How to View Facebook Ad Leads

Running a Facebook Lead Ad campaign is an excellent way to get contact information from potential customers directly within the platform. But once you start collecting those valuable new leads, a crucial question comes up: where did they actually go? This guide will show you exactly where to find your Facebook ad leads, how to download them, and most importantly, how to automate the process so you can follow up in record time.

What Are Facebook Lead Ads, Anyway?

Before we find them, let’s quickly clarify what we’re looking for. Instead of sending users to a landing page on your website, Lead Ads open a pre-filled form right inside Facebook or Instagram. This form pulls information like their name and email directly from their user profile, making it incredibly easy for them to submit their details with just a couple of taps.

This low-friction approach is fantastic for getting conversions, but it also means the leads live inside Meta's ecosystem until you retrieve them. Waiting too long to follow up can mean the difference between a new customer and a missed opportunity, so let's get you access to them immediately.

Option 1: The Go-To Method - Meta Business Suite's Leads Center

The most user-friendly place to view and manage your leads is Meta’s own all-in-one hub, the Leads Center. It’s designed to be a central repository for all leads collected through your forms on Facebook and Instagram.

How to Find the Leads Center:

Log in to an account with access to your Business Page and navigate to Meta Business Suite. You should have admin or editor-level permissions to complete these steps.
From the main menu on the left side of the screen, select All tools.
A menu of tools will appear. Look under the Advertise section and you’ll find Leads Center. You could also find it under All Tools as the main header above several tool cards, where it can also show as "Instant Forms". Click on it.

Inside the Leads Center, you'll see a dashboard with a list of all your incoming leads. You can filter them by name, date submitted, the specific form they filled out, and their current disposition (e.g., in progress, converted, uninterested).

What You Can Do Here:

View Lead Details: Click on any lead to see all the information they provided in the form.
Download Your Leads: You can select specific leads or all of them and download the list as a CSV file to use in other programs.
Manage the Lead Pipeline: You can assign leads to different members of your team and update their status, turning Leads Center into a lightweight CRM.

Option 2: The Direct Download From Your Facebook Page

If you don’t use Business Suite much, you can still grab your leads directly from your Facebook Page's management settings. This method is slightly less intuitive but just as effective for a quick download.

Fair Warning: Leads are only stored by Meta for 90 days. If you don't download them or transfer them to a CRM automatically, they will be deleted forever. This method relies on you manually remembering to download them, which is why it’s not ideal for the long term.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

Navigate to the Facebook Business Page you are running ads from.
From your Page's left-hand menu, select "Lead generation tools" (or you might find it under a "More" or "Publishing Tools" section in older versions of the UI). Then go to the “Forms library” tab.
You'll see a list of all the lead forms you’ve created. Each form will display a count of how many leads it has generated.
Find the form you want to download leads from. In the ‘Leads’ column, click the number. Then press the Download button.
Meta will give you two options: Download New Leads (only the ones you haven’t downloaded yet) or Download by Date Range (to download all leads within a specific timeframe).
This will download a CSV (Comma Separated Values) spreadsheet file to your computer. You can open this file with spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or Apple Numbers.

Option 3: Get Your Leads from Ads Manager

Since you’re managing the ads from Ads Manager, it makes sense that you should be able to get your leads from there, too. This is a convenient option if you are already in Ads Manager analyzing performance.

How to Download Leads in Ads Manager:

Go to your Ads Manager panel.
Navigate to the level of your campaigns. Select the ad campaign whose leads you want to find. From there, select a specific Ad Set that you’re looking at.
At the ad level, you will see your active and past lead ads. Look for the Results column related to the ad you are running. If the ad is an "Instant Form" objective, and it’s running, this is where your results should populate. For an active lead ad, you’ll typically see the result labeled as "On-Facebook Leads" with a number next to it.
Click the hyperlink that appears when you scroll over the number, which will pop up saying On-Facebook Leads. Click it, download your leads, and open it later via a spreadsheet tool or import it to your preferred software. There will be a blue Download leads link under the advertisement name. Click this to start the download. This will generate a new page within Ads Manager that allows you to download these leads and choose your lead criteria as usual. You'll get your list as a CSV file. The file should automatically download, but if not, Meta may give you a few format options.

