Importance of Parallel Pinging

While some ping post software sends pings in sequence (one at a time, waiting for the response before pinging the next buyer), pinging in parallel is a more effective approach. boberdoo determines all potential buyers and pings each one at the same time, collects the bids, and then creates the best revenue scenario for distribution. This ensures you return a bid to a lead seller before any timeouts are met and prevents one slow buyer from holding up your entire lead distribution.

boberdoo clients process over 30 million inbound ping requests on peak days. This does not include pings blocked for duplicate reasons. A good portion of the volume is immediate duplicates from different sources and leads that vendors reprocess throughout the day. The outbound number is typically about 5-6x since most pings can be sent out to many potential buyers.

Once boberdoo receives an inbound ping and determines the potential buyers, we send out pings in parallel. There is an overall timeout based on the source and we keep a running clock to monitor that timer. If any buyer has not responded before the timeout hits, we exclude that buyer and build a scenario based on the pings we did receive. Even one dead buyer system will cause issues for everyone if you are going through potential buyers in serial, one ping at a time.

The Ping of Death occurs when the same ping goes around and around between lead companies due to cross selling. For example: Seller A pings Seller B, B pings C, C pings D, D pings B, and so on. This can produce crazy volume and crash buyer systems. Reasonable duplicate checks are required to prevent this problem.

Many people new to the lead industry think they can arbitrage leads by taking a small margin between sellers. But most established lead companies already work with each other. An unnecessary middleman can cause the Ping of Death and produce inflated, illogical pricing. Buyers may also get annoyed if you are sending them virtually identical pings at high frequency.

With all of this volume, you must have safety mechanisms in place. Set up both lead buyers and sellers to have daily or hourly limits, so if there is some incorrect configuration or burst, you are not accepting a huge number of leads by mistake.

We rarely see leads taking more than 30 seconds to process, even when attempting each ping to 30 buyers. The only time it takes more than 30 seconds is if one of your buyer's systems is dead and you are hitting timeouts. The backlog causes problems for everyone in the ecosystem, so set realistic timeouts.