Stop Selling Leads and Start Sharing Revenue With Outcome-Based Partnerships
The biggest marketplaces are swapping $50 lead fees for 15% revenue shares. Here is the setup you need to move to a true outcome-based model.
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Ping post is a two-step way to sell a lead or a phone call. First, the seller sends a short summary to several buyers at once. That is the ping. Buyers answer with a bid.
Then the seller sends the full lead, or connects the call, to the buyer who won. That is the post. Losing buyers never get the full record.
Ping post started in web lead generation, where insurance and mortgage leads are sold this way every day. Pay-per-call took it up later, with one big difference: the caller is waiting on the line.
How ping post works, step by step
1. The ping. A form is submitted or a call comes in. The seller sends each eligible buyer a summary: the location, the vertical and the answers the person gave. The name and phone number usually stay out.
2. The bids. Each buyer's system checks the summary against its own rules. It answers with a price, or it declines. A buyer that doesn't answer in time is left out of that auction.
3. The pick. The seller compares the bids and picks a winner. Usually that is the best bid, as long as it clears the seller's minimum.
4. The post. The seller sends the winner the full lead, or transfers the call. The buyer pays what it bid, if the lead or call meets the agreed terms.
Ping post vs. direct post
Direct post skips the auction. The seller sends the full lead, or the call, straight to one buyer at a price agreed in advance.
Direct post is simpler. There is no bidding to set up, and the buyer knows the price before anything arrives. It works well with one buyer and steady demand.
Ping post earns more when buyers value calls differently. A buyer short of volume today bids higher. A buyer at its cap declines. The auction finds today's price, not the one you agreed months ago.
Ping post also keeps personal details tighter. With direct post, every buyer you try receives the full lead. With ping post, only the winner does.
What changes when you sell calls, not leads
With a web lead, the post is a data record sent to the buyer's system. A lead can wait a few seconds, or even a few minutes.
With a call, the post is a live transfer. The caller is on hold, so the whole auction has to finish fast. Bid windows are short, and a buyer that answers late misses the call.
Calls also come with a quality bar. Most buyers pay only when the call lasts long enough, for example 90 seconds. A high bid on a call that hangs up early pays nothing.
That is why some platforms compare bids by expected value, not face value. A $40 bid from a buyer that answers nearly every call can be worth more than a $50 bid from one that misses a third of them.
What goes in the ping
The ping should carry enough to price the call, and no more. For a call, that usually means the state or ZIP code, the vertical and the caller's area code.
It also carries the answers from the IVR, such as homeowner status or current insurer. Each question your IVR asks becomes a detail buyers can bid on. A call with three useful answers draws better bids than a bare call.
The caller's phone number and name usually stay out of the ping. They go to the winner with the post. Some buyer networks ask for the number in the ping, so check each buyer's format.
When nobody bids
Sometimes every buyer declines, or every bid is below your minimum. Decide what happens then before you go live.
The usual answer is a fallback: the call goes to a buyer at a fixed price, the direct post way. Without one, the call finds no buyer and you paid for that ad click for nothing.
Is ping post worth it?
Ping post pays off when several buyers want the same calls and value them differently. The more buyers and the more varied the calls, the bigger the gain over a fixed price.
It does little with a single buyer, or with a contract that fixes the price anyway. Then the auction adds setup and earns nothing extra.
It also needs buyers that can bid. A buyer without a bidding system can still take calls at a fixed price, through normal routing or as the fallback.
Ping post in CallMatrix
CallMatrix runs ping-post auctions on inbound calls, on the Launch, Growth and Scale plans. The auction starts after the IVR, while the caller is on the line.
Before any ping goes out, each buyer is checked against its caps, business hours, routing rules and the IVR answers it requires. A buyer that can't take the call isn't pinged.
The ping carries the state, city, ZIP code, vertical, caller area code and IVR answers. The CallMatrix format leaves out the caller's number. Some partner networks' formats require it, and those buyers get it in the ping.
Each offer has its own ping URL, post URL, minimum bid and authentication, and its own limit on how long to wait for a bid.
The highest bid wins by default. You can switch a routing plan to expected-value bidding instead, which weighs each bid by how often that buyer answers the calls it's sent.
The call then transfers to the winner, and the post with the caller's details goes out as the transfer starts. The bid counts as revenue only once the call passes the offer's minimum duration.
If nobody bids, the call goes to the routing plan's backup buyer, or to a static auction at each buyer's set price per call. If the winner doesn't answer, CallMatrix runs a static auction among the other buyers, then tries the backup buyer.
The Ping-Post Auction page lists every setting. To see it on your own calls, request access and build your first campaign for free.