Glossary · Term
A two-step lead auction where partial data is offered to buyers first (ping) and full data is delivered only to the winner (post).
Definition
Ping post is the underlying protocol most lead-distribution platforms use for real-time buyer decisioning. A stripped-down record — enough for the buyer to price the lead but not enough to contact it — is pinged to one or many buyers. The highest bidder that accepts receives the full record on the follow-up post.
Why it matters
Ping post determines which buyer wins each lead, at what price, and in what order. A misconfigured ping schema, a mistimed timeout, or an incorrect field mapping silently reduces bid participation and drops effective payout per lead across every source at once.
How it fails in practice
The most common failures are silent: a required field missing from the ping payload causes buyers to no-bid without an error, a timeout too short excludes slower buyers from the auction, or a post retry policy resends the same lead and doubles apparent revenue in reports.
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