Run GroundTruth from Your Dealership CRM

The tactic dealers ask for by name, described accurately, including the part the pitch leaves out.

GroundTruth is a location based advertising platform. A buyer draws a boundary around a real world place, the platform targets mobile devices observed inside that boundary, and afterwards it reports how many of those devices were later seen at the advertiser's own location. Targeting and measurement are the same instrument pointed in two directions.

For a dealership the headline application needs no explaining, because every store in the country has already been pitched it. Draw the boundary around the competitor down the road. Serve advertising to the people standing on their lot. It is the single most requested tactic in dealership advertising, and it is the reason this page gets read more than most in the catalogue.

The second application is quieter and often better. Boundaries around service drives, auction lanes, apartment complexes, employers, or the routes a trade area actually uses tell you something about movement that a zip code does not. The category as a whole is covered on our geofencing advertising page, which argues the channel. This page answers a narrower question: what a connection between this vendor and your CRM would and would not do.

The case is that it targets behaviour rather than a description. Somebody who spent twenty minutes walking a competitor's front line is demonstrating intent in a way no interest segment approximates, and reaching that person in the following days with your own offer is a legitimately good idea. The visit reporting is also closer to a real outcome than a click. A dealership cares whether somebody came to the store, not whether they tapped a banner, and this is one of the few channels that even attempts to answer the first question.

The honest objection is that both halves of that are softer than they sound.

A boundary drawn around a dealership catches the parts store next door, the bus stop, the sidewalk, the delivery driver, the service customer waiting for an oil change, and your competitor's own staff arriving at seven in the morning. Location precision on mobile devices drifts, and the supply of location data has been narrowing under regulatory and platform pressure, which means the pool available today is not the pool the tactic was famous for. Presence is also not intent: a person standing on a lot is frequently a person already deep in a negotiation, which is late to be introducing yourself.

The visit measurement carries the more structural problem. The vendor that sold the media also counts the visits and grades the lift, with no independent party in the middle. That is not an accusation, it is a description of the arrangement, and it is a reason to set your own pass mark before the campaign runs rather than accepting the one that arrives with the report.

Finally, the tactic is symmetrical. Nothing stops the store across town from drawing a boundary around you.

Available on request. The published test for that status is that the work is not started and demand decides the order, and this page does not stretch it by a word. No adapter file exists in the ad gateway for this platform, and there is no credential block, no authorization URL and no wire up checklist waiting behind the scenes.

Access class is PARTNER, which is the vendor's gate rather than ours. Credentials require an application the vendor reviews before issuing them, and in location advertising that review tends to be a genuine one rather than a form, because the vendor carries obligations about how its data may be used downstream.

The sequence therefore has two halves and only one is ours. We would schedule the engineering, which the request tally on this page decides. Somebody at another company would approve a credential, on a calendar we cannot see. Given how often this specific tactic is asked for, it is worth saying clearly that wanting it badly does not move the second half, and that a directory quoting dates on eighty pages would be worth nothing to anybody.

A design rather than a description, because none of it runs.

Two rows deserve a second read. The visit counts in the second row would be carried into the CRM as the vendor reported them, labelled as the vendor's figures, because they are not something we produce or verify. The last row rules out the other thing stores ask for here, which is suppressing or targeting their own existing customers inside a boundary.

A page about an unbuilt platform can be concrete because networks are not added here as bespoke projects. On a location platform the interesting design question is how boundaries are described in a campaign payload, since a radius around a store is a simple number and a set of drawn polygons around eleven competitors is not.

One provider agnostic library inside the CRM defines what any advertising platform must be able to do: hand us an authorization URL, exchange the code for a token, list the accounts a credential can reach, deploy a campaign, pause or resume it, return spend and results, and prove on demand that the connection still works. Seven operations, one adapter file per network, answered the same way by all of them. Nothing in that contract moves a customer record outward on any network.

Twenty networks are registered against it and exactly one is implemented. The nineteen that are not return a refusal naming themselves, so a stray call fails readably rather than looking like an outage at the vendor. GroundTruth is not among the twenty, which is a smaller and more honest claim than registered, and every entry in the directory is required to make the distinction rather than imply the flattering one.

Underneath the adapters is infrastructure that already exists and would not be rebuilt for a new network. Credentials are encrypted before storage with AES-256-GCM. Every action against a network is written to an append only audit log carrying the company, the network, the user and the detail, stamped in UTC deliberately, because those tables are shared across dealerships and a timezone relative timestamp cannot be reconciled later. Campaign objects record which credentials created them and re resolve those credentials afterwards, so a disconnected account does not orphan the work built under it.

Two routes, and the store picks. The first is the webXintel Ads Network: included, built and operated by our team from the selections you make in Leads Manager, arriving as one line rather than a stack of platform invoices. That path is live and nothing on this page gates it.

