Each year, the Pied Piper PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness (ILE) Study measures a dealer’s responsiveness to those types of customer queries coming through dealership websites, which it considers a key requirement for retail success in today’s world. In that regard, Lincoln dealers haven’t performed too terribly well in recent years, ranking below the industry average of 55 with a score of 50 in 2022, after which they once again came in below the mean in 2023 with a score of 57 versus the industry average of 58. However, Lincoln dealers rebounded in a major way in the 2025 ILE, it seems.
This year, Lincoln dealers soared all the way up to fifth place with a score of 68, which places them behind only sellers of Subaru, Infiniti, Acura, and Toyota vehicles, as well as far above the industry average of 65. Lincoln dealers improved their score by nine points versus last year, once of the biggest jumps of any brand, as the overall industry gained three points year-over-year. Lincoln dealers were joined by their cohorts at Ford, which posted a massive improvement as well, moving above the industry average for the first time.
To gather this data, Pied Piper submitted customer inquiries through the websites of 4,023 automotive dealerships representing all major brands, each asking a specific question about a vehicle in dealer inventory with a customer name, email address, and phone number. From there, Pied Piper evaluated the speed and quality of dealership responses by email, telephone, text message, and chat over the next 24 hours.
The 2025 ILE study scores were derived using 20 differently weighted measurements, based upon best practices that are mathematically most likely to generate sales, which combine to generate an overall ILE score ranging from 0 to 100. Overall, dealers continue to improve in terms of responsiveness to online inquiries, though there is certainly still room for growth.
“The effort to improve is worth it. Historically, dealers who improve their ILE performance from scoring under 40 to scoring over 80 on average sell 50 percent more units from the same quantity of internet leads,” said Cameron O’Hagan, Pied Piper’s Vice President of Metrics and Analytics. “We all agree that customers today visit dealer websites first, and how dealers respond to those customers drives today’s sales success,” said O’Hagan. “The trouble is that website customers can be invisible in day-to-day operations which makes them too easy to overlook.”
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