Meta Lead Ads: What Happens When a Lead Never Arrives

How does a Meta lead reach your system?

In two steps. When someone submits the form, Meta sends a notification to your server, called a webhook. The notification carries a lead ID, and your server then uses it to read the lead's answers. Meta's Retrieving Leads page describes this: the notification holds a leadgen_id, you pass it to the Graph API to fetch the lead, and reading leads needs the leads_retrieval permission. It also says the real-time notice can arrive a few minutes late. Our guide to Meta lead ads and webhooks covers that path in full.

What does Meta do when your server does not answer?

It retries for a while and then gives up. Meta's webhooks page says your endpoint should answer every notification with 200 OK. If it does not, Meta will "retry immediately, then try a few more times with decreasing frequency over the next 36 hours", and "unacknowledged responses will be dropped after 36 hours." The page adds that you cannot query historical webhook notifications afterwards, and that your server should handle duplicate deliveries.

Read that as a plain rule: for 36 hours Meta keeps trying, and after that the notification is gone. The lead itself is not gone. It is still in the form in Meta, where you can read it through the form's leads. But nobody will tell you it is there. A weekend outage, an expired access token or a failed deploy are enough to open that gap.

How do you find a lead the webhook missed?

Ask Meta for the form's leads directly. The Retrieving Leads page names a form endpoint, /<FORM_ID>/leads, that lists the leads on a form, and it warns that a form reused across ads holds more leads than any one ad. Compare that list with your own, using the lead ID as the key. A lead whose ID you already hold is skipped, and one you do not hold is new. Using the ID as the key is what stops a second copy of a lead that the webhook did deliver. Meta's pages we read give no retention period for this data, so do not plan around leaving it for months.

What does MAJ Leads do about a missed lead?

Practice. Once a day, for each connected Meta Page whose connection is not known to be broken, MAJ Leads reads the last 48 hours of leads from the Page's forms and adds any it does not already hold. The window is longer than Meta's 36-hour retry period, which is our reasoning for choosing it. The lead ID is the key, so a lead the webhook already delivered is recognised and nothing is doubled. The same read is behind the 24-hour, 7-day and 30-day buttons the owner can press in Settings, under Sources.

What if the connection itself is broken?

Then reading the form fails too, and the catch-up would only fail quietly. Practice. MAJ Leads runs a separate check once a day on each connected Page with one small read using the Page's own access token. If Meta answers that the token expired, the permission was removed or the Page is gone, the source is marked broken, the owner gets one notification for that breakage, and Settings shows "Facebook access expired. Reconnect this Page." or its sibling message. A timeout, a server error or an unfamiliar error code leaves the state as it was and the check tries again next time, because those prove nothing. The catch-up skips a Page the check has found broken.

What should you check yourself?

1. Count the leads Meta shows for your form over a recent week and compare with your list. A small gap is worth reading, and a large one suggests the connection broke.
2. Open Settings, Sources after any change to the Facebook Page, the ad account or the person who connected it, because the connection works with the access that person gave.
3. Look at the leads added by catch-up, and contact them. They are real people who asked for a call.
4. Read why the first minutes after a lead ad matter, because a catch-up lead has already missed them.

Where does this leave your Meta leads?

A missed delivery is a known failure of any webhook, not a surprise, and MAJ Leads treats it that way: one daily read to bring missing leads in without duplicates, and one daily check that says out loud when the connection needs attention. See how it works and pricing.