Connect Facebook & Instagram lead ads
Run lead-form ads on Facebook or Instagram and have every submission land in your Houscade pipeline within ten minutes, instead of waiting in Business Suite.
When you are done
Lead-form submissions appear in Leads automatically.
Everything below gets pasted into Settings → Meta lead ads. Takes about 15 minutes, once.
Before you start
- A Facebook Page for your studio, and a Meta Business account that owns it.
- At least one lead-form ad — it can be paused; the connection does not need a live campaign.
- Admin access to Business Settings. If someone else runs your ads, they need to do this part or add you.
Steps
Open Meta Business Settings and find your Page ID.
Business Settings → Accounts → Pages → your Page. The ID is the long number shown under the Page name — around 15 digits, e.g. 102938475610293. It is not the @handle.
Go to Business Settings → Users → System users.
A System User, not your own login. This is the whole point: a personal token expires and the connection dies quietly a day later.
Add a system user if you have none, then click Generate new token.
Choose the app associated with your business. Give it the Admin role on the Page.
Tick exactly three permissions: leads_retrieval, pages_manage_ads, pages_show_list.
Meta needs all three. leads_retrieval reads the submissions, pages_manage_ads lists the forms they belong to, pages_show_list confirms the Page is yours. Missing any one produces a token that saves and then returns nothing.
Copy the generated token immediately.
Meta shows it once. If you lose it, generate another — there is no way to read it back.
In Houscade, open Settings → Meta lead ads, paste the Page ID and the token, and save.
Paste the System User token exactly as Meta gave it. Houscade exchanges it for a Page token itself, so you do not need to do that step. Both values are checked against Meta before anything is stored, and the token is stored encrypted.
If it does not work
- Saved fine, but no leads ever arrive.
- Almost always a token from the app's API Setup page rather than a System User token. Those expire within about a day, and the failure is silent — the connection looks connected. Generate a System User token instead.
- Meta rejects the token when you save.
- One of the three permissions is missing, or the system user does not have a role on that Page. Both are fixed in Business Settings → Users → System users.
- Leads appear, but hours late.
- Houscade polls Meta rather than waiting to be called, so new submissions arrive within about ten minutes. Longer than that means the token has stopped working — Settings shows the last error.
- Old leads never appeared.
- The connection collects from the moment it is made. Submissions from before it are still in Meta's Business Suite and have to be exported by hand once.