What Is Ping Post?

How a ping and a post work, step by step

In a plain sale, the seller sends the whole lead to one buyer at a price agreed in advance. Ping post adds a pricing round in the middle. Here is the full sequence for one lead.

1. The consumer fills in a form

   A prospect submits a form on the seller's site or a publisher's site. The seller now holds the full record: name, phone, email and address, plus the answers that qualify the lead, such as what service the person wants and where they live.

2. The seller sends the ping

   The seller strips the record down to what a buyer needs to price it, usually location, the qualifying answers and a source sub ID, and sends that preview to a buyer or a distribution platform. Names, phone numbers and email addresses stay out of the ping.

3. Buyers price the preview

   Each buyer checks the ping against its own filters, caps and budget, then answers with an offer or a decline. When several buyers are in the running, the highest offer becomes the one returned to the seller.

4. The seller accepts or walks away

   The seller compares the offer with its own floor and with the other places it could send the lead. If the price works, it accepts. If it does not, it can ping another buyer or hold the lead for overflow.

5. The seller posts the full lead

   Once it accepts, the seller sends the complete record, contact details included, so the buyer can match the post to the ping it priced.

6. The buyer takes the lead and it is delivered

   The buyer checks that the post matches the preview it priced, the sale is recorded at the agreed price, and the lead goes into the buyer's CRM or other delivery channel.

The round trip takes seconds. Companies that publish their ping post terms describe the same shape in their own words: a de-identified ping with no personal details, a bid back, and a post only on acceptance. One says declines cost the seller nothing. Another says that when no buyer is active for a ping, no bid comes back at all, which is worth knowing before you read silence as a technical fault.

Some networks run a ping tree, where a lead is offered to buyers in tiers, usually highest-paying first, and falls to the next tier when nobody above takes it. Five companies in our directory describe running one, two of them personal loan networks. A tiered tree and a single auction both end the same way for the seller: one offer, accept or decline.

What goes in a ping and what goes in a post

The ping carries what a buyer needs to decide, and nothing that would let it contact the person without paying. Which answers count depends on the market. A roofing buyer may price on homeowner status and ZIP code; a lending buyer on state, loan amount and credit tier; an insurance buyer on state and coverage type.

The consent row matters. Of the 38 companies that run ping post, 15 name a third-party consent certificate or token they collect or pass along, and 9 make consent records a condition for the publishers who post to them. One spells out what it expects with each lead: a timestamp, the IP address, the page URL, the browser user agent and the disclosure text the consumer saw. Plan for those fields from the start.

In Juiced, the ping and post split is set per field rather than per integration. Every field on a lead type has four switches: required for post, required for ping, deliverable, and hidden from API spec. Turn on required for ping for the fields a buyer needs to price the lead, and leave it off for contact details. The field types are on the lead fields page.

Who actually uses ping post

We read what all 440 lead companies in our pay-per-lead directory publish about how they buy and sell. Ping post is a minority practice, and the companies that use it look different from the directory as a whole.

Three patterns stand out. First, ping post is a middleman's tool: networks are a minority of the directory but most of the ping post users, and 10 of the 38 also resell or broker leads. Second, it rarely stands alone: most of these companies also generate their own traffic and sell phone traffic, so ping post is one channel in a mixed business. Third, the companies that run it often sell to two kinds of buyer at once. One generator says it charges small buyers a flat price per lead and uses ping post bidding for aggregators and networks. That is a common split: end buyers want a simple price, and other lead companies want to bid lead by lead.

The opposite position exists too. A few companies market the absence of ping post as a feature, telling buyers each inquiry goes to one buyer and is never run through a ping tree or resold. If you sell exclusive leads to end buyers, being outside the ping post world can be part of the pitch.

No vertical in our directory has a majority of companies using ping post. The counts below are companies that run it, against all directory companies in that vertical; 25 of the 38 list several verticals, so the rows overlap.

Relative to size, real estate and home services show it most often, and education, legal and mortgage least. In legal, 67 of the 97 companies sell exclusive leads, 27 sell signed cases, and one advertises that its leads are never ping-posted. Lending is where the vocabulary is most developed: tiered trees, de-identified pings and bids returned in seconds all come up on lending network sites, and 14 of the 38 ping post companies work in lending. If you are entering a vertical, check who the ping post buyers are there before you build for it; in some markets they are a handful of networks, and selling to them is covered in how to sell to lead networks.

Ping post vs. direct post

In a direct post, the seller sends the full lead to a buyer in one step, usually at a price agreed in advance. In host and post, the consumer is sent to a page the buyer hosts. Both are named by a small minority of the directory, usually alongside ping post.

Direct post is the right start for a seller with one or two buyers. Ping post earns its extra step when several buyers bid on the same market, because several buyers bidding beats one buyer at a flat price. Find buyers before building traffic, get them funded, then add the auction. The pricing side is covered in pay-per-lead pricing, and the delivery options in lead delivery methods.

