How to Download Leads From Facebook Ads Manager and Clean Them

The short answer

Your lead ads are working, but the leads sit inside Meta until someone fetches them. Here is how to download leads from Facebook Ads Manager: open the Ads tab, click On-Facebook leads in the Results column of your lead ad, pick your filters, and download a CSV or XLS file (Meta Business Help). Meta Business Suite offers two more download points, covered below, along with what the file contains and what to fix before it goes into a CRM.

Two facts shape everything else. First, Meta only lets you download a lead for 90 days after the person submits the form. Miss that window and the contact details are gone from the download. Second, the file is built for Meta, not for your CRM. IDs carry letter labels, dates include a time zone offset, phone numbers may come with a prefix, and your form questions become column names with underscores.

So the job has three parts: download often, clean the file, and, once the volume justifies it, connect a CRM so nobody has to download anything. The cleaning is the tedious part, and the lead ads export cleaner for Facebook does it in your browser.

Three places to download leads

Meta’s download help page lists three places. They give you different files.

1. Meta Ads Manager (the most complete file)

This is the best choice when you run several lead ads, because you can pull leads from many ads at once and filter them.

1. Go to Ads Manager and click the Ads tab.
2. Find the lead ad you want.
3. In the Results column, click On-Facebook leads. If there is no link, you are probably on the Campaign or Ad set tab. Switch to Ads.
4. In the Download leads window, pick the ads and filter by Ad object, Location, Language and Date range.
5. Click Next, then choose CSV or XLS, and click Download.

2. The Instant forms page in Meta Business Suite

Here you download by form instead of by ad. Go to Meta Business Suite, click All tools, then Instant forms, and click Download next to the form. You get two useful options:

• Download new leads gives only the leads received since your last download. It is the handiest option for a weekly routine.
• Download by date range gives every lead in the period you choose.

Both end with the same choice of CSV or XLS.

3. Leads Center

Leads Center (spelled “Leads Centre” on some Meta pages) is Meta’s simple lead management view. You reach it from Meta Business Suite or from your Facebook Page’s Professional dashboard, and the Download icon exports a CSV based on your current filter. It is the lightest file: Meta’s download page says the fields are limited to date, name, email address, phone number, stage, source and owner, and each CSV shows at most 10,000 leads. No ad names, no form name, no answers to your custom questions. Use it for a quick contact list, and use Ads Manager or Instant forms when you need the full record.

If the download fails or columns are blank, it is usually access. Meta says that before anyone customizes leads access, only people with full control of the Page or messaging permissions can download leads. After customization, only the people who were given access can. To see every column, Meta adds that you need Page admin permissions and a role on the ad account that ran the lead ad (Information included when you download your leads data).

The 90-day limit

Meta’s About expired leads page is blunt about it: leads are available for download for up to 90 days from the time the form was submitted. After that, Meta doesn’t make them available, citing security and storage. Messages people send to your Page stay in the inbox; only the lead downloads expire.

This explains a common puzzle. Say Ads Manager shows 640 leads for a campaign, but your download has only 410. The Results column counts every lead in the period you view, including lifetime results. The download only holds leads from the last 90 days. The difference is expired leads, and Meta can’t give them back.

Meta’s own advice, on its expired leads page, is to download often or use a CRM so you don’t lose access. In our experience, speed matters even more than the limit: a lead that waits a week for a call has often moved on long before day 90.

If you also run LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, the rules differ. LinkedIn’s retention page says sponsored, event and candidate interest leads are kept for 365 days, while Company Page, organizational product and LinkedIn Landing Page leads are kept for 90 days. Don’t assume one platform’s window applies to the other.

What is in the file

Meta’s column list says every Ads Manager and Business Suite download has the same default columns, followed by one column per question on your form (including prefilled ones like email and phone).

Three details trip people up.

IDs with letters in front. Meta’s example shows values like ag:29573B4937375 for the ad and c:1A53834293845 for the campaign: a short label and a colon in front of the ID. The lead’s own id gets the same treatment. Meta’s developer page on the lead ID calls it a unique 15 to 17 digit number and says you may need to strip the leading label before using it as a match key, the value Meta uses to find the same lead again.

Dates with an offset. 2016-03-06T23:09:00-07:00 is Meta’s example. The -07:00 is the time zone offset. Some CRMs import it fine; others store it as text, so the lead can’t be sorted or filtered by date.

