Pied Piper releases annual Internet Lead Effectiveness study results
Kubota dealerships ranked highest in the 2025 Pied Piper PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness (ILE) Compact Tractor Industry Study, which measured responsiveness to internet sales leads coming through dealership websites. Following Kubota were Kioti, TYM, Mahindra and John Deere.
Pied Piper submitted customer inquiries through the websites of 726 compact tractor dealerships representing all major brands. Each inquiry asked a specific question about a tractor in inventory and included a customer name, email address, and local telephone number. Pied Piper then evaluated the speed and quality dealership responses by email, telephone, chat, and text message over the next 24 hours. ILE evaluation of a dealership combines over 20 differently weighted measurements, based upon best practices mathematically most likely to generate sales, to create an ILE overall score ranging between 0 and 100.
Is Industry Performance Changing?
The overall industry average ILE performance remained unchanged compared to last year, with an average score of 33 for both years. Average ILE scores improved from 2024 to 2025 for four brands, Kubota, Yanmar, Bobcat and Case, while the scores for eight brands remained the same or decreased. This year dealers were more likely to quickly answer a web customer’s inquiry by email or text: 27% of the time on average for 2025 vs 22% of the time for 2024. In contrast, dealers were less likely to respond to web customers using multiple paths (email, text, phone): 11% of the time on average vs 13% for 2024. Customers were more likely to be “ghosted” this year, receiving no response from dealers 20% of the time on average, compared to 18% last year.
What is the “80/40 Rule”?
Each brand’s industry study ILE score represents an average that includes top-performing dealers as well as poor performers, each with a score ranging from 0-100. In the 2025 compact tractor bell curve of performance, 4% of all compact tractor dealerships industrywide scored above 80 (providing a quick and thorough personal response), while 59% of dealerships scored below 40 (failing to personally respond to their website customers). In contrast, 34% of auto dealers score over 80, and 14% of powersports dealers score over 80. Cameron O’Hagan, Pied Piper’s Vice President of Metrics and Analytics said, “The effort is worth it. Historically, dealers who improve their ILE performance from scoring under 40 to scoring over 80 on average double the number of units sold from the same quantity of internet leads.”
Top-Ranked Kubota: Which Behaviors Improved from 2024 to 2025?
The average Kubota ILE score in 2025 increased from 37 to 42, the largest gain among compact tractor brands. The percentage of Kubota dealers scoring over 80 rose from 6% in 2024 to 10% in 2025, exceeding the 2025 industry average of 4%. Dealers scoring below 40 dropped slightly from 47% to 46%, well below the industry average of 59%. Kubota dealers responded to customers via multiple communication paths 21% of the time, compared to the 11% industry average. Additionally, the Kubota dealer failure-to-respond rate decreased from 14% to 10%, the lowest among all brands measured in the 2025 study.
