Home / Ping-post software

By Elias MartinezPublished Sep 23, 2026How we review

Ping-post is the auction model behind most of the lead selling industry. Instead of sending a lead to one buyer at a fixed price, the seller asks every eligible buyer what they would pay, then delivers the lead to the best bid. Done well, it raises revenue per lead and cuts the number of leads that go unsold. Done badly, it leaks personal data, slows delivery and leaves money with the wrong buyer. This guide covers the mechanics, the setup that works, and what to look for in ping-post software.

How ping-post works

1. Ping. A new lead arrives. The platform validates it, then sends anonymized data (zip code, age range, product interest, a few qualifying fields) to every buyer eligible under filters, caps and schedules.
2. Bid. Buyers respond in milliseconds with a price, or decline. Their bidding logic usually checks their own caps, duplicates and territory before answering.
3. Select. The platform ranks bids, applies your priorities and floor prices, and picks the winner. A timeout drops buyers that do not answer in time.
4. Post. The full lead, with contact details, is posted to the winning buyer. The buyer accepts, or rejects with a reason.
5. Fallback. If the post is rejected, the lead goes to the next bidder, a direct-post buyer or a ring tree automatically, so it is still sold.

The three delivery models, side by side

Most sellers run all three in the same campaign: an auction first, a fixed-price buyer as a safety net, then a ring tree of secondary buyers. The lead distribution platform decides the order and applies it in seconds. If yours cannot combine them, you are choosing between revenue and sell-through rate on every lead.

What is in the ping, and what is not

The ping exists so buyers can price a lead without receiving it. It should contain only the fields buyers need to bid: location (state and zip), a coarse age band, the product or vertical, and qualifying answers such as homeowner status or current insurance. It must not contain the name, phone, email or street address. Sharing personal data in the ping is the most common compliance mistake in the industry, and it also lets buyers cherry-pick leads without paying.

Two details matter here. First, the ping should carry a unique lead ID so the post can be matched to the bid. Second, buyers often want a consent flag and a source type in the ping, because their own compliance rules decide whether they can bid at all.

Timeouts, floors and priorities

Three settings decide how much you earn per auction, and they are the ones teams tune most often.

• Timeouts. How long the platform waits for a bid before moving on. Too short and good buyers are dropped; too long and the lead gets stale. Most sellers set the ping timeout well under a second and the post timeout a few seconds, then adjust per buyer.
• Floor prices. The minimum bid you accept, per campaign or per segment. A floor stops a lone buyer from winning at a token price on a slow hour. If you know your cost per lead by source, the floor should sit above it.
• Priorities and tiebreaks. When bids are equal, or when you want a strategic buyer to win at a small discount, priorities decide. Some sellers weight by acceptance rate or return rate so reliable buyers win more often.

Fallback: where the margin is

A rejected post is the moment most sellers lose money. The winning buyer rejects because the lead is a duplicate for them, their cap filled in the last second, or a validation on their side failed. Without fallback, the lead sits unsold even though other buyers bid on it seconds ago. With automatic fallback, the platform offers it to the next bid, then to a direct-post buyer, then to a ring tree. Our guide to selling unsold leads goes deeper, and the lead profit calculator puts a number on it for your volume.

Setting up a ping-post campaign

1. Define the segment. One campaign per vertical and format (for example, exclusive auto insurance leads in five states) keeps routing and reporting clean.
2. Configure buyers. For each buyer: filters, daily and hourly caps, schedule, floor price and delivery spec. Get their ping and post specs in writing and test both.
3. Set validation before the ping. Phone and email validation, deduplication window and suppression lists run before any buyer sees the lead, so returns stay low.
4. Add fallback paths. Next bidder, then a direct-post buyer, then a ring tree. Decide whether aged leads can be resold later, based on your consent language.
5. Sync source costs. Connect ad platforms and affiliate costs so profit per source is visible from the first day, not at month end.
6. Test, then watch acceptance. Send test leads to every buyer, then monitor bid rate, win rate, acceptance rate and return rate per buyer during the first week.

This is what the result looks like on a real platform: one lead captured, put on sale, routed automatically and delivered to buyers with their own delivery windows, in seconds.

Caps, filters and schedules belong on the buyer order, applied before the ping. This is what that looks like when your team can edit it directly.

What to look for in ping-post software

• Support for ping-post, direct-post and ring-tree in the same campaign, in the order you choose.
• Configurable timeouts, floor prices and priorities per campaign and per buyer.
• Per-buyer caps, filters and schedules applied before the ping, not after the post.
• Automatic fallback when a post is rejected, with retry logic your team controls.
• Validation and duplicate checks before any buyer sees the lead.
• Reporting on bids, win rate, acceptance rate, return rate and profit per source, without exports.
• Buyer specs your team can set up without a vendor ticket, and a sandbox to test them.
• Consent records (text, timestamp, IP, page) stored with every lead and passed on the post.

Compare platforms on these points in our best lead distribution software ranking, or see Vertikl features. If you route calls as well as web leads, check that separately: not every ping-post platform handles inbound calls.

Common mistakes

• Personal data in the ping. A compliance problem and a revenue problem, since buyers can skim leads without bidding.
• One buyer, one price. Running direct post only when several buyers would compete. Price discovery is the whole point of the model.
• No floor price. Leads sold below cost on quiet hours.
• Fallback set up by hand. Rejected posts handled by email the next morning are leads that are already stale.
• Reporting on revenue only. Without cost per lead by source, a campaign can look profitable and lose money after returns.

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