Pay-Per-Lead Glossary

Deciding which buyer receives a given lead, and delivering it to them. With one buyer it is a forwarding rule. With many buyers it becomes a system: each has different criteria, volume limits, prices and delivery formats, and something has to apply those rules before the lead goes cold.

A two-step sale. First the ping: you send buyers a stripped-down version of the lead, usually no name or phone number, just enough for them to price it. Buyers respond with a bid or a decline. Then the post: you send the full record to whoever won, and only that buyer gets the contact details.

Ping post lets a lead find its highest price without exposing the contact details to buyers who were never going to take it.

The ordered structure the ping runs through. Buyers sit in tiers, and the lead is offered down the tree until someone accepts. The top tier can hold buyers paying the most or holding an exclusivity agreement; lower tiers catch what the top declines.

Offering a lead to one buyer at a time in a fixed priority order, falling to the next only when the current one declines or is capped out. Simpler than ping post and slower, because each step waits for an answer. Fine when you have a clear ranking of buyers and no real price competition.

Rotating leads evenly between buyers rather than ranking them. Used when buyers pay the same price and you have promised each a fair share of volume. Also used inside a single firm distributing to its own intake staff.

The document a buyer gives you describing exactly how to send them a lead: the endpoint, the field names, required and optional values, accepted formats, and the responses they will return. When a working connection suddenly rejects everything, check the posting instructions first.

What a buyer's system returns when you post a lead. An accept usually carries a price and a confirmation ID. A reject carries a reason: duplicate, out of area, failed criteria, cap reached, bad data. Reject reasons are the most useful diagnostic you have, so ask each buyer how they report them.

How long a buyer takes to answer a ping or post. A slow buyer holds up the whole tree while the consumer goes cold, which is why a ping tree can enforce a timeout and move on.

An exclusive lead is sold to one buyer. A shared lead is sold to several, who then race to make contact. Which one a buyer wants depends on how fast their team reaches the consumer and how much competition for the same person they will accept.

In legal verticals most sellers we reviewed advertise exclusive leads. Treat exclusivity as a contract term to confirm, not a claim on a homepage.

A real-time lead arrives within seconds of the person submitting a form or finishing a call. An aged lead is anything resold later, from hours to months old. Aged leads are priced as a separate product and suit buyers with the outbound capacity to work them.

First-party means the consumer engaged directly with the brand they are being connected to. Third-party means they engaged with a comparison site, a survey, or a publisher, and are being passed on. Third-party leads are why buyers ask who collected the consent and who holds the record.

A lead that meets a buyer's stated conditions. In legal work those conditions can include injury type, whether the person was at fault, whether they have already retained counsel, date of incident, state, and whether treatment was sought. A lead failing any one of them is a reject, not a discount.

A claimant who has actually signed a representation agreement with a firm. This is a different product from a lead, priced separately, because the qualifying and conversion work has already been done by the seller.

Watch for sellers quoting a per-case price next to a per-lead price as though they are comparable. They are not.

The process of taking a raw lead and turning it into a signed client: contacting, qualifying, explaining, getting the agreement signed. Firms judge leads through their intake, so ask each buyer how fast their team makes contact.

A United States federal statute on calls and texts to consumers, implemented through rules made by the Federal Communications Commission. In lead-generation commerce it is the reason buyers ask who collected a consumer's consent, what the consumer was shown, and who holds the record.

A consent standard defined in the FCC's rules for certain marketing calls and texts. Commercially, it is why buyers commonly ask for a record of what the consumer was shown, who they agreed could contact them, and when, and why buyers read the disclosure wording and the companies it names closely. The rules themselves are published by the FCC; TCPAWorld tracks how they are being applied.

A record issued by a third-party service. A script on the form page records the consumer's session and issues a certificate URL or token as evidence of what they saw and agreed to. Buyers may ask for a certificate with each lead and may specify which kind they accept, so pass it through your distribution system intact.

Checking a phone number against commercial databases of known repeat TCPA plaintiffs and their attorneys before calling it. TCPAWorld reports on TCPA filing volumes and the firms behind them. Buyers who call leads may ask whether records were checked this way.

