We are lucky that we use salespoint as our LMT and they have a great solution on ferreting out duplicate leads.

I audit this monthly and send the duplicate leads back to the provider for full credit.

I have noticed that the majority of the leads originate from the OEM sites consistently over the course of the months business. This is month after month. So the OEM leads are still the most valuable.

Some of the web site company’s state they will increase the site activity and increase the sales however they usually want the dealer to funnel all the leads including the OEM leads which they are paying $15-20.00 or more per lead into their LMT and this will distort the numbers and skews the reports.

Dealers if they wish to track true; the leads, they need to keep the OEM leads separate so these company’s cannot use the leads they generate to bloat their figures. Some of these company’s charge $5-6,000 per month and the dealer is also paying $15-20.00 per lead, plus many duplicates so the cost could increase 3-fold. Then they wonder why they are losing money. Some of these dealers are getting the royal fleece.

Jeff has got a great site (no cookie cutter here) and I will bet the website cost is not costing $5- 6,000.00 plus per month.

“Can you confirm or deny that, Jeff?”

I used this alias profile 1 time and 1 time only to shop for a Mercedes-Benz. That was the lead that I received on 10/13/2006. A truly appreciate the fact that Phil DuPree took the time to comment and also took his time to look into this particular situation. I doubt most vendors would have the guts to comment on a situation like this.

However, there is still something wrong here.

Fact: I used the Alias 1 time and only 1 time to shop for a Mercedes-Benz
Fact: I received the same lead 2 more times over a 3 month period
Fact: I received it each time from AutoUSA

Phil says that Yahoo! Autos confirmed that they never resend lead and each is uniquely entered by users.

I’m very confident that I submitted the lead on Edmunds and not Yahoo but I can not confirm that 100%. My initial testing was not intended for this purpose, therefore I didn’t track this information. If I didn’t manually submit these leads, then who did? Could Yahoo! be fibbing? Did someone hijack my alias information (using the exact address, phone number and vehicle of interest each time consistently)?

Something still isn’t kosher. The next time I decide to do this, I will be sure to track my request and response from beginning to end.

Phil’s comment is helping this situation, and I’m not accusing him of anything here. However, when a business gets called out and has to defend their practices privacy sometimes gets thrown out the window.

Can you confirm or deny that, Jeff?

The thread brings to mind the Engadget/Kryptonite incident where Engadget syndicated a thread about Kryptonite’s locks capable of being hacked by a Bic pen. Kryptonite did not catch wind of the thread until after it was too late, and the result for Kryptonite was a class-action lawsuit.

Phil, I am encouraged to see your quick action here to address the concern. I think it says a lot for your organization and as threads like this become more regular in the industry, companies that are quick to respond like this will retain their competitive edge.

As you know jeff, I am the President of http://www.dealerlinkusa.com (DealerLinkUSA). We are a PPC/SEO/SEM marketing firm. Our leads are generated in multiple ways through various search media. We, without exception, refuse to charge for leads on a per lead basis. We will generate as many quality leads as possible through a monthly budget program.

I may be naive, but I’d like to think that the situation you incurred with AutoUSA is somewhat isolated. I can’t help but think, they would be in all kinds of hot water if there was any trend like this to be uncovered. Hopefully they will correct their error and it will be the last issue you have with them.

We searched our system for all leads with the Marie Zahn name and found four. Three of them went to your dealership and were submitted on these dates: 10/13/2006, 2/22/2007, and 4/29/2007.

All three of these leads were individually entered on the Yahoo! Autos website. Yahoo! Autos has confirmed that they never resend leads—each is uniquely entered by users. Since Yahoo! sends leads from their website only, they confirmed that these leads were typed in on their “get a free price quote” lead form which has dealers listed for selection. Whoever typed in these leads had to specifically select your dealership in order for us to send you the lead. Since the leads are several months apart, we did not filter them out as duplicates.

The fourth lead was for a different make and came from the PriceQuotes website on 11/13/2006.

AutoUSA is very sensitive about websites creating duplicate leads and selling them to us. We have stringent filters to catch duplicates within a certain timeframe. We only work with the highest integrity websites and we will not buy any leads from websites that automatically create duplicate leads.

We do understand that Internet customers can go to several websites, including the dealer’s website, and request the same vehicle from the same dealership. We can only filter out the leads that come through our system. Dealer CRM’s or CRM ad-on software may be needed for dealers to filter out duplicate leads that come from different lead providers.

If you or your readers have ideas on how we can improve our duplicate filtering, we would love to hear about them either as comments on your blog or emailed directly to us at support@autousa.com.

Even when using a program like i-leadcontrol, the duplicates come through to your CRM. So yes, I would have caught this duplicate no matter who it was from.

You said “and we probably would have assumed that the same customer came back through another website & would have been charged for it.” That’s my point..this was a lead that I can say I’m 100% confident that the customer was NOT on another site shopping.

Since this posting, a big wig from AutoUSA.com has called me to let me know that they are indeed trying to get to the bottom of this mishap. We had a nice conversation and I commend them on their in effort to getting to the bottom this. Maybe we’ll hear from them soon on DealerRefresh.