Third party leads has been a thriving business for the last ten years or more. The concept in the early years was a great one as someone had the forethought to place ads on Yahoo, AOL, MSN etc.. Capturing an unsuspecting audience searching for vehicles via the Internet. In doing so that lead generator would capture names, telephone numbers, addresses and e-mail addresses and then sell that information to dealerships in different market areas. These leads would and still today sell from $6.00 to $35.00 per lead. Creating a huge income for the lead generators, which in turn made them hungry for more, hence more ads, more leads generated.Sound great right? Someone smart enough to generate these leads for the automotive industry. Certainly someone had to do it as the automotive industry IE: The automotive manufactures and dealers did not believe in the internet nor did they have expertise or enough knowledge to make it work for them. So in retrospect dealer’s started purchasing these leads from lead generators. In doing so they (dealers) have hurt themselves and the bottom line they work off of everyday.Let me explain: Currently this is how it works; lead generator places ads via search engines or pay per click campaigns or natural search. When these ads are placed they are placed right next to or above or beneath the dealers and manufacturer ads many times with the dealers name right in the header of the ad, an internet surfer clicks on the ad and walks through the website and submits information that is asked for. That information is then sold to other marketing firms for resale to dealers and that information is also sold to dealers direct. This pour soul that just submitted his information so he could collect information or maybe he was promised something for submitting that information but never the less his personal name, telephone number, e-mail addresses has just been sold to as many firms as the lead generator can find to buy it. This person’s identity has just been raped and they do not even know it until all the telephone calls and emails start pouring in over the next couple of days.So what has happened is the dealer has finally purchased a lead that he probably could have generated themselves, not only that they would have made more gross as the consumer would have been less informed by so many other dealers, because most dealers think it is all about price.If you are an automotive dealer, and you purchase third party leads, you could be spending thousands of dollars that could be spent name branding your dealership and getting you online leads from your own website. You are also feeding the company’s that advertise your new vehicles for less than what you want to sell them for, such as “buy below invoice” do you want your customer expecting that? Or how about “distressed dealers selling for less than cost” You should really take a look at what your online competition is doing to your market. Know this: the lead generators don’t care less what your vehicles sell for, why should they? One company selling leads will say we only sell to one dealer in this market, what they do not tell you is they purchased that lead from someone who will sell it as many times as they can. They might tell you they have scrubbed these leads and have to charge you more for that scrubbing process. Like they say “buyer beware”