Ping Post API: How to Integrate a Ping Post Network (2026)

Last Updated: May 11, 2026

A ping post api is a REST interface that runs a real-time auction for a single lead. The seller sends a partial-data ping to the buyer's endpoint, the buyer returns a bid, and if the bid wins, the seller follows up with a full post containing the lead's contact details. The whole sequence completes in 2 to 5 seconds end to end, with the post itself landing in under 200 milliseconds. A modern ping post api uses JSON payloads, bearer or OAuth authentication, idempotency keys, and a sandbox so integration teams can certify the contract before a single real lead is at risk. For the non-developer view, read ping post explained for non-developers. For the platform comparison view, see our best ping post software roundup.

Create a Lead Distro AI account to test the API. The sandbox is unlocked on every plan including the 7-day free trial.

Key Takeaways

• A ping post api is a REST + JSON interface that runs a real-time auction (ping) and lead handoff (post) for every inbound lead.
• The 2026 latency standard is sub-200ms post delivery and a 2 to 5 second auction window. According to the LeadsCouncil 2025 Industry Benchmark Report, 78% of buyers now require sub-second post delivery in their integration contracts.
• Lead Distro AI publishes an OpenAPI 3.1 spec, a Postman collection, and a sandbox so teams certify in days, not weeks.
• Bearer tokens or OAuth 2.0 client credentials are the modern auth standard. Static API keys still work for legacy buyer endpoints.
• A clean ping post integration uses idempotency keys on every post, a 5xx retry policy with exponential backoff, and signed webhooks for asynchronous events.

Ping Post API Capability Matrix

Ping Post API: What It Does

A ping post api lets two systems negotiate the price and ownership of a lead in real time. The seller's platform receives a consumer form submission, redacts the personally identifiable fields, and sends a ping to one or more buyer endpoints. Each buyer evaluates the partial payload, checks its filters, and returns a bid. The highest bid above the floor wins, and the seller posts the full lead to the winner. Both halves run over HTTPS with JSON, and the contract is documented in an OpenAPI specification so either side can validate against it.

The Ping Post API Sequence

Every ping post integration follows the same five-step sequence.

1. Lead arrives at the seller's web form, landing page, or partner feed.
2. Ping fan-out: the seller sends an HTTP POST /ping to every eligible buyer in parallel.
3. Bid collection: each buyer responds within the configured timeout (2 to 5 seconds) with a bid object.
4. Auction resolution: the seller picks the highest valid bid above the floor price, generates an idempotency key, and sends HTTP POST /post to the winner.
5. Acknowledgement: the buyer returns a 200 with a buyer-side lead UUID. Webhooks fire later for status changes (qualified, contacted, sold, returned).

This is the canonical pattern documented across the industry, including in the Boberdoo API documentation and the LeadsCouncil technical standards. Lead Distro AI's implementation follows the same flow with the additional guarantees in the matrix above.

Sample Ping Request

A ping payload contains everything a buyer needs to bid except the lead's contact details: geography, vertical, AI quality score, source, and timing.

POST https://api.leaddistro.ai/v1/ping
Authorization: Bearer ld_live_8fa3...
Content-Type: application/json
Idempotency-Key: ping_2026-05-11T14:22:01_8fa3
{
  "auction_id": "auc_01HZ8F3K2VN7Q9R4M0XYZ1A2B3",
  "vertical": "auto_insurance",
  "sub_vertical": "non_standard",
  "state": "TX",
  "zip3": "770",
  "currently_insured": true,
  "vehicle_count": 2,
  "driver_age_band": "35-44",
  "ai_quality_score": 0.84,
  "source": "facebook_ads",
  "tcpa_consent": true,
  "trustedform_cert_url": "https://cert.trustedform.com/abc...",
  "expires_at": "2026-05-11T14:22:06Z"
}

The ai_quality_score field is unique to Lead Distro AI and lets buyers bid more confidently on pre-scored inventory. The expires_at field defines a 5-second bid window. The Idempotency-Key header guarantees that retrying a ping never triggers a duplicate auction.

Sample Bid Response (Winning and Losing)

Every buyer api in a ping post network returns a bid object. A winning bid carries a price, a bid token, and an acceptance window. A no-bid returns an explicit reject reason for analytics. Both must return inside the auction's expires_at window.

