the Webhook URL ( Eg: https://yourcrmwebsite.com/googleads-webhook-url ) and GoogleKey (Can be used for identifying, from where the request came.)
   
   
   
   
9. You can send the test data to your webhook link. GoogleAds also provides a webhook testing tool with dummy data( api_tester_sample ). A sample json payload is given below.
10. If you received the data in your CRM software, add this lead extension to your campaign.

Here is a sample payload sent by GoogleAds Lead form extension in json format.

{"lead_id":"MTM4Nzc4MzM2MzpsZWFkX2lkOjE1NTkwODQ5NjQ4MzU","campaign_id":123456,"adgroup_id":0,"creative_id":0, "gcl_id":"CKbai8W4xN4CFcoFrwkdyHEByw","user_column_data":[{"column_name":"FullName","string_value":"FirstNameLastName","column_id":"FULL_NAME"},{"column_name":"UserPhone", "string_value":"1-650-555-0123","column_id":"PHONE_NUMBER"}, {"column_name":"UserEmail","string_value":"test@example.com","column_id":"EMAIL"}], "api_version":"1.0","form_id":123456789,"google_key":"testkey","is_test":true}

That's it. You’ve gone through half way. Let’s check how we’ve done the CRM integration of GoogleAds lead forms.

1. Set up a post request receiver to accept the payload sent by google. We were using python requests to access the request body.
   
   
   
   
2. You have to store the lead_id in your database. Because GoogleAds may send the payload repeatedly if there is any trouble in getting response from our CRM server. When they send the payload again, we have to check that it's already here or not. Otherwise many duplicates will appear in our CRM.
3. You can use the campaign_id, adgroup_id, creative_id, form_id, gcl_id and google_key for identifying the lead in our campaign. Google_key is the same secret key that we have given in the campaign creation page.
4. The field user_column_data contains the lead form submission data. We have to extract the data from this field and add to the CRM. You can either send the data over email or sms or any other way if needed.
   
   
   

Conclusion

         GoogleAds lead form extensions are a good choice for mobile conversions. But, Adult-oriented, Alcohol-related, Gambling-related, Healthcare and medicines, Political types of content in advertisements are not eligible for lead form extensions. One of our advertisers reported 15% increase in total conversions by using Google Ads lead form extensions, even if it's a betaware. Google is going to update it soon with custom form fields and more form data security methods. If you need further clarifications about any of the above content, feel free to contact us.