How It Works
From a consumer hitting submit to a buyer's CRM, with every decision logged along the way.
What happens between form submission and delivery?
Five things, in under two seconds: the lead is validated against the campaign's field rules, checked for duplicates, matched against every buyer's filters and caps, auctioned to the highest bidder, and delivered to that buyer's endpoint. If the winner fails to accept, a waterfall offers it to the runner-up. Money only moves once a buyer accepts.
The full sequence
Capture and consent
The consumer submits a form on the seller’s landing page. The exact consent wording shown, the checkbox state, the IP address, the user agent, the page URL and a timestamp are all recorded. Under CASL the burden of proving consent falls on the sender — this is the record that discharges it.
Field validation
Email format and disposable-domain check. Phone normalisation, area-code validity and repeated-digit detection. Postal code format, and a cross-check that it agrees with the stated province. A lead that fails here is rejected before it costs anyone anything.
Duplicate detection
Identity values are hashed and checked against the campaign’s lookback window — 90 days by default. A seller can also pre-ping before generating the lead at all, avoiding the cost of producing something nobody will buy.
Buyer matching
For every buyer on the campaign the platform checks their filter rules, their hourly, daily and monthly caps, their delivery schedule, and whether their balance can cover the price. Each rejection is logged with its specific reason.
The auction
Every remaining buyer is asked for a bid in parallel. Buyers with a live bidding endpoint price the lead themselves; the rest use their standing bid. Slow responders are dropped so one bad endpoint cannot stall the auction.
Delivery
The full record is posted to the winning buyer in JSON, form-encoded or XML, with field names remapped to whatever their system expects. Their response is checked against their success criteria. The entire request and response are logged.
Waterfall on failure
If the winner times out, errors or rejects, the runner-up is tried, then the next. Funds and caps are re-checked at each step, because a buyer’s budget can be spent between the ping and the post.
Settlement
The buyer is debited, the seller credited their share, and the platform records its fee — all in one atomic transaction, so the books can never end up half-written. Both parties see the same record.
What gets logged
“You never sent me that lead” is the most common dispute in this business. The log is how it gets settled.
| Record | Contains |
|---|---|
| Ping | Qualifying data sent, every buyer response, bid amounts, response times, expiry |
| Bid | Buyer, amount, status (bid / pass / filtered / capped / no funds / timeout), the specific reason |
| Lead | Full payload, consent record, IP, user agent, source, sub ID, processing time |
| Delivery | Exact request body sent, buyer response body, HTTP status, duration, attempt number |
| Transaction | Every balance movement with the balance after it, so any row audits in isolation |
Frequently asked
What happens if the winning buyer's system is down?
The waterfall automatically offers the lead to the next-highest bidder, then the next, until one accepts. Nothing is billed until a buyer actually accepts, so a buyer outage costs you nothing.
How long does a ping token stay valid?
Five minutes by default, configurable per campaign. If it expires you simply send a fresh ping — bids can change in the interim because buyers spend their budgets.
Why do you exclude names and emails from the ping?
Because buyers do not need identity to price a lead, and sending it would let them harvest your data without paying for it. Fields are individually marked as ping-visible or not.
Let's find out if this fits.
Fifteen minutes. Tell us your vertical, your volume, and what's broken about your current setup. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you that too.