Reference
Pay-per-call glossary
The jargon of calls, leads and compliance — decoded in one line each.
- Advertiser / Buyer
- The business paying for qualified calls.
- Publisher / Affiliate
- The marketer generating calls and earning per qualified call.
- Network
- The intermediary that tracks, routes, qualifies and bills calls.
- Qualified call
- A call meeting the agreed rules (duration, area, service, hours, uniqueness).
- Duration threshold / buffer
- Minimum connected seconds before a call becomes billable.
- Dedupe window
- Period during which repeat calls from the same number aren't billable.
- IVR
- Interactive voice response — short automated prompts (e.g., "press 1") that screen or route a call.
- DNI
- Dynamic number insertion — showing a unique tracking number per visitor or source on a web page.
- Static number
- A fixed tracking number assigned to one source or placement.
- Ping/post
- Real-time bidding where a caller's details are pinged to buyers before the call is posted to a winner.
- RTB
- Real-time bidding across multiple buyers for a single call.
- Caps
- Daily, hourly or concurrent limits on how many calls a buyer receives.
- Failover
- Rules for what happens when a buyer doesn't answer — try a backup, or end the call.
- Payout
- What a publisher earns per qualified call.
- CPA
- Cost per acquisition — pricing tied to an agreed downstream outcome.
- O&O
- Owned and operated — websites and assets run by the network itself.
- TCPA
- Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the main U.S. law governing marketing calls and texts.
- PEWC
- Prior express written consent — the consent standard generally required for autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing to wireless numbers.
- One-to-one consent
- A 2023 FCC rule requiring consent to one seller at a time; vacated in 2025.
- DNC
- Do Not Call — national registry and company-specific lists of numbers that must not receive telemarketing.
- Consent certificate
- A third-party, time-stamped record proving what a consumer saw and agreed to on a form.
- Invalid traffic
- Calls or leads that violate the rules — bots, AI-generated calls, incentivized or misleading traffic.
- Disposition
- The outcome of a call (booked, quoted, not interested) reported back by the buyer.
- Postback
- An automated message sending a conversion or disposition back to a tracking system.
- GPC
- Global Privacy Control — a browser signal telling sites not to sell or share personal information.