Car dealer marketing teams must rethink how they measure success as buyer journeys lengthen, costs rise and scrutiny from senior leadership intensifies, according to experts during Automotive Management’s latest webinar.
The free webinar, sponsored by Infinity and Phyron AI, discussed how dealers can improve marketing performance amid rising costs and tighter budgets.
Daniella Lindskog, marketing lead at Phyron AI, said dealer marketers are increasingly expected to “be everywhere”, producing more visuals, ads and formats across digital channels, but often with fewer resources and the same manual processes.
“There’s a growing gap between expectations and capacity,” she said. “Teams are being asked to do more with less, which makes execution increasingly difficult.”
A role that has quietly tripled in size
Vicky Hart, marketing director at Waylands, said automotive retail marketing had “very quietly become three times bigger than it was”, driven by heavier technology stacks, rising media costs and higher expectations around reporting.
“The tech stack got heavier. It’s incredibly powerful, but for many retailers, it’s still fragmented,” she said. “Customers are getting harder and more expensive to reach, so efficiency becomes even more important.”
She added that leadership expectations had shifted significantly, with greater demand for real-time reporting and clear evidence of marketing’s contribution to revenue.
“We are trying to do more with less, while also delivering greater visibility into performance and optimisation,” Hart said.
Where visibility breaks down in the buyer journey
Matt McGillicuddy, vice president of marketing at Infinity, said longer and more complex buyer journeys were exposing weaknesses in data and attribution.
“Visibility breaks down at the point where intent peaks,” he said, particularly when customers move from online research to phone calls or showroom visits.
He highlighted “leakage through the funnel”, noting that around 9% of calls go unanswered across the sector, despite significant marketing investment.
“When budgets are tight, identifying where that leakage is occurring is critical,” McGillicuddy said.
Hart agreed, saying the handoff between digital intent and in-store outcomes remains one of the most difficult areas for dealer marketers.
“Phone calls are often the signal of highest intent, but they are one of the harder things to track,” she said. “As a result, channels that are easier to measure often get over-funded, while upper funnel influence is undervalued.”
Calls, attribution and the online to offline gap
Hart said calls are “the closest thing to a buyer raising their hand”, but are harder to operationalise than digital leads. She said Waylands is using AI to analyse call content and intent, helping to improve attribution and feed insights back into customer relationship management (CRM) and campaign optimisation.
“If we don’t understand call quality and outcomes, we risk skewing our ROI figures,” she said. “Closing the online to offline loop is difficult, but it delivers real value.”
McGillicuddy said better use of first-party data and call outcomes can improve optimisation across automated advertising platforms, provided those signals are acted on rather than simply reported.
Scaling creative without losing speed
Lindskog said scaling creative had become a major constraint, particularly as video-first platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok dominate buyer attention.
“It’s impossible to manually create enough content for an entire inventory,” she said, adding that AI and automation are helping teams scale production and distribution.
Hart said creative bottlenecks for retailers are now operational rather than a lack of ideas.
“We are producing assets in far more formats than ever before,” she said. “We have to avoid over-customisation and focus on modular creative that aligns with the stage of the funnel, while protecting speed to market.”
She added that dynamic, inventory-linked advertising and smarter retargeting had helped improve lead quality by being “smarter and not just louder”.
Rethinking ROI and success metrics
Hart said ROI reporting in automotive retail still too often stops at digital measures rather than real business outcomes.
“We still see all conversions treated as equal and too much credit given to last touch,” she said. “We need to move towards cost per vehicle sold, cost per acquisition and understanding which enquiries are most profitable.”
She said marketing leaders must shift from being channel managers to owning demand flow end to end.
“Our responsibility is tracking demand from the first click through to a vehicle sale,” Hart said. “That means moving away from vanity metrics and focusing on long-term, sustainable revenue impact.”