The second is your own account. Where a network is built, you connect the account your store already holds, campaigns route through it, and the billing, the naming and the spend history stay yours. Disconnect and delivery falls back to the managed path.

Neither route reaches GroundTruth today. It is also worth noting that many stores already buy this tactic through an agency rather than directly, and an agency held account is not necessarily an account an integration could ever address. If geofencing already appears on an invoice you receive, the useful question before anything else is who holds the credential and who owns the boundaries, because that determines whether the spend could ever be compared against your other channels in one place.

The limit that applies across the entire gateway, stated on every page here: pushing, pausing and reading numbers from a network is done by our team, not from your dashboard. That is a deliberate constraint while the connection layer is young, and it is on the list to open up.

Two tracks. The vendor track is an application and a review before a credential exists. Our track is an adapter file against the seven operation contract, a credential block, and each operation wired and checked against a live account. Ours is ordinary scheduled work. Theirs is not on our calendar.

The piece needing real design is reporting, and specifically how a vendor supplied visit number is presented inside the CRM. It would have to be labelled as the platform's own count rather than shown beside figures we produce, because a dashboard that puts an unverified visit number next to a measured lead count is teaching a general manager something false about both.

On measurement in practice, write the pass mark down first. How many devices in the boundaries were reached, how often, at what cost per thousand, and what movement you would expect in your own showroom traffic and direct enquiries over the following weeks. Results in this category are not reliably attributable inside twenty four hours, and a store judging a boundary campaign by the next morning's leads is measuring the wrong thing. None of this forecasts visits or sales, and no honest vendor will hand you that number for a location buy.

The gaps below are the ones that bite on this platform specifically.

We do not measure store visits. No part of our stack observes a device, resolves a location or attributes a visit. Any visit figure associated with this channel is the platform's own, produced by the same company selling you the media, and we would carry it labelled as such rather than presenting it as measurement of ours.

We do not upload a hashed audience or export a customer list. No code in our stack turns your owner base or your lead database into a targeting or suppression segment on this or any network. Stores frequently ask to exclude existing customers from a conquest boundary, and that is a real capability we do not enable.

We do not run a server side conversions endpoint or an offline conversion upload. Those are the mechanisms a location vendor uses to close the loop from an impression to a sold unit, and we operate neither.

We do not install or manage a tracking pixel. Site side measurement is whatever you already had.

We do not retrieve leads from this platform. Lead form retrieval is implemented for exactly one network and this is not it, and a geofenced display impression collects no opt in.

We do not emit a vehicle catalog. No unit level feed goes to any advertising platform from us, so creative here is your store rather than individual stock.

No campaign has ever been deployed to GroundTruth from the CRM, because there is no code that could do it.

Ask, with your store attached, and say which boundaries you actually want. The answer separates the stores that get value from this channel from the ones that renew for a year and cannot say what changed. A named competitor, a service drive, an employer, an auction lane: each of those is a different campaign with a different expectation attached. A general request for geofencing is not a brief.

Requests are recorded against the platform they name, and the tally is what decides build order, because a request from a store ready to spend is a better input than any internal roadmap discussion. You will hear back from a person with a range or a reason.

Expect the reply to ask what you would accept as proof, since this is the channel where that question is most often skipped and most often regretted. The managed path runs today regardless, and pricing for the platform is on the pricing page.

Does LeadLocate integrate with GroundTruth today?

No. The status is available on request, whose published test is that the work is not started and demand decides the order. There is no adapter file, credential block or wire up checklist for this platform in the ad gateway.

Can I use my own GroundTruth account?

Not through the CRM, because nothing exists to reach it. Many stores buy this tactic through an agency, and an agency held account may not be one an integration could address at all. Worth confirming who holds the credential before planning around it.

What happens if I request GroundTruth?

It is recorded against this platform specifically and counted, and the tally is the input to build order. This is one of the most asked for tactics in dealership advertising, so the count here matters, but credentials still need a vendor reviewed application that we do not control.

Can you geofence the dealership across the street for me?

Not through any connection we operate, because there is none. It is worth knowing what the tactic actually delivers before buying it elsewhere: a boundary catches staff, service customers, neighbouring businesses and passers by, and a shopper standing on a lot is often already deep in a deal.

Do you verify the store visit numbers?

No. We do not measure visits and nothing in our stack observes a device or resolves a location. Those counts are produced by the vendor selling the media, and if they were ever carried into the CRM they would be labelled as the platform's own figures rather than as measurement.

Can you exclude my existing customers from a conquest campaign?

No. Suppression works by uploading a list, and we do not export a customer list or a hashed audience to any advertising platform. It is a real capability on the vendor side and it is not one this connection would provide.

A competitor lot, a service drive and an employer are three different campaigns. Requests are counted against the platform they name and the tally decides build order.