The Last Frontier

The process is relatively straightforward: a potential customer lands on the manufacturer’s website, fills out a lead form, purchases a vehicle from a dealership… then eventually those leads get cross-reverenced against sales warranty registrations.

But what about customers who visit the manufacturer’s website and never fill out a lead form? For the 99% of web visitors who decline to give their contact information, how does a brand or agency measure digital actions to downstream sales?

Those questions were impossible to answer. Until recently.

Now, technology exists to reverse-match IP addresses to physical addresses and customer names. That’s right, the ‘Internet Protocol address’ – the identification numbers assigned by your Internet Service provider to your router, wifi network, and connected devices – are no longer as anonymous as you might think.

For our Yamaha client, we recently worked with a vendor that specializes in IP matching and targeting – helping us better quantify our digital efforts.

Preliminary results show that over a third of all Yamaha Motorcycle, ATV and Side-by-Side dealership sales correspond to a recent visit to the manufacturer’s website (www.yamahamotorsports.com) where no lead form was submitted.

Furthermore, our analysts have been able to tease out the source of these retail sales matches. So now we know what % of sales can be tracked back to a website visit originating from Paid Search, Display Banner ads, Social, or Email links. We also know the most common combination of online touches (like Paid Search + Email) prior to retail sales.

And again, all this is being measured in the background, without the customer ever filling anything out on Yamaha’s website. Because the retail sales matches are being done by a 3^rd Party – who isn’t passing specific IP addresses back to us for remarketing – we are not violating customer privacy restrictions.

Are you wanting to get a more complete picture of your company’s digital presence?

If so, reverse IP matching may be your answer.