Native lead ads

Smileline can receive submissions from provider-hosted forms on Meta and Instagram, Google Ads, and TikTok. Native lead capture is included in Smileline Core. It creates the same patient, enquiry or treatment journey used by other capture sources; it does not create or change advertising campaigns.

Open Ads to see provider health and recent lead activity. Use Meta Ads, Google Ads, or TikTok Ads to connect accounts and choose their forms — once a platform is connected its page opens on a dashboard, and the connection, accounts and forms sit behind Settings at the top right. Use Lead capture to review mappings and submissions that need attention.

Who can use it

Owners and managers can connect providers, select accounts, configure forms, import recent leads and disconnect an integration. Front desk and analysts can view connection health, mappings and submission outcomes; telesales have no lead-ads access. Resolving a lead that may attach to an existing patient also requires permission to update patients.

Connect a provider

A platform that is not connected yet opens straight on setup. Once it is connected, the page opens on the platform dashboard and everything below — the connection, its accounts and their defaults, form mappings, Import recent leads and the Google webhook key — is under Settings at the top right of the page. Granting access on the platform returns you to Settings, and a reconnect prompt from a notification takes you there directly.

Select Sync now under Settings to refresh accounts and forms. With the SEO & Ads add-on, the same action also imports campaigns and reporting for your enabled ad accounts; see Platform dashboards. Newly discovered accounts remain disabled until you enable them and save their defaults.

Meta and Instagram

1. Open Ads → Meta Ads and select Connect Meta.
2. Complete Meta's authorization and choose the Facebook Pages used by the practice.
3. Select the Pages to enable. Instagram Instant Forms are delivered through their associated Facebook Page, so they appear in the same connection.
4. Review each discovered form's mapping, then enable it.
5. Send a test lead from Meta's Lead Ads Testing Tool and confirm that the form reports Test received.

Meta may require the practice to grant Smileline access in Lead Access Manager as well as during authorization. The connection, under Settings, shows an action warning if Smileline can see a Page but cannot retrieve its leads.

If the connection reports Meta authorization is missing permissions, select Reconnect and approve every requested permission. The error names the missing permissions. If Meta does not offer them, contact Smileline support so the app's Login for Business configuration can be corrected.

Every Page and ad account the grant can see is listed, however many there are: each sync reads a bounded number of listing pages and resumes from where it stopped, so a grant with hundreds of Pages is complete after a few syncs, and a Page or ad account is only marked as no longer discovered once a complete listing has failed to include it. Instant Forms fill in over successive syncs in the same way as Google and TikTok forms: each sync reads a bounded number of form pages across the practice's Pages and resumes from where it stopped, so a Page with many forms is complete after a few syncs (its card says so while forms are still arriving) and a form is only marked as no longer discovered once a complete walk of its Page has failed to list it.

Meta issues 60-day access tokens (a short-lived token from Meta's login is traded for the 60-day one before anything is stored). Smileline renews yours automatically before it lapses, so you normally never reconnect. Meta's 90-day data-access window is different: the automatic renewal cannot extend it, so its warning — 14 days and again 3 days before access ends — asks you to re-authorise in Meta, which reconnecting does. Connecting also grants Meta's pages_read_engagement and pages_manage_ads permissions, which Meta requires for lead retrieval. The ad, ad set and campaign names on a lead are read only when the grant carries Meta's ads_management permission; without it leads still arrive with their form answers and attribution stays empty.

Google Ads

1. Open Ads → Google Ads and select Connect Google Ads.
2. Enter the practice’s Customer Google Ads ID (10 digits, with or without hyphens). If you access it through an agency manager account, also enter the Manager account ID (optional).
3. Select Continue with Google and sign in with an account that can access that customer. Smileline checks access before connecting.
4. Enable the chosen account and select Save account defaults. Review its discovered forms and their mappings.
5. For the fastest delivery, copy the generated webhook URL and key (shown beside each form under Settings) into each Google lead form, then use Google's Send test data action. Google allows one webhook integration per form.

Google connection requests two permissions: Google Ads access (adwords) for accounts, lead forms, reporting and supported campaign and conversion-action management; and Data Manager access (datamanager) for conversion feedback. The connection does not request Chrome Web Store publishing or add permissions from other Google integrations. Campaign management still requires the SEO & Ads add-on, and conversion feedback must be enabled separately.

Smileline also reconciles connected Google Ads accounts through Google's API. The API path recovers missed deliveries and forms that do not use the optional webhook. A form configured with another CRM webhook can therefore remain connected to that service.

Recovery and imports respect the requested time window, including when the Google Ads account uses a different time zone or the clocks change.

Only the chosen customer is connected to this practice. The manager’s other customers are not imported or displayed. Older connections that did not record a customer choice ask you to reconnect; their account inventory stays hidden until you complete setup. Conversion feedback uses the chosen customer. A practice with conversion history cannot be switched to a different customer: connect that customer in its own practice.

Lead forms fill in over successive syncs. Each sync reads a bounded number of form pages for the chosen customer and resumes where the last one stopped. Its card indicates when forms are still arriving. A form is only marked as no longer discovered after a complete walk of that customer’s forms.

