Dealership Marketing Benchmarks 2026: The Numbers Worth Knowing

This page collects the benchmarks we use in planning and reporting for dealership clients, with the source and date for each. It is updated quarterly; the figures below are current as of late September 2026. Where a number is our own arithmetic on a published figure, it says so. Where no reliable public figure exists, we say that too rather than fill the gap with a vendor's guess.

Advertising spend

Budget mix by channel, 2025 (NADA): search 21.1%, third-party listings 20.0%, SEO and website 19.5%, social 14.2%, TV 10.5%, radio 6.9%, direct mail 5.6%, newspaper 2.1%. The full table and a method for allocating are in dealership advertising budget allocation by channel.

Cost per lead and cost per click

Note the direction of the Google figures: cost per lead up 13.9% and conversion rate down 22.6% in a year. Fewer, more expensive clicks that convert less often is consistent with AI Overviews taking the informational searches and leaving the transactional ones.

We do not publish cost-per-sale ranges for listing sites. The figures that circulate online ($8,000 to $12,000 per sale for some marketplaces) come from vendor blogs with no methodology and should not be used in a plan.

Lead close rates and lead handling

The 92% figure is the one that should reshape reporting. If nine in ten sales never touch a lead form, a report built on leads is describing a tenth of the business.

Gross profit per unit

Public groups run higher per-unit gross than the average private store, so use Presidio-NCM for a typical franchise point and the public figures as an upper bound. The planning implication: front and back gross on an average new unit is roughly $3,600. Any advertising channel that cannot deliver an incremental unit for less than that is losing money on that unit before the service relationship.

The market: SAAR, prices, incentives

Cox and J.D. Power compute transaction price differently (Cox includes all sales, J.D. Power is retail only), which is why one reads about $50,000 and the other about $46,000. Cite one consistently.

Seasonality

Mercer Capital's analysis of monthly sales from 2015 to 2025 finds November and December the strongest combined period, January and February the weakest, a March to April recovery tied to tax refunds, a strong July and August, and a September spike around Labor Day and model-year closeouts that needs to be normalized in any year-over-year comparison. The pattern held across the whole decade.

Tax season is the used-vehicle event of the year. In February 2026 the average federal refund was just over $3,700, up 10.6%, and used retail sales ran 5.5% ahead of February 2025 while days' supply fell to 42 (Cox Automotive).

Deal density also follows the calendar. An iSeeCars analysis found December carries 38% more used-vehicle price cuts than an average month and January about 20% more, while May carries 28% fewer. Veterans Day, Black Friday, and New Year's Eve are the heaviest single days.

Trade area sizing

Most franchised dealers draw the majority of retail sales from within 10 to 20 miles. Manufacturers assign a Primary Market Area (or APR, or AOI) built from census tracts or ZIP codes nearest the store, and measure sales effectiveness as actual sales divided by expected sales, where expected sales are the brand's regional share applied to registrations in the territory. A score of 100 means the store matches the brand's regional penetration in its own backyard; by construction, about half the dealer network is below 100 at any time.

For a demographic picture of any trade area, households, income, vehicles per household, growth, and new movers by ZIP, use our free Market Area Snapshot.

Questions dealers ask

What is a good cost per lead for a car dealership?

For Google search, the 2026 median for automotive sales campaigns is $44.26 (WordStream). For Meta lead campaigns it is $35.52. A good cost per lead is the one that produces an acceptable cost per sale after applying the channel's close rate, which is 6% for internet leads and 14% for phone leads on an industry basis (Urban Science). A cheap lead from a source that closes at 3% is an expensive sale.

What is a good close rate on internet leads?

Six percent within 30 days is the 2025 industry figure from Urban Science's registration-matched data; Foureyes measures 11.7% of sales leads across all sources resulting in a purchase. Stores with strong lead handling run well above both, and 42.7% of qualified leads are mishandled on average, so process is usually the bigger lever than media.

What is the average gross profit per car for a dealership in 2026?

For the average franchised store in Q2 2026, $1,840 on a new vehicle and $1,409 on a used vehicle, plus $1,769 in F&I per retail unit (Presidio-NCM). Public dealer groups report higher: Lithia's new GPU was $2,718 in the same quarter.

How often is this page updated?

Quarterly, after NADA, Presidio-NCM, Haig, and Cox publish. Each figure carries its own date so you can judge how current it is.

Sources

• NADA Data 2025 via Dealership Guy, Inside Radio, and Collision Repair Magazine
• Presidio-NCM Average Dealership Performance Benchmark, Q2 2026 and Q4 2025
• Haig Report, Q2 2026
• WordStream Google Ads Benchmarks 2026, 2025, and Facebook Ads Benchmarks 2026
• Urban Science, Close Rate vs. Defection Rate, Nov 2025 and Hidden Leaks, Oct 2025
• Foureyes 2026 Automotive Dealer Benchmarks and 30-Day Close Rate Study
• Cox Automotive and Autotrader, 92% of Vehicle Sales Untraceable, July 2025
• Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study 2025
• Cox Automotive Auto Market Weekly Summary, Sept 8, 2026, August 2026 ATP Report, and June 2026 Forecast
• J.D. Power and GlobalData, September 2026 Forecast
• Lithia Motors and AutoNation Q2 2026 earnings calls via The Motley Fool and GuruFocus
• Digital Dealer U.S. Tariff Tracker, May 2026
• Mercer Capital, Understanding Seasonality in the Auto Industry, Jan 2026; Cox Automotive Used-Vehicle Inventory, Feb 2026
• Boardman Clark, Responding to Unsatisfactory Sales Performance Claims; Arenson Law, Understanding Sales Performance Measurement, 2026