How to Set the Full Name Mapping from Facebook Lead Ads to Dynamics 365 using Zapier

Miguel Nepomuceno, 01 October 2017

Zapier is a service that allows for integrations and task automations across multiple web applications. In my previous blog posts, I went over setting up the Facebook Lead Ad Trigger and the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Action in your Zaps as well as some of the common errors to watch out for. This blog post will go over configuring the Full Name field mappings in Zapier for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Action step.

The most common fields that are retrieved in Facebook Lead Ad Forms are covered. These are: Full Name, Email, Phone Number and Birthdate. Email and Phone Number are simple with direct mapping, where we can just select them in our Zapier dropdown (screenshot below).

The out-of-the-box Lead entity has a Full Name composite field containing the text fields First Name and Last Name. When Zapier retrieves the custom fields from CRM it will retrieve First Name and Last Name, and requires a value to be mapped because the field is set to Business Required. There are two solutions to tackling this problem. The first option is splitting Full Name when customizing your Facebook Lead Ad Form from taking Full Name, and changing it to take in First Name and Last Name. Facebook Lead Ad Forms allow for customization, so you can untick ‘Full name’, and tick ‘First name’ and ‘Last name’.

Note that the best practice is keeping the Lead Ad Form short and simple. The trade-off of obtaining more information from a user is the chance that a user will abandon the form before completing it. Thus, you would need to consider users having additional user actions on the form. Splitting the field Full Name into First Name and Last Name means there are more field controls in the Lead Ad Form.

The second option for mapping Full Name is by using Formatter, a built-in tool that allows for Triggers and Actions in order to reformat data used in your Zaps. You can convert data into different formats before adding it into the Actions steps. For this option, we can use the Formatter to split the Full Name, using the space as our separator (default value). We can then pass the output of this Formatter into our ‘Create Lead’ Action, mapping the field values into Microsoft Dynamics 365. This method allows you to maintain having Full Name in your Facebook Lead Form. The screenshot below is the Formatter configuration I made to split the First Name from the Full Name in the Facebook Lead Ad.