# Facebook Instant Forms

> Pick a Meta Lead Ads form and match its fields to yours.
> Source: https://www.eventsiq.io/docs/facebook-instant-forms


A Facebook Instant Form is a lead form that lives inside Meta's ad platform: you build it in Ads
Manager, and it opens without ever leaving Facebook or Instagram. EventsIQ does not build those
forms. It connects to one you already have and takes the leads as they come in.

The work therefore splits differently to a website form. There is no builder. Instead there is one
step nobody can do for you: telling EventsIQ which of Meta's field names mean which of yours.

Leads usually reach EventsIQ within seconds of being submitted. If one is ever missed, EventsIQ
picks it up a little later on its own, so a short outage does not lose leads.

## Step 1: Start a new form

Go to **Forms**, click **New form**, give it a name and choose **Facebook instant form**. Then click
**Next: where leads go**.

![Choosing the Facebook Instant Form type](https://www.eventsiq.io/docs-media/facebook-instant-forms/fb-1-type.png "The new form's Basics step with a name typed in and Facebook instant form picked.")

## Step 2: Pick a routing setup

Same step as any other form: pick which routing setup these leads should run through and click
**Continue**, or click **Decide later**.

If the routing setup expects fields this form does not collect, EventsIQ tells you as you pick it.
That warning is worth reading: it is the difference between finding out now and finding out from a
destination's rejection rate next week.

## Step 3: Connect Facebook and pick the form

If no Facebook account is connected yet, click **Connect Facebook**. The Facebook sign in opens **in
a new tab**, deliberately: leaving this page would throw away the wizard you are halfway through.
Approve the permissions, come back to the EventsIQ tab, and click **Refresh accounts**. To use a
different login, click **Connect another account**.

![The connect step with an authorised account](https://www.eventsiq.io/docs-media/facebook-instant-forms/fb-2-connect.png "The Connect and match step with a Facebook account connected and every permission granted. Account name blurred.")

:::warning{title="Grant every permission it asks for"}
Meta lets people approve a subset of the permissions requested. If lead retrieval or Page access is
declined, the connection appears to succeed and then fails to fetch anything. EventsIQ shows
missing permissions on the account here and on its row under **Acquire → Connections**. If you see
them, pick **Reconnect** in the row's menu and approve everything rather than trying to work around
it.
:::

Then choose the **Page** the ad runs from, and the **Lead form** itself. Type in any box to search.
Forms already connected to EventsIQ are marked **already connected**, so you cannot create a
duplicate by accident. Click **Connect lead form**.

![Picking a Page and a lead form](https://www.eventsiq.io/docs-media/facebook-instant-forms/fb-3-pick-form.png "A Page picked and its lead forms listed. Page and form names blurred.")

## Step 4: Match up the fields

This is the step that matters. It follows straight on in the wizard, and you can come back to it at
any time: open the form from the **Forms** list and its **Match fields** tab.

![The field matching editor](https://www.eventsiq.io/docs-media/facebook-instant-forms/fb-4-field-mapping.png "A Facebook lead form's Match fields tab, with several rows matched and What your destination receives on the right. Values blurred.")

The left column lists everything found in an actual lead from this form. The right side is where you
say what each one means.

**Press "Do it for me" first.** It matches everything it recognises by name and saves you most
of the typing. Then check its work and fill in the rest: the badges in the toolbar tell you how
much is still unmapped.

For each row you can also set:

-   **Clean-up steps**: an ordered chain applied before the value is stored. Trim whitespace,
    take the first answer from a list, format a phone number into E.164, turn "Texas" into "TX". The
    order matters and is shown as numbered chips.
-   **Kind of value**: what the answer should be coerced into. Following the canonical field's
    own type is almost always right.
-   A star marks an answer a destination in the routing requires, so a lead without it would be
    turned away.

:::note{title="If there is no lead to match against"}
A form connected minutes ago has no stored leads yet. Press **Get newer leads** and EventsIQ
will ask Meta for recent ones. If there are none, submit a test lead through Meta's Lead Ads Testing Tool
and press it again.
:::

### Meta's test leads look broken. They are not.

Meta's testing tool sends placeholder strings like `<test lead: dummy data for phone_number>`. Those
cannot be turned into a real phone number, so the preview says so in amber and tells you a real lead
will convert fine. That is the expected result on a correctly configured form, and it is not an
error.


## Step 5: Confirm it works end to end

Send a test lead through Meta's Lead Ads Testing Tool, then open **Activity → Lead logs**. The lead
should appear within a few seconds. Open it: **Answers** shows your matched fields, and **Exactly
what arrived**, under **For developers**, shows exactly what Meta sent.

Compare the two. If a value is missing from **Answers**, the match for that field is wrong, and what
arrived shows you the field name it actually came under.

## Keeping it working

**Connections can lose access.** EventsIQ keeps your Facebook connection signed in by itself. If
Meta takes the access away, for example because somebody removed the app or changed a Page role,
the connection is flagged and needs reconnecting. [Connections](https://www.eventsiq.io/docs/connections) covers what breaks it and how to reconnect.

![The Facebook Lead Ads page](https://www.eventsiq.io/docs-media/facebook-instant-forms/fb-6-integration.png "Forms, Facebook Lead Ads, with the connected account Working and the list of connected lead forms. Names blurred.")

**Changing the form at Meta's end changes the field names.** Adding or renaming a question in
Ads Manager will produce leads with paths your mapping does not know about. Pull a fresh lead and
check the mapping after any change to the form.


## What to read next

-   [Connections](https://www.eventsiq.io/docs/connections): keeping the Meta grant this all depends on alive.
-   [Fields](https://www.eventsiq.io/docs/fields): what the canonical keys on the right of the mapping editor are.
-   [Routing](https://www.eventsiq.io/docs/routing): the routing these leads run through.
-   [Destinations](https://www.eventsiq.io/docs/destinations): where these leads end up.