#The report you get tells you almost nothing
It is not a report. It is what the vendor wants you to see.
NADA 2025: average franchise store spent $586,246 on advertising, $739 per new vehicle. Digital was 74.9%. Search 21.1%. Third-party 20%. SEO 19.5%. Social 14.2%. TV 10.5% (about $61,500). Radio 6.9%. Industry total $9.96 billion.
That's the biggest lever you have on sales and service. And a lot of dealers still get a monthly packet of impressions, clicks, and brand-lift charts their agency chose.
Impressions don't pay floorplan. Clicks don't write ROs. A green dashboard that hides a rising cost per sale is usually hiding something.
#What you should actually see
You won't track every visit. Cookie banners and platform walls already took that away. You can still demand the same short list every month from every partner:
- Spend by channel. Paid search, social, third-party, SEO, email/database, OTT, TV, radio.
- Leads, appointments, ups, and sold units you can tie to a source.
- Cost per lead. Cost per appointment and cost per sale when the CRM will support it.
- Whether you're over or under the plan you set. Not last month's vanity chart.
Traffic and CPC belong on page two. They explain the first page. They are not the first page.
NADA/Cox: digital leads close 8–12%. Showroom closes 25–30%, often with 15–25% more front-end gross. Cheap leads can be expensive sales. Paid search leads commonly $25–65. Third-party $35–60 and rising. Database and organic, once built, are much cheaper. Your store needs its own number this month, next to the spend.
#Allocation is a decision
Paid search and marketplaces catch people shopping a model today.
Database and service catch people who already own your brand and are due.
Social, retargeting, OTT, and TV mostly catch people who are not in market this week.
Buyers purchase every few years. Service is every few months. A channel that can't name who it's talking to and whether they're ready is a brand channel. Brand has a job. It should not become most of the budget because it's hard to argue with.
Things that show up constantly:
- Paid search at 10% and TV at 60%. Something is off.
- OTT spend matching or exceeding paid search. OTT can influence shoppers. It is not where you get your leads. It is not your highest converting channel. Don't spend more there than you do on search.
- No dynamic retargeting on VDPs or service.
- Thin social, or all awareness and no offer.
- CRM and service file barely touched while prospecting keeps climbing.
NADA mix is roughly 40% search + SEO, 20% third-party, 14% social, 10% TV. A store at $80k/month with $8k in paid search and $48k in TV/OTT is not balanced. It is uninspected.
Management fees, creative, tools, and brand overlap can push a reported $150 lead toward $280–320 once everything is counted. Get your fully loaded number.
#Decide on the data you have
You will not get perfect attribution. Waiting for it is how budgets drift. Rank channels by cost per lead, then appointments, then anything you can match to a sale or RO. Move money in steps. If paid search is efficient and capped, the next dollar usually belongs in database, service, and retargeting before another unmeasured video flight.
Demand the one-page version. If a partner cannot give you spend, leads, cost per lead, and a sales or appointment read without a giant export, the report is built for them, not you.
A partner like Carbide Digital should be able to force the scoreboard and point the vendors at it in hours, not after another quarter of decks.
Inspect what you expect. If you cannot see it, you are not managing it.