Marketers Will Drool Over Facebook’s New Signup Ads That Auto-Fill Your Email Or Number

Businesses desperately want your email address, but it’s annoying to enter it on mobile. Cue Facebook’s latest News Feed ads. A marketer can buy an ad asking for you to sign-up for a newsletter or request a sales call, and with two-taps you can auto-fill your email address, phone number, or other info you’ve registered with Facebook.
Facebook is testing these “Lead Ads” with a small group of businesses around the world to gain feedback before considering rolling them out. Google has tested similar contact form ads for years, but they always required users to manually enter their info.
Facebook’s ads can auto-fill any of these pieces of information:

• Full Name
• Email
• Street Address
• Phone
• Zip
• City
• State
• Country
• Company Name
• Job Title

To make Facebook’s ads privacy-friendly, Facebook won’t just hand your info over. You have to click the call-to-action button like “Subscribe,” and then “Submit” your info once you’ve reviewed what was auto-filled. Users can edit that info inside the ads, and businesses only get what’s voluntarily submitted. From there, advertisers can only use the data in accordance with a mini-privacy policy they embed in the ad, and can’t resell it to anyone else.

This is one more part of Facebook’s quest to absorb the Internet. The Lead Ads fits right in with buy buttons on ads, hosted videos and Instant Articles.
Rather than ads that lead you offsite to fill out sign-up forms, it’s pulling that experience into the News Feed, so when you’re done, you keep right on social networking. Removing the click away and manual data entry could drastically boost conversion rates on these kinds of ads, making them easier to sell at higher prices.
You could try to bend this as some privacy attack on users, but it’s not. You’re going to see ads anyway unless you like stealing services through Adblock. You still choose whether to give a marketer your data or not. It’s just way easier to do so now. And personally, I’d be happy if I never had to manually punch my email address into a dinky mobile form again.