I absolutely understand your desire to avoid another third-party subscription service like Zapier, especially when the need for automatic lead creation from Facebook forms in Odoo seems like such a fundamental requirement.
While there are Odoo apps available on the Odoo App Store that promise this integration, often for a one-time purchase, you asked about a non-subscription, best practice solution that offers high reliability, and that's where the combination of Odoo's native capabilities and Facebook's robust tracking tools comes in, even though it requires a bit more technical setup initially.
The most robust, long-term solution that bypasses subscription-based automation platforms like Zapier is an architecture leveraging the Odoo API, the Facebook Conversions API, Google Tag Manager (GTM) for server-side tagging, and a GTM server hosting solution like Stape or your own Google Cloud Platform (GCP) instance.
This setup is superior because it uses your Odoo system's API as the secure, direct entry point for data, ensuring data quality and bypassing manual imports.
Instead of waiting for a third-party app to poll Facebook for new leads, you're building a real-time, server-side data pipeline.
Here is how the components work together: the Facebook lead form data is typically sent to a webhook endpoint.
You would configure this webhook to send the form data to your server-side GTM container, which is hosted by a service like Stape or on your own GCP.
GTM's server-side container acts as a powerful, flexible intermediary.
It receives the raw form data and can then process, clean, and enrich it before sending it on its way.
Crucially, you would configure GTM to perform an action using a custom HTTP Request tag or a dedicated API tag.
This tag takes the processed lead data and uses your Odoo API credentials to directly create a new lead record in your Odoo CRM.
This direct communication, or server-to-server integration, eliminates the need for a separate polling service or a constant synchronization app.
As a secondary, highly beneficial function, this same server-side GTM setup can use the Facebook Conversions API to send back a server-side event, specifically a `Lead` Standard Event, directly to Facebook.
This is excellent for ad campaign optimization because it confirms the conversion event from a more reliable server source, improving data matching and ad targeting precision, which is becoming increasingly vital due to browser privacy restrictions like ITP and the deprecation of third-party cookies.
The `Lead` Standard Event sent via the Conversions API often includes unique event IDs to deduplicate events from the browser-side Facebook Pixel, providing the most accurate possible attribution and ad performance data.
In short, while it's not a single Odoo module download, a custom implementation using the Odoo API and the Facebook Conversions API through a server-side GTM setup provides the most control, highest data accuracy, and, most importantly for you, avoids ongoing *software* subscription fees, leaving you only with the minimal hosting costs for the server-side GTM container.