Import Facebook Leads into Pipedrive from a Spreadsheet

Pipedrive’s spreadsheet importer is genuinely good — auto-mapping, duplicate merging, a 48-hour undo — and it’s the tool for three distinct jobs: backfilling history before Meta’s 90-day deletion eats it, migrating from another system, and the weekly rhythm for teams whose leads land in a Google Sheet first. This is the walkthrough with the details that make it painless — most of which are decisions you make in the spreadsheet, before Pipedrive ever sees it.

Get the Sheet Right First (This Is 80% of It)

Pipedrive auto-maps columns to fields by their names . Name your columns after Pipedrive’s fields once, and every import from that sheet maps itself forever:

• Name (or First name + Last name) — a person’s name is the one mandatory field; a row without it won’t import as a Person.
• Email, Phone — these also power duplicate detection, so keep them clean: one value per cell, no “call after 5pm” notes appended.
• Lead title — if you’re importing into the Leads inbox, give each row one (“Facebook — Kitchen Remodel form” beats a blank).
• Qualifying questions (Budget, Timeline, Service area) — name these columns exactly like the Pipedrive custom fields you want, creating those fields in Pipedrive first (or inline during mapping). This is the difference between answers you can filter a pipeline on and answers buried in a note.
• A source column — Lead source: Facebook Lead Ads on every row. Future-you, staring at a pipeline wondering which channel produces, will be grateful.

If your leads flow into a Google Sheet automatically, set the column headers there once and the export side of this is permanently done. One habit: keep the receiving tab raw (headers + data only) and do your formulas on a separate reporting tab — the importer wants a clean table, one tab, header row on top.

The Import Itself

1. Download the rows you’re importing as CSV or XLSX (from Google Sheets: File → Download; export a date range, not the whole history, if you import on a rhythm).
2. In Pipedrive: account menu → Tools and apps → Import data → Import from spreadsheet, then Get started. Limits: 50,000 rows, 50 MB, one tab.
3. Check the mapping. Well-named columns arrive pre-mapped; drag any stragglers to their fields, or create a custom field on the spot. Confirm each column’s entity is right — person fields to the Person, lead fields to the Lead.
4. The duplicate step — don’t rush it. Pipedrive flags rows matching existing records and offers merge instead of create. Choose merge for overlapping re-imports; it’s what keeps a weekly rhythm clean.
5. Import, then verify immediately: open the batch, spot-check ten records — names split correctly, phones intact (see the gotchas below), custom fields populated. The 48-hour revert exists precisely for this moment; a mis-mapped import discovered on day 3 is a cleanup project instead of a click.

The Three Classic Gotchas

• Leading zeros and phone formats. Spreadsheet apps love turning 0712... into 712... and long numbers into scientific notation. Format phone columns as text before the data arrives (in Google Sheets: select column → Format → Number → Plain text), not after.
• Full name in one column when you want two. Facebook forms deliver full_name by default; Pipedrive happily takes a single Name column, but if your team works with first names, split it in the sheet (=SPLIT(A2," ") and tidy the exceptions) before importing, not in Pipedrive after.
• Checkbox and multi-select answers. A form question allowing multiple answers arrives comma-joined in one cell. Map it to a Pipedrive text field unless you’ve built a matching multi-option field with exactly the same option labels — mismatched options silently drop.

Backfill: The Import Everyone Should Run Once

Whatever your ongoing setup, leads collected before it existed are stranded — connectors can’t reach backward , per Pipedrive’s own docs. Export everything from Meta’s Leads Center , run it through this import with duplicate-merge on, and your pipeline history is whole. The deadline is real: each lead is deleted 90 days after submission, oldest first, unrecoverably. If you have more than a few weeks of un-exported leads, today is the day.

If the Import Is Your Whole System

A scheduled export-import rhythm is a legitimate way to run a small pipeline — plenty of teams do Mondays with coffee. Two honest observations from watching it in practice: the interval between imports is time a lead sits unworked (the response-time math is unkind to Mondays), and rhythm-keeping depends on the person who keeps it. If those bite, the fix is to automate the capture end: PipeLeads creates each lead in Pipedrive within seconds of submission — same $15/month whether it’s one destination or all of them — and this import goes back to being what it’s best at: history, migrations, and rescues.