In late 2023, we introduced Blocko, our innovative spam mitigation tool designed to protect dealers from spam and low-quality e-mail leads. We’re pleased to share that from strong initial results upon launch we’ve continued to evolve this tool and grow sustained performance against spam leads over the last 6 months. Below, we take you through Blocko’s impact to date and explore the exciting improvements in store.
carsales’ mission to safeguard our dealers lead pipeline and boost the quality of interactions with genuine car buyers was one of the key reasons why we developed Blocko as a solution. Early on, Blocko demonstrated the power of its sophisticated algorithms, successfully filtering out a significant volume of spam e-mail leads. Since its inception we’ve seen over 52,000 leads that were flagged as disingenuous blocked, saving our dealers a significant amount of time following up on dud-leads.
Now, here in 2024, Blocko’s impact is more apparent than ever. Our analysis reveals a tangible increase in lead closure rates across our dealer network. This underscores our commitment to delivering not just leads, but ensuring those leads are of a quality that translate into sales.
While Blocko has been exceeding our expectations, we aren’t resting on our laurels. Our team will be doubling down on Blocko’s capabilities with a series of strategic enhancements now live and actively being monitored by our Dealer Support Team.
Key updates include:
Revised Ruleset: We’ll be carefully revising Blocko’s filtering ruleset. Initial modelling suggests these changes could effectively double Blocko’s effectiveness in identifying and blocking spam.
Introducing Human Review: Alongside these automated improvements, we’re training a team of specialists to manually review suspicious e-mail leads flagged by Blocko. This two-pronged approach will help provide unparalleled accuracy. For complete transparency, dealers will also be notified when a spam lead has been detected and blocked, either automatically, or by our review team.
Controlled Access levels: With our commitment to improving lead quality, we have also installed safeguards around mitigating access to information on listings. This information, such as vehicle pricing is masked when a user is not signed in to a carsales account and suspected to be undertaking spam activities outside of typical human activity. The ruleset for controlling access levels is similar to those implemented by the Blocko tool, as such we are continually reviewing the data to ensure it’s as accurate as possible.
Following the implementation of the adjusted ruleset, our team is committed to closely monitoring the rollout and making any necessary adjustments.
The fight against spam leads takes a community effort. The more dealers that report leads to our team, the more we can use that information to continue to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the tool.
After all, Blocko embodies our dedication to both technological innovation and the long-term success of our dealer partners. Combating lead spam is an ongoing process, and we’re determined to stay ahead of the curve. Our dealers deserve nothing less than the highest quality leads, and we’ll continue to raise the bar for delivering that.
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