While many businesses on Facebook are looking to get new page fans, many want instant results, which is why Facebook is now offering advertisers direct response ads. Last week Matt Zarzecki posted screenshots of a new Chick-fil-A homepage advertisement. After click the ad, users are encouraged to enter their address in order to get a coupon for a free Chicken Biscuit. Until now Facebook has refrained from offering any form of direct response ads but as of last week, that all has changed.

This is a pretty significant offering for Facebook as it shifts from the traditional Facebook sales funnel, which I’ve written about extensively. Rather than just “engaging” the user, this new ad serves as lead generation. What’s interesting though is that the advertisement doesn’t use traditional online marketing techniques to convert users. Instead, users are simply offered a free chicken biscuit and then expected to enter their info.

Personally, a Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit isn’t enough to get me to put in my personal address but I’m sure plenty of people have taken up Chick-fil-A on the offer. I would have imagined that entering an email would have been more useful in order to re-market to the users. While having names and addresses is great for direct mail marketing channels, it seems strange that the company would use this given that Facebook is an online service.

Facebook is testing out all advertising models in order to boost revenue. This new form of engagement ad is definitely an interesting test. The only unanswered question is: how well did the ad perform?