How LeadMove works

Every lead follows the same path, in the same order, however it came in. Knowing the order tells you where a lead stopped and which setting to change.

1. Intake

The lead arrives at a source — a posting URL you gave a vendor or form tool — or by CSV import or manual entry. See Sources & posting URLs.

2. Field mapping

Your source's mapping is applied, then field names are matched to your pipeline's fields case-insensitively, ignoring spaces, underscores and dashes. Unmatched fields show in the Intake panel to map or ignore. See Fields & validation.

3. Spam filter

Your pipeline's spam conditions run on reception, on the raw values, before anything is cleaned. A match is quarantined — never distributed, never billed — and the conditions that matched stay on the lead. See Spam filtering.

4. Normalization

Your inbound transforms clean values once, for every buyer: lowercase the email, format the phone, trim whitespace. This runs before validation and deduplication, so both see the cleaned value. See Data normalization.

5. Validation

Required fields must be present, email and phone well-formed. A failing lead is stored as invalid rather than dropped, and the source gets an HTTP 422 carrying the lead's ID so you can fix the data and resend.

6. Deduplication

The lead is compared against leads the same pipeline received inside your window, on the fields you chose. With the default action a match is kept as a duplicate — not routed, not billed. See Deduplication.

7. Manual review (optional)

With manual review on, a clean lead is parked as held instead of going out. It's still scored, so you see a grade before deciding. Approve or reject it — or set an auto-release delay and it goes out by itself. See Manual review.

8. Forwarding (optional)

Forwarding rules send the lead into another of your pipelines, where it runs that pipeline's full intake from stage 1. Every matching rule fires: copy forwards and keeps distributing here, transfer makes the lead leave entirely. See Forwarding.

9. Scoring

The lead gets a 0-100 quality score and an A-D grade. It runs alongside distribution, and when a routing rule uses the score or grade, distribution waits for it. See How scoring works.

10. Distribution

Tiers are tried in order. Inside a tier, every rule whose conditions match is a candidate — a more specific condition doesn't win, so use tiers to give a buyer first refusal. Buyers that are capped, closed or out of prepaid balance are skipped. See How distribution works.

11. Delivery and billing

Each selected buyer receives the lead at its endpoint in the format you configured, and delivery is what triggers billing at the lead's price. A buyer outside its operating hours has its delivery deferred until it reopens. The buyer can then contest the lead within the dispute window — see How disputes work.

Common questions

Why is spam checked before the data is cleaned? So junk is judged exactly as it arrived. Your conditions are written against what suppliers actually send, not a tidied-up version.

Are spam and duplicate leads billed? No. Neither reaches a buyer, so neither is a billable delivery, and neither counts toward your monthly lead quota.

Does a lead ever skip stages? Yes. A lead that's quarantined, duplicate, invalid or held stops there and never reaches distribution — which is why its status tells you how far it got. See Lead statuses explained.

Where do I see this for one lead? On the lead page: the routing trace lists every buyer considered and why it was chosen or excluded.