// Winning bid (HTTP 200)
{
  "auction_id": "auc_01HZ8F3K2VN7Q9R4M0XYZ1A2B3",
  "bid": {
    "amount": 38.50,
    "currency": "USD",
    "bid_token": "bid_v3JxK9pQwT4mNh7sLdYr",
    "valid_until": "2026-05-11T14:22:11Z"
  },
  "buyer_filters_passed": ["state", "vertical", "tcpa", "score_threshold"]
}
 
// Losing or no-bid (HTTP 200 with bid:null)
{
  "auction_id": "auc_01HZ8F3K2VN7Q9R4M0XYZ1A2B3",
  "bid": null,
  "reject_reason": "below_score_threshold",
  "reject_detail": "ai_quality_score 0.84 < buyer_min 0.90"
}

Returning a structured reject_reason rather than a 4xx is the modern pattern. It keeps bid analytics clean and avoids polluting buyer error rates. Lead Distro AI logs every bid, win, and reject per lead and exposes the data through the same REST surface.

Sample Post Request

The post fires immediately after auction resolution, carrying the full lead identity and the winning bid_token so the buyer can match it to the original ping. Sub-200ms delivery is the target.

POST https://api.leaddistro.ai/v1/post
Authorization: Bearer ld_live_8fa3...
Content-Type: application/json
Idempotency-Key: post_auc_01HZ8F3K2VN7Q9R4M0XYZ1A2B3
{
  "auction_id": "auc_01HZ8F3K2VN7Q9R4M0XYZ1A2B3",
  "bid_token": "bid_v3JxK9pQwT4mNh7sLdYr",
  "lead": {
    "lead_uuid": "ld_01HZ8F3K9XY2Q4R7M0ABC1D2E3",
    "first_name": "Maria",
    "last_name": "Lopez",
    "email": "maria.lopez@example.com",
    "phone": "+15125550182",
    "address": {
      "line1": "1200 Sample St",
      "city": "Houston",
      "state": "TX",
      "zip": "77001"
    },
    "tcpa": {
      "consent_text": "By clicking submit, I consent to be contacted...",
      "consent_timestamp": "2026-05-11T14:21:58Z",
      "ip_address": "203.0.113.42",
      "trustedform_cert_url": "https://cert.trustedform.com/abc..."
    }
  }
}

A successful post returns 201 with the buyer's internal lead ID. A failed post (5xx) is auto-retried per the ping post webhook retry policy below. The Lead Distro AI ping post software also emits a lead.posted webhook to the seller's endpoint so downstream systems stay in sync.

Authentication and API Keys

The 2026 standard is OAuth 2.0 client credentials for production and bearer tokens for sandbox. According to the OpenAPI Initiative, 89% of newly published REST APIs in 2025 ship with OAuth 2.0 as the default flow, citing better key rotation and scope control than static keys (OpenAPI Initiative State of API Report 2025).

Lead Distro AI supports both. Generate a sandbox bearer token from the dashboard in 30 seconds, then upgrade to OAuth 2.0 client credentials when you go live. Rotation is one click. For a wider look at how a modern lead distribution api should handle auth, scopes, and rate limits, see general lead distribution API design.

# Sandbox: bearer token
Authorization: Bearer ld_test_8fa3kQ2pXn...
 
# Production: OAuth 2.0 client credentials
POST https://auth.leaddistro.ai/oauth/token
{
  "grant_type": "client_credentials",
  "client_id": "ld_client_8fa3...",
  "client_secret": "ld_secret_X9pQwT4mNh7sLdYr...",
  "scope": "ping post webhook"
}

Latency Requirements and SLAs

The 2026 standard is 200ms p99 post latency measured from auction close to the buyer's HTTP 201. According to the LeadsCouncil 2025 Industry Benchmark Report, 78% of large buyers contractually require sub-second post delivery, and 41% specifically require sub-200ms. Anything slower than 500ms costs the buyer measurable contact rate, which lowers bids on future auctions.

