Introduction
What buy3 call tracking is, who it is built for, the objects you will work with and how one call moves through them.
buy3 call tracking is a self-serve workspace for anybody who buys, sells or routes inbound phone calls. You buy tracking numbers, add the buyers you sell calls to, and build a routing plan. Every call that lands on one of your numbers is then routed, recorded, priced, logged and — the part we care most about — explained.
It does real-time bidding in both directions: your publishers can ping you for a bid before they send a call, and you can ping your buyers' bidding endpoints before you dial them. If you are moving from another call tracking platform, the ping formats you already use are supported, so switching does not mean asking every partner to re-integrate.
Who it is for
| You are | What you do here |
|---|---|
| A publisher | You generate calls from your own media. Put a tracking number on each source — or a pool of numbers on your website — and see which source produced which call, what it was worth and what it cost you. |
| A network | You take calls from many publishers and sell them to many buyers. Give each publisher a lane with its own payout terms, run a routing plan across your buyers and keep both sides honest with a log they can read themselves. |
| A broker | You sit between supply and demand and live on the margin. Bid on inbound pings, ping your buyers in turn, and see revenue, payout and margin per call rather than per month. |
| A buyer | You are on the other end of a target. You receive calls by phone number, SIP or a bidding endpoint you host, and you can post a conversion back so the seller's books match yours. |
The object model
Seven nouns cover almost everything. Core concepts defines each one properly; this is the shape they make together.
- A workspace is your account: its team, its wallet, its plan and everything below.
- A campaign is one stream of calls — one offer, one vertical, one set of rules. It holds the hours, caps and caller policies that apply before any buyer is considered.
- Numbers belong to a campaign. A number can also be tied to a publisher, or sit in a pool for dynamic number insertion on a website.
- Publishers send you calls. Each publisher joins a campaign through a lane that carries their payout terms and their key.
- Buyers are who you sell to, and each buyer owns one or more targets — the actual destination a call is sent to.
- The routing plan is the campaign's ordered list of targets: who is tried first, who shares traffic, and who catches a call the first choice did not answer.
How a call flows
01
A call lands
on one of your tracking numbers
02
Context
publisher, DNI session, tags, caller state
03
Gates
plan, wallet, hours, caps, caller policies
04
The plan
every target judged, then put in order
05
Dial
with failover down the plan
06
The books
revenue and payout recorded
- The call arrives on a tracking number. The number tells us the campaign, and — if it has one — the publisher or the website visitor behind it.
- Context is gathered. Tags come from the publisher's ping, from the visitor's DNI session, from the number itself or from the platform (the caller's state, from the area code). Every tag remembers where it came from.
- The gates run, in a fixed order: is the workspace's plan active, is the wallet funded, is the campaign live, is the caller blocked or anonymous, is the campaign inside its hours and under its caps, is this a repeat caller? A call that fails a gate ends there, with a reason code.
- The plan is resolved. Every target on the routing plan is judged — paused, outside its hours, at its concurrency limit, capped, filtered out by a tag, and so on. Targets that bid in real time are pinged in parallel. What survives is ordered by the campaign's routing mode.
- The call is dialled. Capacity is reserved on the target and its buyer, and the call is transferred. If the buyer does not answer, is busy or rejects it, the reservation is released and the next target is tried, inside the campaign's failover budget.
- The books are written. When the call ends, revenue from the buyer and payout to the publisher are recorded against it. Nothing moves between wallets: your buyers pay you directly, and the platform records what is owed.
What is different here
- Every call explains itself. The waterfall lists every gate the call passed, every target that was considered with the reason it was skipped, and every dial attempt with its result in words.
- Every ping is a ledger row. Inbound and outbound pings keep their request, response, latency and reject code, and both you and your publisher can read your own side of the ping ledger.
- You pay for connected minutes, never for pings. A call that never connects costs nothing. Rates are on the pricing page.
- Nothing fails silently. Webhooks and pixels have a delivery log, retries with backoff, and replay.
- Everything is logged. Each configuration change writes an activity row with who made it and the before and after values.
- Tags carry provenance. A tag records whether it came from a publisher, a DNI session, a number, the platform or the API — so a value a partner supplied is never mistaken for one you measured.
Where the work happens
| Surface | Who uses it | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| The workspace console | You and your team | Everything: campaigns, numbers, buyers, targets, calls, reports, keys and the wallet. Each person has a seat with a role — see Team. |
| The publisher portal | Each publisher you work with | Their own calls, their own pings and their own payouts — and nothing of anybody else's. See The publisher portal. |
| The REST API | Your systems | The console's own reads and the handful of writes an integration needs, behind a scoped API key. See the API reference. |
| Webhooks and pixels | Your systems, and your partners' | Events pushed out as they happen, with a delivery log, retries and replay. See Webhooks. |
What it does not do
- It does not hold your buyers' money. Revenue and payout are recorded per call so your reports and invoices are right. The money moves between you and them, as it did before.
- It does not price your calls for you. What a buyer pays is what you agreed with them, set on the target or bid by them in real time.
- It does not make outbound calls. This is inbound call tracking: numbers ring in, and the platform decides where each call goes.
- It does not decide whether you may record a call. The setting is yours per campaign, and so is knowing the law where your callers are. See Recordings.