I was asked this week for my thoughts on the “hot” topics which could be discussed at the 2026 Digital Marketing Strategies Conference (DMSC) in Scottsdale, April 26-28th. The question encouraged me to write down some of my predictions and share them with you in my newsletter.
Since dealers have a large amount of vehicles sitting on their lots, there will be a tendency to throw more money at advertising campaigns. My suggestion to dealers with high floor plan costs is to examine the way that they are currently marketing.
So here are four conversation starters which I believe will carry through to DMSC in April and be hot topics of conversation at NADA. I am also hoping that the recent announcement by NCM Associates and Foundation Data to fully leverage the ASC Specification to help set new digital marketing KPIs will encourage dealers to follow suit so they can also reduce marketing waste and lower their cost per sale. Learn more here: https://foundationdirect.com/ncm/
I. Dealers need a better re-targeting strategy
Many dealers are leveraging a marketing pixel (i.e., Google, Meta, TikTok) to advertise to consumers who visit their websites. Targeting all consumers who come to the dealer’s website sounds smart until you look at the behavior of all website visitors.
Many website visitor sessions are not customers who are shopping! Visitors will bounce when they hit the website and never engage. Some of the sessions are from bot networks, which is a growing trend which inflates session counts. Other sessions may land on a VDP or SRP and after 3 seconds leave the website.
Should a dealer be retargeting ALL website visitors? No!
Dealers should be retargeting people based on the QUALITY of the engagement on their website pages and not because they landed on a Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) from a VLA advertising campaign.
Smarter retargeting designs, based on engagement scoring, take work and a sophisticated marketing automation platform. It takes agency professionals who care enough to educate their customers that all website traffic is not worth a reinvestment of additional ad dollars.
Sadly, many retargeting strategies amplify the waste created by the conquest campaigns which send low quality traffic to the dealer’s website.
Dealers, when was the last time your agency walked you through (detailed) how their retargeting campaigns are configured? Have you asked how big those retargeting audiences are and how long people stay in that audience?
II. Dealers need a refined acquisition strategy
Many agencies are also using conquest audiences from Google and Meta based on claims that their audiences are filled with in-market shoppers. Ironically, the number of actual “in-market” shoppers for many dealer markets is very small.
For example, how many people are actively shopping for Audi vehicles in Jupiter, Florida? If the number of shoppers is under 1,000 people, advertising platforms inject modeled consumers (non-shoppers) to make their audience size requirements work. In some cases, they will mix 2x or 3x modeled shoppers in with actual shoppers.
Would you pay for an expensive bottle of French wine if you knew that 25% was from the Bordeaux region and 75% was from Argentina?
Dealers need to wake up and realize that Google and Meta have flawed targeting models which inflate dealer spending. Dealers must start using audience data built from actual shoppers who are in market for sales and service.
Audience size for some brands/markets will be too small for Google and Meta marketing thresholds, which is what the data is screaming, yet they will still take the dealer’s money and spend it on modeled audiences.
The best way to see the impact of better acquisition strategies is to compare existing marketing campaign performance with campaigns generated from automotive specific audience platforms. I recommend dealers test the Active Shopper Network® audience generation platform from Client Command®.
Client Command has the fastest ROI for dealers because, using their patented Active Shopper Network®, dealers can spin up marketing campaigns and deploy OEM-compliant creative very quickly. Client Command can run the campaigns internally or dealers can run their own campaigns; the activation options are wide open.
Using their Audience Builder tool, dealers get actual counts of active shoppers by brand and zip code so there is full transparency on marketing spend.
You may remember the famous TV commercial where a grandmother asks “Where’s The Beef?” which questioned the size of the patty in the hamburger bun. In the same way, if dealers understood how much “filler” is in their marketing hamburgers, they may just throw up.
III. Dealers need to reduce their cost per sale
Lately, I’ve been writing about website conversion optimization, and one caveat is that dealers need to be careful about asking for more leads. What they should be asking for is more UNIQUE shopper leads per month. Since a consumer will only purchase one car, having four leads from the same person looks great on lead reports but, in the end, inflates the marketing cost per sale.
Dealers need new tools to look at their overall cost per sale, based on all their marketing investments. To do this, dealers have to stop using their CRM lead close rate reports to decide which marketing investments are working to sell more cars. CRM reports mask influence and reward the first source of a lead in the CRM, even if the lead was generated by a pop-up coupon which offered no exchange of value.
Thankfully, more dealers are building the data infrastructure to build better attribution models. Helping dealers with attribution reporting is Clarivoy. Their identity graph can see which marketplace websites consumers visited and how consumers engaged with a dealer’s marketing campaigns to drive the eventual sale.
IV. Dealers need to fix their website conversion rates
Most digital marketing campaigns are designed to drive in-market shoppers to their dealer’s website. The dealer hopes that their inventory, pricing, and brand reputation will encourage them to call, chat, or fill out a lead form. That works great in theory except that dealers have built Frankenstein websites which impede conversion.
At PCG Digital, we have been rethinking our marketing approach. It’s clear that conversion rates can increase 25%, 50%, 75%, and even 100% by fixing the CTAs on a dealer’s website. Website conversion optimization is normally not a part of a digital marketing service, but we believe that it must be one of the first steps.
At first glance, you might think that one dealer we tested has a clean VDP design. The OEM requires that the dealer show only MSRP so the dealer decided to use the “Unlock” CTA approach. This design is performing horribly at 12%.
We have tested multiple UNLOCK designs on MSRP-only VDPs with similar results!
If the website page designs and CTA choices are disappointing 88/100 people, how can any marketing campaign generate more leads for the dealer at a low cost? Poor CTA design is one reason why the cost per sale is so high.
Interestingly, the UNLOCK CTA works much better on VDP designs with a detailed math block which shows discounts. I hope that OEM leaders start to look at the impact of their MSRP-only design decisions. There are better CTA choices for OEMs which require MSRP, which will be part of the DMSC conversation.
Mark your calendars for DMSC 2026
Dealers and marketing professionals who want to increase their knowledge, skills, and strategies to generate more opportunities for sales and service should mark their calendars.
If you have been working on a ground breaking digital marketing strategy at your dealership and would like to share your findings at DMSC, contact me. Let’s review your work to see if it’s a good fit with our themes this year.