TikTok

1. Open Ads → TikTok Ads and select Connect TikTok.
2. Authorize the advertiser account and choose the account used by the practice.
3. Review the discovered Instant Forms and their mappings.
4. Enable account-wide capture so newly created forms are discovered automatically.
5. Create a TikTok test lead and confirm that the form reports Test received.

Each advertiser also shows a Direct messages form for leads that arrive through TikTok direct-message ads. Map it like any other form. Direct-message leads arrive live only: TikTok offers no export for them, so Import recent leads does not cover that form. TikTok currently offers direct-message lead ads to advertisers registered in APAC and LATAM; elsewhere the feature needs a TikTok allowlist, and the form stays visible but empty until it applies.

TikTok lead storage is regional. Smileline uses the European lead region for UK, EEA and Swiss advertiser accounts, and whenever a catch-up import comes back empty it checks the other regions as well, so ads targeted at another region are still reconciled.

An advertiser with several hundred Instant Forms fills in over successive syncs: each sync reads a bounded number of form pages and picks up where the last one stopped, so the full inventory appears after a few daily syncs (or a few presses of Sync), and an advertiser whose forms are still arriving says so on its card. The first complete inventory walk marks any previously stored form it did not list as no longer discovered; after that a form is only marked once two consecutive complete walks have failed to list it. If you have moved an advertiser's leads into a Business Center form library, Smileline records the library from TikTok's form listing and from the first lead it delivers, and exports that form's leads through the library rather than the advertiser account.

Map a form

Forms and their mappings live under Settings on the platform page. A form cannot be enabled until at least one valid contact route—email or mobile phone—is mapped. For each form, review:

• first name, last name or full name;
• email and mobile phone;
• the practice location and lead source;
• an optional default owner;
• treatment routing: a fixed treatment, an answer-to-treatment map, or Enquiry triage;
• which submitted answers staff should see in the capture record;
• any explicit marketing-consent checkbox and the channels it covers.

Use Enquiry triage when the form does not establish a treatment. The submission creates a Review new enquiry task in Today — for a first-time contact as much as for a known patient — where staff confirm the treatment or dismiss it.

Smileline keeps a submitted answer snapshot with the capture record. Provider payloads and credentials are not exposed as general patient fields.

Marketing consent

Submitting a native lead form does not by itself grant promotional consent. Smileline records an opt-in only when you deliberately map a form checkbox or disclaimer response and specify the covered channels—email, SMS or WhatsApp. The provider, form, field, submitted value, notice text and submission time are retained as evidence.

An absent, blank or unmapped checkbox leaves the patient's existing preference unchanged. It never opts a patient in automatically.

Test leads and exceptions

Provider test leads validate authorization, delivery and field mapping, but they never create a patient, journey, task or automation enrollment. Neither Meta nor TikTok flags a test lead, so Smileline recognises the placeholder text their testing tools fill in ("test lead: dummy data for …"); a test lead you complete with real-looking details is treated as a real enquiry.

Real submissions can wait in Lead capture → Needs review when:

• the form is new, disabled or missing a valid mapping;
• neither a valid email nor phone was supplied;
• the email and phone match different existing patients;
• a referenced location, lead source or treatment is no longer available;
• the provider connection needs authorization again.

After correcting the mapping, select Replay. For an identity conflict, choose the correct patient or create a new enquiry. Smileline records the resolution and processes the submission once.

Two more cases are kept rather than lost. A submission that was received but could not be queued for processing — an outage at that moment — counts under Needs replay at the top of Lead capture; select Replay on the row. A submission for an ad account or Page the practice had not connected yet waits in the review queue as lead-ads-unknown-asset: connect the account, then Retry it there and the lead lands in the practice that owns the account.

Import recent leads

New connections capture live submissions by default. Owners and managers can optionally import the last 7 days, 30 days or the provider maximum from Import recent leads under Settings on the platform page:

• Meta and TikTok: up to 90 days;
• Google Ads: up to 60 days.

Historical imports do not create due-now follow-up tasks or start automations. A historical submission without a treatment remains in review instead of appearing as a new enquiry in Today.

Imports and routine reconciliation are idempotent. Receiving the same provider lead through a webhook and a recovery scan does not create it twice.

Raw provider and normalized lead payloads are removed 30 days after processing. A submission that remains unresolved has a hard 90-day limit; at that point its raw details are redacted and the submission closes as ignored, while its non-sensitive receipt and status history remain.

What native lead capture does not do

Native lead capture only brings submissions in — it never creates campaigns, spends budget, or captures Instagram/Facebook direct messages. The rest of the Ads workspace covers the other direction and the money:

• Conversion feedback reports Lead, Booked and Won back to the platforms (Smileline Core).
• Ad campaigns and the Creative studio create and manage campaigns (SEO & Ads add-on).
• Spend & results in the Ads workspace compares platform-reported spend with CRM truth per campaign (SEO & Ads add-on); the Ads weekly digest report is its email counterpart.