How Ping-Post Lead Distribution Works: A Complete Technical Guide

Key Takeaways

If you buy or sell leads, you have heard the term "ping-post." But most operators never see how the system actually works under the hood -- and that gap costs them money.
The US lead generation market processes an estimated $10 billion in annual lead transactions across insurance, finance, legal, and home services verticals, according to Borrell Associates' 2025 local advertising forecast.
A ping-post system operates in two phases.
If you are buying leads, the ping-post system your seller uses determines the quality of what you receive.

The Setup

If you buy or sell leads, you have heard the term "ping-post." But most operators never see how the system actually works under the hood -- and that gap costs them money. They either overpay for leads that get sold to five other buyers simultaneously, or they build routing logic so brittle that a single downstream failure drops leads into a black hole.

The conventional approach is straightforward: a consumer fills out a form, the lead goes into a spreadsheet or CRM, and someone manually sends it to a buyer. That works at 10 leads a day. At 500 leads a day across multiple verticals, manual routing is a revenue leak. Leads age in seconds. A life insurance lead that sits unrouted for 60 seconds is worth measurably less than one delivered in under 5 seconds. According to a 2024 Velocify study, the odds of qualifying a lead drop by 80% after the first five minutes of inactivity. In ping-post, those minutes are compressed to seconds.

The industry moved to ping-post because the economics demanded it. Buyers want to bid on leads before they commit to purchase. Sellers want maximum revenue per lead by letting multiple buyers compete. The system that sits in the middle -- the distribution engine -- determines whether both sides get what they want, or whether leads leak, duplicate, or get delivered to the wrong buyer at the wrong price.

What the Data Shows

The US lead generation market processes an estimated $10 billion in annual lead transactions across insurance, finance, legal, and home services verticals, according to Borrell Associates' 2025 local advertising forecast. Within that market, ping-post is the dominant distribution method for high-value verticals like insurance, where a single exclusive auto insurance lead sells for $25-$70 and a life insurance lead for $50-$150 (source: industry pricing benchmarks, 2025-2026).

Stealth Labz infrastructure has processed 616,543 leads (as of January 2026) through PRJ-01, a production-grade platform with feed routing that supports dual routing modes, blacklist checking, per-route suppression with expiration, and cap enforcement at daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time intervals. This is not a prototype -- it is tested against real lead volume across 7 verticals and 2 geographies (US and South Africa).

The platform's feed routing system handles persona-based targeting, duplicate detection per route, and integration-specific payload formatting for 6 outbound providers. Delivery is currently processed via scheduled jobs running at 1-2 minute intervals. Real-time ping-post bidding (sub-second response) is a planned expansion -- estimated at 4-6 weeks of net-new development on existing infrastructure.

Industry data from Boberdoo's 2025 lead distribution benchmark report shows that operators using automated ping-post distribution see 15-30% higher revenue per lead compared to static routing, because competitive bidding forces buyer pricing upward. The tradeoff: you need infrastructure that can handle the bidding logic, timeout management, fallback routing, and real-time payload formatting without dropping leads.

How It Works

A ping-post system operates in two phases. The "ping" is a partial lead -- enough data for a buyer to decide if they want it (zip code, age range, coverage type) but not enough to contact the consumer (no name, no phone number, no email). The system sends this partial data to multiple buyers simultaneously. Each buyer responds with a bid price or a pass. The system collects bids, selects the winner based on price (or price plus other criteria like buyer quality score or fill rate), and then "posts" the full lead to the winning buyer.

In PRJ-01's architecture, this distribution logic runs through a feed processing pipeline. Each route has its own suppression rules (so a buyer who already received a lead does not get it again), cap limits (so a buyer who committed to 50 leads per day is not sent lead 51), and payload formatting (because Buyer A's API expects JSON with camelCase fields while Buyer B expects XML with underscored fields). The system logs every step of the pipeline, so when a buyer disputes a lead, the operator can trace exactly when it was received, how it was scored, which buyers were eligible, what bids came back, and why the winning buyer was selected.

What separates a working ping-post system from a poorly built one is what happens when things go wrong. Buyers go offline. APIs time out. Cap limits hit mid-day and leads need to cascade to the next eligible buyer. A production system handles all of this without operator intervention. PRJ-01's blacklist checking alone covers 306,676 entries (as of January 2026), preventing known-bad leads from ever reaching a buyer's queue. That is the kind of data hygiene that only comes from running real volume.

What This Means for Business Operators

If you are buying leads, the ping-post system your seller uses determines the quality of what you receive. Ask your seller: how do they handle duplicate suppression? What are the cap enforcement intervals? Can they provide delivery logs with timestamps? If the answer is vague, you are probably getting leads that were also sent to three other buyers -- and you are paying exclusive pricing for shared delivery.

If you are selling leads, the distribution engine is your margin. The difference between $15 per lead and $45 per lead on the same auto insurance form fill is entirely a function of how many qualified buyers are bidding and how efficiently your system routes the winning bid. An operator running 2,000 insurance leads per month at $20 average versus $35 average is leaving $30,000 per month on the table -- $360,000 per year -- purely on routing efficiency.

References

Velocify (2024). "Lead Response Study." Speed-to-contact conversion analysis.
Borrell Associates (2025). "Local Advertising Forecast." Local digital advertising market data.
Boberdoo (2025). "Lead Distribution Benchmark." Ping-post routing revenue impact data.
Keating, M.G. (2026). "The Compounding Execution Method: Complete Technical Documentation." Stealth Labz. Browse papers