Marketing for Car Dealerships.
Priced right, booked in, sold.

A dealership's month opens with a count of enquiries, split by where each one came from: a listing site, Google, the dealership's own website, the phone or the showroom door. Buyers can shop around before any forecourt (lot, in the US) sees them. In Cox Automotive's 2025 study of 2,300 US buyers, 75% used third-party websites and 59% used dealership websites, and 53% completed all steps at the dealership while only 7% bought completely online. Cox owns the US Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book sites. In the UK, Autotrader reports an average of 13,942 retailer forecourts advertising with it in 2026, so a dealer's cars sit beside thousands of rivals on one screen.

Set up tracking so each call and form carries its source, then run Google Ads search campaigns around the make, model and town terms buyers type, Meta lead campaigns where an offer suits, and SEO so model and used-stock pages answer the question in their first lines. NADA estimates that US franchised new-car dealerships spent an average of $586,246 each on advertising in 2025, including $123,698 on search engine marketing, $117,249 on third-party listing sites and $83,247 on social media advertising. That shows where dealerships put money and is no guide to what you should budget, so judge each line by the sold units it produced.

Each week, take a sample of live cars and compare the price on the listing site, on Google, on your own website and in any finance offer. Any mismatch is a place where the guidance below applies. In the UK, the CMA's guidance says the total price should normally include any unavoidable or mandatory charges, and giving them separately will not normally be enough. It lists administration fees, however described, among such charges, and where a priced advert presents a particular version of a car, the price should reflect what the consumer would need to pay. The guidance is general, so whether a given dealer fee is mandatory depends on the sale.

In the US, FTC staff say a fee the dealer requires a buyer to pay to purchase the car must be in the advertised price, and that on webpages that state any amount a buyer may pay, including inventory-search and vehicle-listing pages, the actual price must be the most prominent amount. They add that state document fee rules do not change the requirement. The FTC says these are staff views, not binding. The FTC's CARS Rule is not part of this: the Fifth Circuit vacated it on procedural grounds in an opinion filed on 27 January 2025, and the FTC withdrew it formally in a rule published on 12 February 2026. The staff views above still cite the FTC Act.

FTC staff also say everyone who has control over the advertising is responsible for the actual price appearing most prominently. In practice, that includes whoever writes your ads, so every template should pull its price from one record the dealership controls. The Texas DMV's dealer manual says that terms such as "internet price" or "e-price" are prohibited where they suggest a different price for online buyers.

An enquiry is only a lead until it has a time on it. Because 53% of US buyers completed every step at the dealership, the online job is to book a visit, so track the share of enquiries given a named time, the share that then arrive, and how long the first reply takes. Your own last twelve months, split by source, are the benchmark to beat. In the UK, Autotrader says its top retailers now convert over 80% of reserved vehicles. That is a vendor claim about its best performers and says nothing about an average dealer, but it makes the reservation a number worth tracking beside appointments.

Ads and lead generation landing pages offer a specific appointment time, forms ask the questions that separate a buyer from a browser, and automated email follow-up chases a warm enquiry that has not booked, so no one has to remember to ring back.

Finance penetration is the share of cars sold with finance arranged through the dealership. Marketing moves it by giving finance enquiries their own route, a finance landing page and form and adverts that show a payment or a rate, and those adverts carry rules of their own. In the UK, the FCA's page for dealers that own the cars they sell says it is likely you will need Limited Permission for secondary credit broking if you introduce customers to third party finance providers, and its application guidance asks you to show in your financial promotions policy how you'll ensure consumers know you're a broker, not a lender. The same page says that offering part exchange on vehicles with outstanding finance likely needs further permissions. Under the FCA Handbook, a finance promotion that indicates a rate of interest or an amount relating to the cost of credit must also, among other things, include a representative example (with exceptions), so read CONC 3.5 itself.

In the US, stating in a closed-end credit ad a down payment (amount or percentage), the number of payments or the repayment period, a payment amount or a finance charge triggers further disclosures under Regulation Z, including the APR. In a lease ad, stating a payment amount, or any payment due at signing or by delivery (including that none is required), triggers lease disclosures under Regulation M.

Separately, the FCA has a motor finance redress scheme, described as compensation for motor finance customers treated unfairly between 2007 and 2024. As of its 2 July 2026 statement, the Upper Tribunal has suspended parts of the scheme and firms must comply with the rules not suspended. For your adverts, our advice (not the FCA's) is to leave claims about the scheme or compensation out.

Take the representative example and APR from the dealership's finance provider, never from an agency copywriter, and report finance enquiries beside financed sales so the metric shows which adverts produced them.

Stock days are the days from a car's arrival to its sale, with a count of cars past the dealership's own ageing line. Marketing moves that number by pushing the ageing cars specifically: search ads on the make and model, a refreshed listing and, where a dealership is eligible, Google vehicle ads. Google says vehicle ads are available in the United States and in open beta in the United Kingdom, where a dealer must apply and be allowlisted first, and that ads from private sellers, individuals or auto brokers are not permitted.

Decide each month how spend splits between cars past the ageing line and cars due to arrive. An incoming car can be advertised on conditions: FTC staff say, among other things, that an ad for a car in transit or located elsewhere must plainly say so. Take a sold car out of every feed the same day; in New York, the Attorney General lists failing to say that an advertised car is not in stock among deceptive practices in price advertising.

Used stock has its own limits in the US. In 2017 the FTC finalised orders barring CarMax, Asbury and West-Herr from claiming used vehicles are safe, repaired for safety issues or rigorously inspected unless they were free of open recalls, or the dealer clearly and conspicuously disclosed that its cars may be subject to unrepaired safety recalls and explained how buyers can check a car's recall status. The orders bind three named dealers, but they show what the FTC acted on, so "safe" or "fully inspected" in a used-car ad needs evidence behind it.

In the UK, Autotrader forecasts a 17% drop in availability of 5 to 7 year old used cars over the next two years. That is one marketplace's forecast, but if it holds, buying stock gets harder, and part exchange (trade-in in the US) and "we buy your car" pages become part of the marketing job as well as the selling.

Units sold, new and used separately, is the number the rest exists for, and the seasons distort it. In Great Britain, the DVLA's table gives 26 as the age identifier for March to August 2026 and 76 for September 2026 to February 2027. SMMT says March is typically the busiest month of the UK new car year and that the September plate-change month typically accounts for around one in seven annual registrations. Compare March with last March and September with last September; setting September against August says more about the calendar than about the campaign.

The US has no single date. The EPA's rule on a model year's production period lets production begin as early as 2 January of the calendar year before the year it is named for, so next year's models can be in production before the calendar year turns. That rule is for emissions certification and says nothing about when dealers discount, so the safe comparison is the same month last year.

Under units, the report shows marketing cost per unit sold and gross profit per unit after that cost, worked out from the dealership's own sold-unit data. The Social Target has run marketing for 600+ clients since 2017. We’ll reply in writing within one working day, then scope the work if it’s a fit. We take on car dealerships in the UK and the US, work across both countries' time zones, and quote in GBP or USD.