Lead form
Also called Lead form assets, Lead ads, Instant forms.
A form that opens inside the ad platform rather than on your website. Google calls them lead form assets, Meta calls them lead ads, TikTok calls them instant forms. The person never leaves the feed or the results page.
Why it matters
They convert well and they break the chain this whole glossary describes, because there is no site visit. No landing page means no URL, no query string, and no click identifier for your site to capture.
What goes wrong
The identifier still exists on the platform's side, and each platform hands the lead back with its own reference, so attribution is not lost so much as moved: it now depends on that reference surviving the integration into your CRM rather than on a hidden field in your form. That integration is usually set up once by whoever built the campaign and never audited, and it is a common reason a CRM has two populations of leads, one matchable and one not, with nobody aware of the split. Lead forms also collect fewer fields by design, which is exactly the firmographic detail a value model prices on.
How to check it on your own account
Split your CRM by how the lead arrived. If leads from on-platform forms carry no identifier while website leads do, the integration is the gap, not your site.
Next to this
- GCLIDGoogle AdsThe identifier Google appends to your landing page URL when someone arrives from an ad and auto-tagging is on.
- Match rateGoogle AdsThe share of your leads carrying something Google can join back to an ad click: a click identifier, or a usable email where enhanced conversions for leads is switched on.
- Enhanced conversions for leadsGoogle AdsMatching an offline conversion to an ad click using hashed first-party data, usually an email address, rather than a click identifier.
- Quiz funnelA lead capture flow built as a short series of questions, where the answers qualify the person and the contact details are asked for at the end or in exchange for a result.
The rest of this step
Measure this on your own data
The diagnostic reads a CRM export in your browser and reports your volume, your match rate and the spread between your leads against the thresholds in this glossary. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.