Conversion tracking failures are quietly sabotaging dealership ad performance across the industry.
"I get random calls all the time where a dealer will call and say this account will not spend," Mathew Growden told Daily Dealer Live hosts Sam D'Arc and Uli de' Martino. "I'll dig into the account and all of the conversion setups are fudged."
Growden, who spent nearly a decade with Google Canada's automotive retailing team, now consults with dealer groups across North America.
Why it matters: When conversion tracking fails, Google and Meta can't optimize campaigns properly. Dealers end up with accounts that won't spend or waste budget on ineffective ads because platforms lack success signals to guide spending decisions.
The problems: First, every little widget on dealership websites makes tracking tougher.
"For every iframe and button that opens in a different window that pulls data from a different service, that gets trickier to actually track as a conversion," Growden explained.
Second, dealers are trying to optimize for too many things at once. Their budgets get spread across multiple conversion types, which confuses algorithms that need clearer signals.
On top of that, Google releases features faster than many dealers can adapt.
For example, AI Max, which has been heavily promoted this year, is "terrible" and “too new” for franchise dealers because "it'll start bidding all over the place and you won't have control of keywords," Growden explained.
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As far as fixes go, Growden said it's more about getting the basics right, than spending more money.
1. Find someone reliable who can set up conversion tracking properly.
"Because both Google and Meta are conversion and value obsessed, if you don't have that foundation set up properly, nothing else is going to work," he said.
2. Use first-party customer data. Upload CRM information to Google Customer Match and Meta's audience tools. Even if direct tracking fails, this gives the platforms a picture of what your actual buyers look like.
3. Stop focusing on junk metrics. Don't optimize for VDP views just because they're easy to track.
"Usually that's an indication to me that whoever the ad provider was wasn't able to drive leads and phone calls and so they picked lower hanging fruit," Growden said.
Instead, focus on cost per actual conversion instead.
Bottom line: Many dealers often spend more money or switch vendors when ads underperform, but broken tracking is usually the real culprit.
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