Troubleshooting Follow Up Boss Integrations

Why Do Follow Up Boss Integrations Break?

Follow Up Boss connects to dozens of lead sources and tools — Zillow, Realtor.com, Facebook Lead Ads, Zapier, and custom webhooks — through a combination of email parsing, REST API calls, and outbound webhooks. Each connection point is an opportunity for silent failure.

The most common root causes, in rough order of frequency:

• Expired or rotated API key — A new team member regenerated the key, or a security audit forced rotation, and the connected app still holds the old one.
• Webhook URL changed — You migrated servers, changed a subdomain, or redeployed an app and the URL in FUB (or the source) was never updated.
• Zapier zap paused — Zapier pauses zaps automatically after a task error threshold is reached. No notification is sent by default.
• Field mapping mismatch — FUB renamed or deprecated a custom field that a Zapier step or API payload was writing to.
• Duplicate contact merge — FUB's deduplication logic merged an inbound lead into an existing contact, and the activity appeared on the wrong record.
• Rate limit hits — High-volume imports or poorly throttled API scripts can exceed FUB's rate limits, silently dropping records.

How to Diagnose a Broken Lead Source Integration

Start with FUB's Activity Log — it timestamps every inbound lead and shows the source label. If the log shows no activity from a source that should be sending, the break is upstream. If the log shows the lead arrived but it went to the wrong place, the break is in routing or field mapping.

1. Open the FUB Admin panel → Activity Log. Filter by the source in question and confirm whether any records arrived in the last 24–48 hours.
2. Check the source platform's delivery logs. Zillow, Realtor.com, and Facebook Ads each have a lead delivery history in their own dashboards. A "delivered" status there with nothing showing in FUB means the FUB receiving end (email or webhook) is broken.
3. Verify the webhook URL or inbound email address in FUB. Go to Admin → Lead Sources and confirm the receiving address or URL exactly matches what the source platform has configured.
4. Send a test event. Most lead sources let you trigger a test submission. Use it — a successful test rules out credentials and URL issues and isolates field mapping problems.
5. Check for unexpected contact merges. Search FUB for the test lead's email or phone. If it merged into an existing contact, that contact's Activity tab will show the inbound event.

Fixing Zapier → Follow Up Boss Integration Issues

Zapier is the most common middleware layer for FUB — and the most likely to fail silently. A paused zap or a stale FUB connection can stop leads from flowing without any visible error in FUB itself.

Work through this sequence when a Zapier → FUB zap stops delivering:

1. Open the Zap → Task History tab. This shows every run: successful, skipped, and errored. Error messages here are the fastest path to a root cause.
2. Check whether the zap is paused. Zapier pauses zaps after a run of failures. The zap status indicator will show "Off" even if you last left it on. Re-enable it after fixing the underlying issue.
3. Look for field-name errors. The most common error is a field that existed in FUB when you built the zap but has since been renamed or removed. The Task History will say something like "field not found." Fix it by updating the field mapping in the Zapier action step.
4. Re-authenticate the FUB connection. Go to Zapier → Connected Accounts → Follow Up Boss and click Reconnect. This generates a fresh API session. Required any time the FUB API key is rotated.
5. Turn the zap off, then back on. After any fix, toggling the zap resets internal state and clears cached auth tokens.

Follow Up Boss Webhook Troubleshooting

FUB's outbound webhooks notify your app when contacts, deals, or tasks change. When those notifications stop arriving, the problem is almost always a URL mismatch, an HTTPS certificate error, or a webhook secret that no longer matches.

Step-by-step webhook diagnosis

1. Capture a raw payload first. Point the webhook URL temporarily at webhook.site or a similar inspector. Trigger an event in FUB (update a contact) and confirm FUB is actually sending. If nothing arrives, the webhook is misconfigured in FUB.
2. Confirm the event type. FUB fires distinct events — contact.created, contact.updated, deal.created, deal.stage_changed, and others. Make sure the event type registered in FUB matches what your receiving endpoint expects.
3. Verify the webhook secret. If your endpoint validates an HMAC signature, the secret stored in your app must exactly match the one set in FUB. Even a trailing space will cause every request to fail signature verification.
4. Check your server's HTTPS certificate. FUB requires a valid TLS certificate on the receiving URL. Self-signed certificates and expired certificates will cause delivery to fail.
5. Let FUB retry. FUB retries failed webhook deliveries automatically with backoff. If your server had a brief outage, missed events may be delivered on the next retry cycle — check your logs a few minutes after restoring the endpoint.

