Leads from a Meta Instant Form stay inside Meta, which lets you download them as a CSV from Ads Manager or the Instant Forms library for 90 days after they arrive; for anything ongoing you need a connection that reads them through Meta’s API as they come in, because a lead called the same hour is worth far more than one found in Friday’s download.
Lead ads have one odd property that surprises almost everyone the first time. The form fills up, the results column counts the leads, and nobody gets told who they were. Meta does not email them to you. It keeps them, and waits for you to come and fetch them.
That is fine for a test. It is a real problem for an agency running lead campaigns for several clients, where the person who should call the lead is not the person who can log in to Ads Manager.
The manual way: download a CSV
There are two places to download from, and they give the same file:
- In Ads Manager, open the ad, and in the Results column click the leads count. Choose new leads or a date range, then CSV.
- In the Instant Forms library (All tools, then Instant Forms), find the form and click Download, then pick the dates.
The limit that matters: you can download a lead for 90 days after it arrives. After that it is gone from the download. A campaign that ran in spring and was never exported is a list of people nobody can call.
What the slow way costs
Someone filling in a form on their phone is interested right now. They have often filled in two or three similar forms the same evening. The business that calls first is the one they remember, and a lead downloaded on Friday and called on Monday is calling someone who has already spoken to a competitor.
There is a second cost that is easy to miss. If leads arrive as a weekly spreadsheet, nobody says which ones were real while the memory of the call is fresh, and that verdict is exactly what Meta needs to find more people like your buyers. A slow handover loses the lead and the lesson.
The automatic way: read them as they arrive
Every lead can be read through Meta’s API the moment it is submitted. That is what CRM integrations and connector tools do. Whichever you use, it needs two permissions, and these are where setups usually stall:
- The app or tool reading the leads needs Meta’s leads_retrieval permission.
- The Page that owns the form has to grant it Leads Access, in Business Settings under Integrations, then Leads Access. Without this, the tool connects without errors and sees no leads.
Then decide who gets each lead and how fast. The best setup is the plainest one: the lead lands where the person calling it already works, and marking it good or junk takes one click in the same place.
The form is the easy half. The lead is only worth what happens in the first hour after it arrives.