How ping post companies price and pay

Running a ping post system does not mean selling everything by auction. Of the 38 companies that run one, 28 list a price per lead, 18 quote custom pricing, 13 sell per call and only 10 list bidding or auction pricing. The auction usually sits between lead companies, while the end buyer at the bottom of the chain still pays a set price per lead. If your buyers are local businesses, expect them to want a fixed number, and keep the bidding for the networks and aggregators that buy alongside them.

Two other traits set these companies apart. They sell shared leads more often than the directory as a whole, 12 of the 38 against 95 of 440, because a system built to offer one lead to many buyers can also sell it to more than one. And 21 of the 38 say they cover the whole country, against fewer than half of the directory. A ping post system pays off when it can place a lead from anywhere, which takes many buyers with different territories in the auction.

On the supply side, 18 of the 22 companies that accept ping post traffic publish something about how they pay sources. The pattern:

Read those terms together. A source posting into someone else's ping tree is paid on acceptance, often a month later, and can lose pay for leads returned after the sale. That is a good overflow channel and a weak only channel. If you are the one running the tree, the same terms show what other sources will expect from you before they post.

What ping post buyers ask of the sources that post to them

If you plan to post into someone else's ping post system, their publisher terms are your spec. Of the 22 companies that accept ping post traffic, 18 publish requirements for sources. The same items recur.

• Approval before traffic runs. Several describe an application and review. Across the 38, several also describe a technical step before launch: API documents and a sandbox, test pings and posts, or a low-volume test period before scaling.
• Consent records with every lead. Nine of the 38 ping post companies make this a condition, often naming a certificate or token.
• Banned traffic types. Five of the 38 ban incentivized traffic and six ban co-registration. Others ban bots, proxies and trademark bidding.
• Real-time posting. One requires leads to be posted within seconds of form completion.
• Pay on acceptance. A ping that wins and a post that is then rejected earns nothing.

Read the agreement as well as the marketing page. Across the whole directory, researchers found about ten companies whose pages disagree on exclusivity, such as a product page that says exclusive and terms or consumer consent copy that allow several buyers, and at least two of them run ping post. If you are buying through someone's ping post system, or reselling into one, know which version governs.

What can go wrong

Settle each of these before the first lead, ideally in the same document as your return policy.

1. Duplicates

   The same consumer can be pinged twice: by one source that resubmits, by two sources that both bought the same click, or by a person who fills in two forms. If both pings win, a buyer pays twice for one person. Of the 224 directory companies that publish return terms, 65 name duplicates as a return reason. Among ping post companies the share is higher: 9 of the 18 that publish return terms name duplicates. Catching a repeat at the ping, before anyone has priced it, is far cheaper than settling it as a return later. More in duplicate lead checking.

2. Offers that change

   An offer is made against a buyer's state at the moment of the ping. By the time the post arrives, that buyer's cap may have filled or its budget run out, so the offer the seller accepted can no longer be honored. Treat every ping offer as conditional, decide in advance what happens when a post fails, and keep a record of what was offered and what was paid.

3. Posts that do not match the ping

   A buyer prices what it sees. If the post arrives with a different ZIP code, a changed answer or missing fields, the buyer is being asked to pay for a lead it did not price. Agree which fields are required at each step, reject posts that leave them out, and expect buyers to refuse a post that contradicts its ping.

4. Contact data that fails after the sale

   The ping cannot carry a phone number, so a buyer cannot check it before bidding. Bad contact information is the most common return reason in our directory: 96 of the 224 companies that publish return terms name disconnected, wrong or invalid contact details. Buyers who win a ping and then find a disconnected number will return it, so validate what you can before you post.

5. Consent records that do not travel

   A ping post sale passes through more hands than a direct one, and buyers ask for proof, so make sure the record arrives with the post. This page does not state what the rules require; they are published by the FCC and the FTC, and TCPAWorld tracks changes.

How Juiced runs ping post

In Juiced, a source sends a lead preview, and Juiced returns an offer based on current buyer bids. If the source accepts, it posts the full lead. The details:

• Same rules as everything else. Ping traffic obeys the same buyer criteria, caps and budgets as all other distribution, so an offer only comes from a buyer whose filters match and who has room left. See budgets and caps.
• Offers from live bids. Buyers bid above the seller's minimum, and the highest bid sets the offer. See buyer bidding.
• Repeats caught early. Repeat submissions are caught at the ping stage, before a buyer prices them.
• Documented endpoints. Sources integrate through documented ping and post endpoints.
• A full record. Every exchange from ping to post is recorded in the flow log, so you can see what was offered, what was posted and who bought.
• Funded buyers. Buyers add funds to a wallet before leads arrive and are charged at delivery, with approved returns credited back. See wallet billing.
• Overflow. Leads that miss their first route move into the seller's private marketplace, where the price declines on a schedule until a buyer takes the lead or it reaches the seller's floor. See the private marketplace.

The full feature is on the ping post page. Juiced distributes web leads; it does not scrub leads, run compliance checks or route calls, so calls need separate call tracking.

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