Bankable marketing measurement for dealers and agencies is shifting from clicks, form fills, and site activity to programs that connect advertising to verified sales, according to Urban Science.
First things first: The swing, as highlighted in the insight group’s report, “Start with Your Destination,” produced in collaboration with The Trade Desk, stems from changes in the car buyer’s journey, with most purchases still happening offline.
Shopping journeys are becoming more fragmented and, in some cases, shorter, while changes in how consumers engage online are making tracking more difficult.
The growing use of AI-enabled tools like ChatGPT is also creating measurement gaps, given that their ability to deliver value depends on the fidelity of the data they are trained on.
“Consumers have access to more information in more places, faster than ever before,” Carl Matter, Director of AdTech Performance at Urban Science, told CDG News via email. “This means that instead of media agencies defining these journeys, consumers are defining them for themselves.”
Carl Matter
Why it matters: As consumer paths become less linear and harder to track through traditional digital signals alone, dealers that rely too heavily on soft metrics risk misreading performance and overspending on campaigns that look busy but do not produce vehicles out the door.
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Zooming in: Advances in technology—which Matter said allow for deeper measurement and tracking across more channels (i.e., Connected TV, Social, Linear TV, etc.)—enable dealers to manage advertising budgets more effectively and improve ROI, as detailed in the report’s case studies.
In a recent collaboration between Urban Science, Toyota, H/L agency, and Nexxen, optimizing for offline cost per acquisition (CPA) reduced cost per sale by about two-thirds compared to traditional online KPIs.
A case using SalesMatch and The Trade Desk reported +66% tier 1 attributable sales, +83% tier 2 attributable sales, and 12–24% lower cost per unit sold after shifting optimization toward vehicle sales.
A tier 3 OEM program delivered 3,928 verified sales ($118M MSRP revenue) and reached 95% dealer enrollment by June 2025, with 6% lower cost per sale vs. the NADA benchmark.
“Dealers and dealer advertising agencies need to evolve and leverage the best data to drive their strategies,” said Matter. “Given that consumers are engaging with more channels on their own terms, dealer marketing teams must start with premium outcome-based data to tie these touchpoints together and maximize the impact and efficiency of their marketing dollars.”
Bottom line: The opportunity here is better spending discipline. Because the more marketing that can be tied to verified sales rather than proxy engagement metrics, the easier it becomes to cut waste, defend ad budgets, and invest in channels that actually move inventory.
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