Troubleshooting Zillow and Realtor.com Lead Routing

Zillow and Realtor.com deliver leads to FUB via email parsing — they send a structured lead notification email to a unique inbound address that FUB assigns to your account. This is different from a webhook, and its failure modes are different too.

• Confirm the FUB inbound email address. In FUB Admin → Lead Sources, find the source (Zillow or Realtor.com). Copy the inbound email address shown there.
• Confirm the source platform has the correct address. Log into your Zillow Premier Agent or Realtor.com Connection Plus dashboard and check where leads are sent. The address must match character for character — including any subdomain component.
• Check spam filters. Some email security gateways (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) can quarantine lead notification emails before they reach FUB's parser. Check the spam/quarantine folder of whatever inbox sits behind the FUB inbound address.
• Request a test lead. Both Zillow and Realtor.com support sending a test lead from their advertiser dashboards. A successful test confirms the email path is open and FUB's parser is working.

For Zillow specifically, see the Zillow Playbook for a deeper walkthrough of speed-to-lead and routing strategies inside FUB.

When to Use the FUB API Directly

Follow Up Boss exposes a REST API at https://api.followupboss.com/v1/. Developers can use it to build custom integrations, sync external data sources, or automate bulk operations that Zapier can't handle efficiently.

Common API integration mistakes

• Hitting rate limits. FUB enforces request rate limits per API key. Bulk imports should use batching with delays between requests. If you receive HTTP 429 responses, your code is not respecting the rate limit.
• CORS errors in browser apps. The FUB API is intended for server-side use. Calling it directly from a browser will trigger CORS errors because your domain is not whitelisted. Route API calls through your own backend.
• Sending invalid field names. Custom fields in FUB are referenced by their internal key, not their display label. Fetch the field list from the API first and map display names to keys before writing data.
• Not handling pagination. Endpoints that return contact lists are paginated. Stopping at page one is a common source of "missing records" bugs.

How Follow Up Ace Helps Keep FUB Data Clean

Integration failures often surface as data quality problems — contacts with missing fields, stale records that were never followed up, or leads that routed to the wrong agent. Follow Up Ace adds an intelligence layer on top of FUB that makes these problems visible before they cost you deals.

Ace Score fields flag stale and unresponsive contacts

Every Follow Up Ace account includes free predictive fields that populate inside FUB — today Ace Win Score + Ace Churn Risk (the pre-consolidation set below was retired June 2026; see the update note above):

• Ace Score (0–100) — composite engagement score
• Ace Tier — Hot / Warm / Cool / Cold / Dormant
• Ace Status — current lifecycle label
• Ace Response Time — how quickly the contact responds
• Ace Velocity Score — rate of engagement change
• Ace Days Since Inbound — time since last inbound signal
• Ace Preferred Channel — email, call, or text preference

Contacts that were silently dropped by a broken integration tend to surface quickly with a low Ace Win Score and high Churn Risk — they arrived in FUB but received no follow-up and show no engagement. Smart Lists filtered by Ace Churn Risk = High are a practical way to find leads that may have slipped through an integration gap.

Pipeline health check for missing data

Follow Up Ace's pipeline-health-check tool (one of 215 MCP tools available through the Agentic platform) can surface contacts with incomplete or missing field data — the signature fingerprint of a field-mapping failure in a Zapier or API integration. Connect Ace to Claude or ChatGPT via the MCP connector and ask it to run a pipeline health check on your account.

The Ace Trove tier also gives you access to deeper data analysis, including detecting patterns across your entire contact database that point to systematic integration gaps — not just one-off missing records.

Compliance scanning as a data quality signal

If your integrations import notes or message content into FUB, Follow Up Ace's Fair Housing compliance scan can flag imported text that contains potentially problematic language before it's used in outreach. This is especially useful when integrating third-party lead enrichment services that append notes to contact records.