Ford Dealers, Are you receiving all new car leads routed through Ford Direct?

[csabatka1]

I was working on rolling out Dealer.com's Accelerate DR tool for @Dan Sayer Anderson Auto Group which has 4 Ford dealers. The setup is a little tricky because we allow the customer to select their dealership in which they would like to work with, regardless of where vehicle is located.

Fast forward to the actual issue. As I was testing my custom script for store selection, I sent in multiple leads to each of the 4 Ford dealers on new vehicles. I am aware of FD's blocking sending test leads, I used realistic names, but used the same email address for each. What I found is after a customer submits a lead that is parsed through Ford Direct, any additional NEW VEHICLE lead is automatically marked Duplicate and not sent to CRM. Additionally, FD's system will mark leads invalid for no explainable reason an not send to CRM. This does not affect used vehicles and wasn't because of the tests I did. There are rules within Ford Direct's system that blocks any additional leads on new vehicles. Also, they have a pretty strict rule setup for "Invalid" leads that looks for strings within the lead that it deems as spam. The cases below as invalid were due to random characters within the URL string sent through the lead.

We looked at the historical logs for FD leads and noticed this wasn't just limited to the DR tool, but any 3rd Party leads, plus any leads submitted through FD websites.

Green below are actual customer leads not received. Red is my tests to multiple stores. This tool was live only for a few hours and had 4 customers submit a deal and of those 2 did a second vehicle (which was blocked by FD), and 1 was marked invalid.

 

[craigh]

I will say, this is a very tricky subject. Lead form spam is out of control, including the ability to bypass captchas, fill out hidden forms, etc.
The same email address for multiple names is one of the flags that we commonly use to mark leads as invalid, as a customer would typically not have multiple names and the same email address and, if they do, we assume they'll get a response from the first lead anyways.
In that scenario we only send one email, but we record the other leads on their customer profile.

Additionally, FD's system will mark leads invalid for no explainable reason an not send to CRM.

This is tough too, because it could be anything from foreign characters to them using a spam reduction service that isn't intelligently configured for automotive.
Sounds like they need to clean it up, but I would just note that I have yet to see a perfect system that blocks spam without blocking valid leads.

 

[csabatka1]

I will say, this is a very tricky subject. Lead form spam is out of control, including the ability to bypass captchas, fill out hidden forms, etc.
The same email address for multiple names is one of the flags that we commonly use to mark leads as invalid, as a customer would typically not have multiple names and the same email address and, if they do, we assume they'll get a response from the first lead anyways.
In that scenario we only send one email, but we record the other leads on their customer profile.



This is tough too, because it could be anything from foreign characters to them using a spam reduction service that isn't intelligently configured for automotive.
Sounds like they need to clean it up, but I would just note that I have yet to see a perfect system that blocks spam without blocking valid leads.

I agree with this. I'll clear up on thing, the multiple names on same email address wasn't the trigger on these duplicates. It was strictly a rule based on email address and more than one new vehicle lead.

The big problem is what our Ford Direct rep confirmed, Ford Direct saw a rise in lead volume and big drop in close percentages with DR tools, so that was the main reason in deploying this rule. I'd have to dig for my email with the stats of previous tool, these stores saw a large percentage of customers who filled out a DR deal on more than one vehicle. After spot checking those additional submitted deals most purchased a vehicle which wasn't the first submitted.