Blank ad and ad set IDs. Meta gives three reasons: the lead came from organic reach, it was submitted through an ad preview, or the person downloading has no advertiser role on the ad account. Preview leads are usually your own tests, so they are worth removing.

Clean the file before your CRM

A CRM import does exactly what the file says. If a phone number has junk in front of it, the CRM stores the junk. Here are the problems to fix, in the order you will notice them.

The CSV opens in one column. You double-click the file and every value sits in column A, or names like José turn into odd symbols. Excel guessed the separator or the text encoding wrong. Meta’s pages don’t say which encoding the CSV uses, so don’t fight it. Download the XLS version instead, or use Excel’s import (Data › From Text/CSV) and pick the separator and UTF-8 yourself. Google Sheets usually reads the file correctly too.

Phones with a p: prefix. Some downloads show phone numbers like p:+16175550132. Meta’s help pages don’t explain the prefix, but your CRM will treat the whole value as text, and dialers or SMS tools can’t use it. Remove the p: and keep every number in E.164 format: a plus sign, the country code, then the number.

IDs that Excel rounds. Lead IDs are long. If you strip the labels in Excel, it shows numbers like 1.20E+16 and saving can lose the last digits. A lead ID with the wrong digits can’t be matched later. Clean IDs outside Excel, or format the column as text first.

Names and answers. Full names often arrive as one field, typed in all caps or all lowercase. Answers to multiple-choice questions can come through as values like within_1_month. Split the names and turn the answers into readable text, so your sales team doesn’t have to.

Duplicates and test leads. People submit the same form twice from two devices, and your own preview tests land in the file too. Remove them before import, or your CRM creates two records and two reps call the same person.

You can fix all of this by hand, but it is tedious every week. The leads download cleaner for Facebook handles it: it removes the p: and the ID labels, writes phones in E.164, converts dates to your time zone, splits names, and sets aside duplicates and test leads in a separate file. Nothing is uploaded.

Running LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms as well? Its downloads have their own quirks. For example, LinkedIn lets advertisers rename form fields for downloads, so column names can differ from form to form. The lead gen form download cleaner for LinkedIn handles that file, so both sources end up with matching columns.

Send leads to your CRM automatically

Downloading works for catching up. For new leads, a connection is better: leads reach your CRM without anyone downloading them, and the 90-day window stops mattering. Meta’s CRM integration page describes three types:

• Direct integration. Your CRM connects straight to Meta Business Suite. Meta’s list of available integrations includes HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho CRM and Pipedrive, among many others.
• Third-party integration. A connector such as Zapier or LeadsBridge sits in the middle. Meta’s integration page calls this the easy option with no coding required.
• Custom integration. Your developer builds it with Meta’s developer tools (webhooks and the Graph API).

For small teams without a CRM, Google Sheets is a good middle step. Meta lets you connect a sheet from the Instant forms page, and new leads are added to it automatically (Connect Google Sheets). The connected sheet gets a lead_status column with stages such as Intake, Qualified, Converted, Lost and Not qualified. When you update that column, Meta reads the new status and uses it as feedback for your lead ads.

That feedback loop is the real prize. Meta’s Conversions API for CRM guide says sending lead stages back may bring higher-quality leads that are more likely to convert. It works best when your CRM stores the 15 to 17 digit Meta lead ID; if you don’t have it, Meta asks for other details such as the click ID, phone number or email. That is one more reason to keep the id column intact when you clean the file.

Meta also says a CRM integration is optional: you can keep downloading from Ads Manager or Business Suite if you prefer. Just set a routine so the 90-day limit never decides for you.

A simple weekly routine

Until a CRM connection is in place, this routine keeps every lead safe and gets them to sales quickly:

1. Pick a fixed day. Monday morning works for most teams. While a campaign is new or busy, download daily.
2. Use “Download new leads”. On the Instant forms page it gives only the leads since your last download, so you don’t import the same people twice.
3. Choose XLS if Excel garbles your CSV. It saves the import step.
4. Clean, then import. Remove prefixes and labels, fix phones and dates, take out duplicates and tests.
5. Keep the raw files. Save each original download in one folder. If an import goes wrong, you can redo it, even after Meta has expired those leads.
6. Exclude people who already converted. Upload your leads as a customer list and exclude it from lead campaigns, so you stop paying to reach people who already filled in the form. Our guide on formatting a customer list for Facebook Ads covers that file.

Once you are downloading every week anyway, a CRM connection usually pays for itself quickly. Start with Meta’s list of available integrations, check whether your CRM is on it, and keep this routine as your fallback.