Budget Caps

Budget Cap Explainer

Budget caps ensure your Lead Prosper campaigns deliver only as many leads as your clients can afford. They’re most useful in a scenario such as ping post where lead price might vary.

This article will go over Budget Caps and how to set them up. Click here for a video version.

Standard Caps

Lead Prosper was created to route leads automatically in real-time, and while automation is incredibly powerful, it can be a liability without the proper rules and parameters in place. Caps are an integral part of Lead Prosper because they ensure your buyers or endpoints don’t get more leads than they bargained for.

If we start by opening a campaign, we’ll see our suppliers and buyers here are uncapped. That means data can continue to flow indefinitely. To establish a cap on the buyer, let’s start by clicking the edit button

These standard lead caps are pretty intuitive — if a client wants no more than 100 leads per day, for instance, you can set a daily cap to enforce that request. Or, if they want the bulk of their leads earlier in the week, you might set specific day caps, allowing for 200 leads on Monday, 150 on Tuesday, and 50 each for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

You’re still going to send the client 500 leads per business week, but daily caps give you additional control over distribution and help you meet a variety of client requests.

Budget Caps

Now, on to budget caps, which are useful when clients prepay for leads that have a variable cost. If the cost per lead in a campaign was fixed, regular lead caps could accomplish the same thing. Say your buyer prepays $1,000 for the week and we know each lead will cost $100. We could set a weekly cap at 10, and we’d deliver exactly $1,000 worth of leads every week.

If lead cost varies, however — maybe you’re distributing leads via ping post to sell to the highest bidder, for instance — lead caps could underutilize or exceed the buyer’s budget depending on the market rate for leads that week.

That’s when we turn to budget caps. By specifying a weekly budget for our buyer of $1,000, we can let Lead Prosper keep track of the fluctuating price per lead and pause our buyer when their budget cap is reached. Like lead caps, budget caps can be applied to specific days, allowing for granular control over lead delivery. If your buyer wants their $1,000 weekly budget spent over the course of the week instead of possibly going through it in a single day, you could toggle on specific day caps and break it down into $200 per business day.

In this case, you’ll still want to leave a cap on a total weekly budget, and that’s where the warning in yellow comes into play. “With budget caps, it's possible to exceed a fixed budget, but only by 1 lead.” This note is most applicable when lead cost varies, but to explain it, let’s imagine we have a $1,000 budget and $90 leads. That would mean you could sell 11 leads for $990 and still have $10 left over. Because you have a positive budget remaining, the campaign hasn’t been paused, but the next $90 lead that’s sold will exceed the budget by $80.

For most partnerships, an $80 overage over the course of the week is far from a big deal, but if you only had daily caps and no weekly ones, a similar scenario could play out every day. That’s why it’s a good idea to have an overarching weekly or monthly cap along with any daily limits you might set.

In addition, it’s not a bad idea to set a budget cap that’s slightly smaller than your customer’s actual budget. If your customer sends you $1,000, for example, and you know your average lead sells for about $50, you could apply a $950 budget cap to mitigate any potential overages.

And finally, in certain campaigns with many buyers, it could take the Lead Prosper platform a few milliseconds to weigh each buyer’s bid, route the lead, and mark it as sold. If that campaign has a very high volume of incoming leads, a budget cap could be exceeded, though not by much. For that additional reason, it’s a best practice to build a small buffer amount into budget caps you might set.

As always, use the support button within the platform to get your questions answered or suggest any features you may have dreamed up while using Lead Prosper.