Why are you paying for leads your team never calls?
Every channel you pay for delivers its leads somewhere different. Here is how leads fall between them, what the ad platforms themselves advise, and how to give every lead the same fast call.
The short answer
Each ad platform holds its leads in its own place, and only for a while: Google Ads keeps them for 60 days, Meta for 90.
Google and Meta both tell you to send leads straight to your CRM rather than download them.
One queue, one first call and one set of retries for every channel is what stops leads falling between them.
Where do your leads land?
Count the places. Google Ads leads wait in your Google Ads account. Facebook and Instagram leads wait in Meta’s Ads Manager or Leads Center. Website enquiries often arrive as emails. Missed calls sit in a phone’s call log. WhatsApp messages sit on whichever phone the number is on.
Each place has its own notifications, its own person who checks it, and its own routine. The leads are not lost. They are simply in five different queues, and nobody is responsible for all five.
Why does each channel get a different response time?
Nobody owns every channel. The person who runs the ads is rarely the person who calls the leads.
Some leads have to be fetched. A CSV download is a task on someone’s list, and a task on a list waits for a quiet moment.
Notifications go to different people, and some of them are on leave, on the road, or asleep.
Busy weeks favour the easiest channel. When the team is stretched, the leads that are hardest to reach wait longest.
Do leads left on the platforms expire?
Yes. The ad platforms hold your leads for a limited time, and after that a lead you never moved is gone from the platform too.
Google Ads: 60 days. Google keeps lead form leads for 60 days, and the CSV download covers only the last 30. Until 2025 the limit was 30 days.
Meta: 90 days. Facebook and Instagram leads can be downloaded for up to 90 days after the form was sent. Meta’s own reason: by then, the customer’s interest would have faded.
Neither limit is a reason to wait. They mark the point at which a lead nobody moved disappears from the platform as well.
What do the ad platforms advise?
Capture your leads immediately.
Meta says that cutting the time to follow up can improve lead quality, that downloading leads by hand slows you down, and that you should run lead ads during business hours so someone can start a conversation quickly.
Google says the same in its own words: for fast follow-up, send leads from its lead forms straight into your CRM with a webhook or Zapier, rather than downloading them or waiting for an email.
How many leads never get a call at all?
When researchers sent real web enquiries to 2,241 US companies, 23% never responded (Harvard Business Review, 2011). In a later test of demo requests, nearly 30% got no reply within seven business days (Chili Piper). Both measured web forms rather than ad-platform leads, and neither is a measure of your business, but they show how ordinary it is for a paid-for lead to get nothing.
What does one queue look like?
Every channel feeds one place, automatically, the moment a lead arrives.
Every lead gets the same first call, quickly, within your calling hours, whichever channel it came from.
Every lead gets the same retries until someone answers.
One person, one call. Someone who enquires on two channels at once should hear from you once.
One record of what arrived, per channel, so a channel that stops sending leads is noticed.
How does IntrLume put every channel in one queue?
Connect each channel once. Website forms, from any form tool that can send a webhook or through Zapier or Make. Google Ads lead forms, which Google sends straight to IntrLume. Zoho CRM, whose new leads are called automatically. Calls to your own number, which you forward so the agent answers them.
Bring in the rest through your CRM or Zapier. Meta lists Zoho CRM among its lead ads integrations, and Zapier covers the others, so Facebook and Instagram leads can join the same queue.
Every lead gets the same fast first call. IntrLume rings each lead straight away within your calling hours. A lead that arrives outside them waits for the next window.
Retries on every channel. How many times, how far apart, and for how long, set for each source. It stops once they pick up.
One person, one call. The same enquiry arriving from two channels at about the same time rings them once, not twice.
Every call shows its source. Each call is labelled with the channel its lead came from, and each channel keeps a log of everything it sent. The outcome and the source can go to your CRM together.
Common questions
Do I have to change my forms or my ads?
No. Your forms and ads stay as they are. You connect each channel to IntrLume once.
What about Facebook and Instagram leads?
Send them to your CRM, where IntrLume can pick them up (Meta lists Zoho CRM among its lead ads integrations), or straight to IntrLume through Zapier or Make.
Can I cap how many leads get called each day?
Yes. Each source can have a daily limit. Leads beyond it are turned away and listed in that source's log with the reason.
What if the same person enquires on two channels?
If both enquiries arrive at about the same time, they get one call, not two. If they enquire again later, they are called again.