The Best Option: Automate Lead Collection & Stop Manual Downloads

Manually finding and downloading leads is fine when you’re just starting, but it has three major drawbacks:

It’s Slow: The sooner you contact a lead, the better your chance of converting them. Studies show that contacting a new lead within five minutes can increase conversion rates by up to 9 times. Downloading spreadsheets once a day doesn't cut it.
It’s Prone to Error: Someone on your team may forget to download the leads, or they might download the wrong date range, causing leads to fall through the cracks.
It’s a Time-Consuming Chore: You and your team have better things to do than repetitively download and reformat spreadsheets all day.

The professional approach is to automate the process by integrating your Facebook Lead Ads directly with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or a spreadsheet.

Check for a Direct CRM Integration

When you create a Lead Ad in Ads Manager, there is a "CRM Setup" section. Here, Meta allows you to connect natively with dozens of popular CRMs and email marketing platforms, including:

Salesforce
HubSpot
Mailchimp
ActiveCampaign
Many more...

If you use one of these systems, setting up a direct integration is often the easiest path. You'll simply authorize Facebook to connect to your CRM, and you can map the form fields (like Name, Email, Phone Number) to the corresponding fields in your CRM. Once connected, new leads will instantly appear in your system, ready for follow-up.

Use a Third-Party Connector like Zapier

What if your CRM isn't on the list? No problem. Automation tools like Zapier and Make act as a bridge between Facebook and thousands of other applications. With these tools, you can create a simple workflow:

Set a "Trigger": "New Lead from Facebook Lead Ad"
Set an "Action": "Create a New Contact in [Your CRM]", "Add a Row to Google Sheets", "Send a Slack Notification to the Sales Team", etc.

Setting this up once means you’ll never have to manually download a CSV again. Your leads are delivered in real-time right where you need them, allowing for instant follow-up, seamless addition to email nurture campaigns, and cleaner data management.

Beyond Viewing: Thinking About Lead Ad Performance

Now that you know how to access your leads, the next step is to analyze their performance. Simply counting leads is not enough - you need to understand their cost and quality.

Key Metrics for Lead Generation

In Ads Manager, keep a close eye on these metrics:

Cost Per Lead (CPL): This is your primary metric. How much are you spending, on average, for each lead you generate? A "good" CPL varies wildly by industry, but tracking your own CPL over time is crucial for optimization.
Lead Form Conversion Rate: This tells you what percentage of people who opened your form actually finished and submitted it. If many people open the form but don't complete it, your form might be too long, asking for sensitive information too early, or unclear.
Lead Quality: Are the leads you’re generating actually turning into customers? This loop can only be closed by tracking leads in your CRM. If you find a certain campaign has a great CPL but none of the leads ever become paying customers, it's not a successful campaign. This is where connecting ad spend data to sales outcomes is critical.

Final Thoughts

Locating your Facebook ads contacts is a critical first step, whether you're using Meta Business Suite, downloading CSVs directly, or accessing them through Ads Manager. Whichever method you select, remember the faster you respond, the better - which is why automating your system to place prospects immediately into your outreach pipeline is essential for maximizing conversion.

At Graphed, we help companies automate both the collection and the analysis of this complete journey. Instead of manually exporting files from Ads Manager and your CRM to figure out which ad sets led to which sales calls, our system can connect everything. Our platform allows you to make queries in your normal daily vocabulary, like “Build a dashboard to show my Facebook CPL, my Facebook lead-to-MQL conversion rate, and revenue pipeline.” Using Graphed allows you to get quick, simple answers that tell you how to scale your brand, without needing to waste time wrangling data files.