Since May of 2018 we have had to hit “accept” on everything we touch online.  Talk about annoying.  Aside from that it is a show of how flat the world is online.  European legislation is now legislating in America.  But don’t get too bent out of shape on that front because we haven’t even begun to touch on what it is going to do to your online marketing.

You, Mr. Dealer, have enjoyed unfettered information about your online shoppers.  Unless someone is actively masking herself, you can figure out exactly who she is if she comes to your website.  Every visitor has an I.P. address that can be traced and probably a cookie too.  With a combination of data sets you can figure out at least what neighborhood that visitor is in and how credit worthy she is.  Yes, you could put a value on the visitors coming to your website, but you have not seen that offering because there isn’t much demand for it.  And it is expensive to employ that kind of tracking.  Well, it is hard to justify the investment as a car dealer, but not too hard if you’re an online retailer.  Let’s not get hung-up on that either because this level of tracking is going away.

Being able to attribute a click to a lead or even a sale is going to be much more difficult.  You can thank companies like Facebook for being too aggressive with people’s information.

All this aside, let’s be simple about what it means:

Digital marketing is going to be measured the same way as traditional marketing.  Walls are being built to mask things and you will no longer be looking at some of the more detailed stats you’ve enjoyed from digital marketing.  Anonymized stats will still persist, but you’ll be back to a gut and faith kind of measurement like you have when looking at your television campaigns.

In our opinion it just means that your website has to do a better job of driving traffic straight to your physical front door.  It isn’t just about getting leads.