Troubleshooting A Rejected Lead In Lead Prosper

Once your campaign is live and leads are flowing, not every lead is going to be ingested and / or sell. Some will be rejected, some will time out, and some will return errors that aren't immediately obvious. Knowing how to read a lead in Lead Prosper - and where to look when something goes wrong - is one of the most important skills for running a healthy campaign.

This article walks you through how to investigate a rejected lead, what each part of the Lead Modal is telling you, and how to spot and fix the most common issues you'll run into.

Common Lead Statuses

When you open your Leads page, every lead will have a status. The most common are:

• Accepted - The lead was sold to one or more buyers.
• Duplicated by dupe-checker - The lead was flagged as a duplicate by your campaign's Dupe Checker settings.
• Error: no buyers available - No buyers were eligible for the lead, or the lead failed to sell to every eligible buyer.
• Rejected by buyer - The lead went to a single buyer and that buyer rejected it.

For a deeper breakdown of every error message you may see, refer to Lead Prosper Error Messages.

Opening the Lead Modal

Click any lead in your Leads page to open the Lead Modal. This view contains everything you need to understand exactly what happened to that lead from ingestion to final status.

POST Data and Logs

The main page of the Lead Modal (and the POST Logs tab) shows the full data the supplier posted to your campaign.

If the lead went to a Direct Post buyer, this is the data that was forwarded to that buyer.

If the lead went to a Ping Post buyer, you can also click the PING Logs tab to see the data sent on the PING request.

The Lead Lifecycle (Right-Hand Column)

The right-hand side of the Lead Modal shows the full lifecycle of the lead, in order:

1. The Supplier that sent the lead in.
2. Third party integrations that ran on the lead, in the order they were called, with pass/fail responses for each.
3. Data appending that may have run on the lead before or after the filters were run.
4. Each eligible buyer, with a complete breakdown of their responses - whether they accepted on PING or POST, the bid price, margins applied, the final sale price (if any), and whether a buyer-level filter or cap prevented the lead from selling. If you are using buyer groups in your campaign you will see the buyer groups with buyers associated with them organized in this section as well, along with their specific responses.

This lifecycle view is your map. Anywhere you see a failure or unexpected response, you have a starting point for troubleshooting.

Investigating a Rejected Lead

When you click any buyer in the right-hand column, a pop-up opens showing the request that was sent to that buyer and their full response on the PING and/or POST.

This is where most of your troubleshooting will happen. Look for:

• Specific error messages in the buyer's response (missing required fields, invalid values, incorrect formats).
• The actual data sent vs. what the buyer's API specs require.
• Differences in payload between leads that sold and leads that didn't.

When you find an error message that points to a specific issue, head back to the buyer setup and adjust the payload, transformer, or field mapping accordingly.

Common Errors and What They Mean

Not every error is self-explanatory. Some of the most common ones you'll see:

• Unmatched / No Buyers Found / Lead Failed - Vague catch-all errors from the buyer with no specific cause provided.
• Incorrect or missing API key - The buyer's authentication failed. Double-check the API key, token, or auth header in the buyer's payload.
• Invalid data type being sent - A field was sent in the wrong format, such as a string where a number is expected, or a hyphenated phone number when 10 digits are required. For formatting fixes, see Payload Field Transformers.
• Lead failed validation on the buyer's side - The buyer's system rejected the lead based on their own validation rules.
• Buyer flagging the lead as a duplicate - The buyer already has the lead on file, even if your campaign's dupe checker didn't catch it.
• Buyer caps being hit - The buyer has reached their daily, weekly, or monthly cap.

When the buyer returns a vague status like "Unmatched" or "Lead Failed," there isn't much we can pull on our end - we can only show what the buyer returns to us. The best path forward is to reach out to the buyer directly and ask them to provide a reason for the rejection. That insight helps you adjust your setup so more leads sell to that buyer going forward.

Two Tricky Errors That Trip People Up

1. "Rejected" Status Even Though the Buyer Accepted the Lead

If the Lead Modal shows the lead was rejected, but when you open the buyer's response you can clearly see they actually accepted or sold the lead, the issue is almost always a buyer response mapping problem.

Each buyer setup includes a mapping that tells Lead Prosper what an "Accepted" response looks like. If that mapping doesn't match what the buyer is actually returning, Lead Prosper will mark the lead as rejected even when it sold on the buyer's side.

The fastest way to fix this is the Response Parser tool. It lets you point and click on the buyer's actual response to set the correct Accepted, Duplicated, and pricing mappings without having to manually edit JSON paths or regex.

See Using The Upgraded Response Parser To Simplify Buyer Setups for a full walkthrough.

2. The Buyer Didn't Return a Response

If a buyer doesn't appear to have returned anything, the first thing to check is the connection time.

By default, new buyers in Lead Prosper have a 30-second timeout. Any response that takes longer than that has the connection terminated. This timeout exists because when a lead is ingested, the system has to wait for every buyer to respond before sending a final status back to the supplier - and 30 seconds is already a long time for a supplier to wait.

Two important things to know about timeouts:

1. Even though Lead Prosper drops the connection, the buyer's system may still be processing the lead. That means the buyer can still sell the lead on their end without us knowing - which creates the risk of the lead being double-sold elsewhere in the meantime.
2. This makes long buyer response times a serious issue to address quickly.

To fix this:

• Short-term: Temporarily increase the timeout for that buyer so you stop missing responses.
• Long-term: Reach out to the buyer and ask them to optimize their response times. Anything consistently over a few seconds should be improved on their side.

When to Escalate

If you've reviewed the lead, checked the buyer's response, and adjusted your setup but still can't figure out why leads aren't selling, two next steps are usually the most productive:

1. Contact the buyer directly. Send them the lead in question (or a copy of the test lead) and ask for a specific reason it failed. They may flag a field requirement or accepted value that isn't documented in their API specs.
2. Reach out to Lead Prosper support. If something looks off on our side, or you suspect a configuration issue you can't diagnose, email us at support@leadprosper.io with the lead ID and a brief description of what you've already tried.

The more troubleshooting you do up front - reading the lifecycle, opening each buyer's request and response, comparing the data against the buyer's API specs - the faster any conversation with a buyer or with our support team will go.