Lead Distro AI publishes a public 200ms p99 SLA on the post endpoint, measured continuously on the status page. The full sequence stays inside the 5-second consumer-facing budget that the REST API performance best practices guide identifies as the upper bound for synchronous transactional flows.

Rate Limits and Throttling

A production deployment enforces rate limits on three dimensions: requests per second per buyer, concurrent auctions per seller, and webhook delivery attempts. Lead Distro AI's defaults: 100 ping/second per buyer, 1,000 concurrent auctions per seller, and 5 webhook retries over a 24-hour window with exponential backoff.

Rate limit responses follow the standard pattern:

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Retry-After: 2
X-RateLimit-Limit: 100
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 0
X-RateLimit-Reset: 1715438530
{
  "error": "rate_limited",
  "message": "Buyer endpoint exceeded 100 req/s. Retry after 2 seconds.",
  "request_id": "req_01HZ8F3K2VN7Q9R4M0XYZ1A2B3"
}

The Retry-After header is mandatory and the request_id field appears on every error response so support escalations can correlate against server-side logs in seconds.

Error Handling and Retry Logic

A clean integration treats errors as a contract, not a surprise. Lead Distro AI returns 4xx for buyer-side issues (bad payload, missing scope, invalid bid token) and 5xx for transient or server-side issues. Buyers should retry 5xx and 429 with exponential backoff (1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, 16s) and never retry 4xx automatically.

HTTP/1.1 422 Unprocessable Entity
{
  "error": "invalid_payload",
  "message": "Field 'lead.tcpa.trustedform_cert_url' is required when source is 'facebook_ads'.",
  "request_id": "req_01HZ8F3K2VN7Q9R4M0XYZ1A2B3",
  "field_errors": [
    {
      "field": "lead.tcpa.trustedform_cert_url",
      "code": "missing_required",
      "expected": "https URL"
    }
  ]
}

Idempotency keys make retries safe. Resending the same Idempotency-Key for a given post returns the original response without creating a duplicate lead, even days later.

Testing in Sandbox vs Production

Every serious vendor ships with an isolated sandbox. Lead Distro AI's sandbox is a separate tenant with its own bearer tokens, webhook endpoints, and a deterministic test lead generator. Sellers can fire 1,000 synthetic leads in under five minutes to certify the buyer api end to end before a real lead enters the auction.

# Generate 100 synthetic test leads via the sandbox
curl -X POST https://api.sandbox.leaddistro.ai/v1/dev/seed \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ld_test_8fa3..." \
  -d '{"count": 100, "vertical": "auto_insurance", "state": "TX"}'

Sandbox (api.sandbox.leaddistro.ai) and production (api.leaddistro.ai) share the same OpenAPI 3.1 spec, so a Postman collection imported once works against both with a tenant flag flipped. According to the Postman State of the API Report, the average enterprise REST integration takes 6 to 8 weeks. Teams integrating Lead Distro AI in sandbox typically certify in 3 to 5 days.

Lead Distro AI's Ping Post API: Quick Start

The fastest path to a working integration:

1. Create a Lead Distro AI account and grab a sandbox bearer token from the dashboard.
2. Open the Lead Distro AI API documentation and import the public Postman collection.
3. Fire the example ping and post requests against the sandbox to certify the round trip.
4. Plug in your buyer endpoints in the routing dashboard and run 100 synthetic leads through.
5. Flip the tenant flag from sandbox to production, swap the bearer token for OAuth 2.0 client credentials, and you are live.

The same OpenAPI 3.1 spec powers sandbox, production, Postman, and the auto-generated SDKs (Node, Python, PHP, Go). For a platform view, see the Lead Distro AI ping post software page or Boberdoo API alternatives.

Common Integration Pitfalls

Five patterns cause 80% of failed integrations.

1. No idempotency keys. A network blip causes a retry, the buyer creates two leads, the seller pays out twice. Always send Idempotency-Key on every ping and post.
2. Synchronous webhook handlers. Acknowledge in under 1 second, then process asynchronously. Long handlers cause retries and duplicate side effects.
3. No reject reason on no-bids. Returning a 4xx instead of a structured reject_reason pollutes error rates and breaks bid analytics. Always return 200 with bid: null.
4. Hard-coded sandbox URLs in production. Use environment variables. The Postman collection ships with a tenant variable for exactly this reason.
5. No HMAC verification on webhooks. Every Lead Distro AI webhook ships with an X-LD-Signature HMAC SHA-256 header. Unverified webhooks are an open door for spoofed status updates.

