The most expensive leak in most lead-gen setups isn’t the ad. It’s the gap between the moment someone fills out a form and the moment someone on your team actually talks to them. Here’s how we wire that gap closed.
1. Two ways in, one record out
Ad platforms deliver leads by webhook — they call your system the moment a form is submitted. It’s fast and usually reliable. “Usually” is the problem: a webhook that fails silently means a lead you paid for that nobody ever sees.
So we use two intake paths:
- Webhook for speed.
- A poller that asks the platform for recent leads every few minutes, as a backstop.
Both write into the same lead record, deduplicated by the platform’s lead ID. If the webhook works, the poller finds nothing new. If it doesn’t, the poller catches it within minutes.
2. Keep the attribution with the lead
Every lead should carry where it came from: source, medium, campaign, ad set or content, click IDs (like gclid or fbclid), the landing page and the referrer. On a website, those go into hidden form fields at submit time. From an ad platform, they come in the lead payload.
Keep first touch (how they first found you) and last touch (what brought them back to convert). Both matter when you’re deciding where to spend.
3. Check consent and hours before anything automated
Before any automated text or call:
- Did the lead consent to automated texts or calls? (Your form needs clear consent language — not a pre-checked box.)
- Is it inside allowed contact hours for their time zone?
- Are they already suppressed or opted out?
If the answer to any of those is no, the lead goes to a person’s queue instead of an automated sequence.
4. Respond in seconds
Once a lead is cleared, the first reply should go out immediately and acknowledge what they asked for. Then qualification can begin — asking only for what the form didn’t cover.
5. Push to the CRM with an external ID
When the lead reaches your CRM, send your lead ID along with it and store the CRM’s ID back on the lead. That pair is what prevents duplicate contacts when the same person submits twice, or when a retry fires after a timeout.
Log every delivery attempt. If the CRM is down, the lead should wait in a retry queue with a visible failure — not disappear.
6. Tell the ad platform what happened
Ad platforms optimize toward the events you send them. If the only event is “form submitted,” they’ll find you more form-fillers. Send later events too — qualified, booked, sold — from your server.
When the browser and the server both report the same event, include the same event ID in both so the platform counts it once.
7. The approvals that slow everyone down
- Carrier registration (A2P 10DLC) for business texting in the US.
- Meta app review if you want to message leads through Messenger or pull leads through your own app.
- API access to your CRM — some vendors restrict it to higher plans. Check before you build.
None of these are technical problems, and all of them take longer than the build. Start them first.
A quick checklist
- Webhook plus poller, deduplicated by lead ID
- Attribution fields on every lead, first and last touch
- Consent language on every form that triggers automation
- Contact-hour and opt-out checks before any automated message
- CRM push with external IDs and logged failures
- Server-side conversion events with shared event IDs
- Registration and app reviews started on day one