Checking numbers against the national and state Do Not Call registries, plus the buyer's own internal suppression list. The registry rules and the exemptions to them are published by the FTC under the Telemarketing Sales Rule and by the FCC. Whether a given consent record changes what you may call is a question for those rules and your counsel, not for a glossary.

The quality checks run on a lead before it is sold: does the phone number exist and connect, is the email deliverable, is the address real, is the data internally consistent, does it look automated. Ask each buyer which checks they expect before you send the first lead.

The same consumer submitted more than once. Buyers reject duplicates against their own history over an agreed window. Sellers deduplicate too, against their own file. Agree in writing what counts as a duplicate, and over what period.

The agreed basis on which a buyer can hand a lead back and not pay for it: wrong number, duplicate, outside criteria, consumer denies submitting. Write the return policy before the first lead: the acceptable reasons, the window for claiming, and the evidence required. An uncapped return policy transfers all the risk to the seller.

The commercial model this whole industry runs on: the buyer pays for each qualified lead delivered, rather than paying for ad spend, clicks, or a monthly retainer. The price is either agreed per lead or set by buyers bidding above the seller's minimum. The seller carries the risk of generating the lead; the buyer carries the risk of converting it.

Almost everything else on this page exists because of that arrangement. Once money changes hands per lead, what counts as qualified, who the lead goes to, whether it was exclusive, and whether it can be returned all stop being details and become contract terms worth arguing over.

A pay-per-lead agency sells leads instead of charging clients a monthly fee, often with buyers funding a wallet that each lead is charged against. See the pay-per-lead agency model.

The same model priced per qualified inbound phone call rather than per form submission. A call counts once it stays connected past an agreed duration, which filters out wrong numbers and immediate hang-ups.

Calls are harder to run: a buyer has to answer live, and a call nobody answers cannot be sold later. Juiced distributes web leads; calls need separate call tracking. See pay-per-lead vs pay-per-call.

Paying only when the lead becomes a defined outcome: a sale, or in legal work a signed retainer. This pushes conversion risk from the buyer onto the seller, and prices accordingly. Sellers accept it when they trust the buyer's reporting, which is the catch.

What a buyer pays for one lead. The headline number in most negotiations, and on its own almost meaningless: a more expensive lead that converts more often can be the cheaper lead.

What a seller actually earns per lead generated, averaged across the ones that sold at full price, the ones that fell to a lower tier, and the ones nobody bought. The number that tells a seller whether a traffic source is viable.

The gap between what a reseller pays for a lead and what they sell it for. For companies that both buy and sell, this spread is the entire business model, which is why they care so much about placing each lead with the highest bidder rather than the first one.

Limits a buyer sets on how much they will take: per day, per week, per month, often broken down by state or lead type. When a cap is hit the buyer stops accepting, and your distribution has to route elsewhere rather than stall. Caps reset on schedules that vary by buyer, which is a detail worth getting right.

The share of purchased leads a buyer actually reaches by phone. Speed to dial, time of day, and whether the lead was exclusive all affect it. Set expectations about it on the first call, because buyers will blame the leads.

The share of leads that become the outcome the buyer is paying for, which in legal work is a signed retainer rather than a sale. A buyer who tracks it can judge a source on more than cost per lead.

A buyer under-reporting the leads they received or accepted, so they pay for fewer than they took. It is difficult to prove from one side, and it is the main reason sellers keep their own independent record of every post and every response.

The practical defense is logging on your own system rather than trusting the buyer's dashboard, and reconciling the two regularly.

Whoever generates the lead: the site, campaign or media buyer that put the form in front of the consumer. Publishers sell to networks, aggregators or buyers directly.

A company that buys leads from many publishers, consolidates and often improves them, then resells to end buyers. Aggregators absorb the work of managing many small traffic sources, and take a margin for it.

A platform where multiple sellers and multiple buyers transact, rather than a bilateral relationship. A marketplace can run ping post underneath and set common rules on data format, consent records and returns.

Collecting a lead for one offer while the consumer is signing up for something else, typically through an additional checkbox or an offer presented after the main form. Intent is lower because the consumer came for something different, and the consent record needs particular care for the same reason.

A tracking value passed with each lead identifying which traffic source produced it. Without sub ID tracking you cannot tell a good publisher from a bad one inside the same feed, and you cannot cut the source that is generating your returns.