"The best ping post integration is the one your engineers can certify in three days, not three months. That means a public OpenAPI spec, a real sandbox with synthetic data, idempotency keys on every endpoint, and signed webhooks. Everything else is plumbing."

Rafael Hernandez, Founder & CEO of Lead Distro AI

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a ping post api?

A ping post api is a REST interface that runs a real-time, two-step auction for a single lead. The seller sends a ping request with partial lead data to buyer endpoints, each buyer returns a bid, and the highest qualifying bid wins. The seller then posts the full lead to the winner. The protocol uses JSON over HTTPS, sub-200ms post latency, and idempotency keys to make retries safe. Lead Distro AI publishes an OpenAPI 3.1 spec with a fully isolated sandbox.

What is the typical latency requirement?

The 2026 standard is 200 milliseconds p99 post latency from auction close to buyer acknowledgement, with a 5-second end-to-end ceiling for the full ping-to-post cycle. According to the LeadsCouncil 2025 Industry Benchmark Report, 78% of large buyers contractually require sub-second post delivery and 41% specifically require sub-200ms. Anything slower than 500ms reduces buyer contact rate measurably, which lowers future bids on the seller's inventory.

How do I authenticate against the API?

Modern ping post APIs use OAuth 2.0 client credentials in production and bearer tokens in sandbox. Lead Distro AI supports both. Generate a sandbox bearer token from the dashboard, certify the integration, then swap to OAuth 2.0 client credentials when you flip to production. The OAuth flow returns a short-lived access token that refreshes automatically. Static API keys still work for legacy buyer endpoints but rotation and scope control are weaker.

What does a ping request look like?

A ping request is an HTTP POST with a JSON body containing the lead's geographic, vertical, and quality signals but no personally identifiable contact data. Common fields: auction_id, vertical, state, zip3, ai_quality_score, source, tcpa_consent, trustedform_cert_url, and an expires_at timestamp defining the bid window. The buyer evaluates the payload against its filters and returns a bid object. See the annotated sample ping request earlier in this guide.

How do I test a ping post integration without real leads?

Use the sandbox. Lead Distro AI provides an isolated tenant at api.sandbox.leaddistro.ai with its own bearer tokens, webhook endpoints, and a deterministic synthetic lead generator. Hit the /v1/dev/seed endpoint to fire 100 to 1,000 test leads through your buyer endpoints in minutes. The sandbox shares the same OpenAPI spec as production, so a Postman collection imported once works against both environments with a tenant variable flip.

Does Lead Distro AI provide a ping post api?

Yes. Lead Distro AI publishes a REST + JSON interface with a 200ms p99 post SLA, a public OpenAPI 3.1 spec, a sandbox, OAuth 2.0 plus bearer authentication, idempotency keys, signed HMAC webhooks, and official SDKs in Node, Python, PHP, and Go. The full reference lives at the Lead Distro AI API documentation. Ping post is included on every plan, and the sandbox is unlocked on the 7-day free trial.

How long does it take to integrate?

A clean integration against a modern platform like Lead Distro AI takes 3 to 5 days for a single buyer or seller endpoint, including sandbox certification. Legacy platforms with SOAP, partial OpenAPI specs, or no public sandbox typically take 4 to 8 weeks. The Postman State of the API Report puts the enterprise REST integration average at 6 to 8 weeks, so anything under two weeks is best in class. Idempotency keys, signed webhooks, and a deterministic test lead generator are the features that compress the timeline most.

The Bottom Line

A great developer integration is boring in the best way. REST + JSON, OAuth 2.0, idempotency keys, signed webhooks, sub-200ms post latency, a public OpenAPI 3.1 spec, and a sandbox with synthetic test leads. Your integration team should certify in days, not months. Lead Distro AI ships with all of the above plus official SDKs in Node, Python, PHP, and Go. If you are evaluating platforms on developer experience, the API contract is the thing to read first.

For the broader platform comparison, read our best ping post software roundup.