Guides / Paid
How to split a $5,000 dealership ad budget
Brand, conquest and retargeting each do a different job. Most stores overspend on the one that was going to happen anyway.
A GM showed me a Google Ads report last spring. Cost per lead of $22, best in the group, everyone pleased. Then we opened the search terms report. Seventy percent of the spend had gone to people typing the dealership's own name.
Those leads were going to arrive anyway. The ads just charged admission.
The three jobs a budget does
Split every dollar by the job it is doing, not by the platform it sits on.
- Brand defence — someone already searching your name. Cheap clicks, high conversion, almost no incremental units. Worth a small budget so a competitor's ad doesn't sit above you, and no more than that.
- Conquest and model demand — "used RAV4 Halifax", "F-150 lease Moncton", "best SUV under 30k". Expensive clicks, lower conversion rate, and this is where actual incremental units live.
- Retargeting — people who already touched your inventory. The cheapest path back to a vehicle page, and the easiest line to overspend.
If you cannot say which of the three a campaign belongs to, that campaign is not being managed. It is being renewed.
Where a $5,000 month should go
For a single-rooftop store doing 60 to 90 units, something close to this works:
- $500 to $750 on brand. Enough to hold the position, capped.
- $3,000 to $3,500 on conquest, weighted to your three strongest model lines and your used inventory — not the whole lot, just the vehicles you can actually replace.
- $750 to $1,000 on retargeting, frequency-capped.
The exact numbers move with your market. The ratio holds. When somebody proposes shifting more into brand because the blended cost per lead looks better, that is the report asking for easy credit.
The part that ruins good spend
The landing page. If a conquest ad for "used RAV4 Halifax" drops someone on your homepage, you paid conquest prices for a bounce. It has to land on filtered inventory — the actual RAV4s, in stock, with prices showing.
Half the underperforming accounts I audit are not a bidding problem. They are a destination problem.
What to measure
Not cost per lead. Cost per appointment shown, split by campaign job. Brand will always win on cost per lead and it should not get the credit for it.
Then pull the search terms report every month and actually read it. That is where the wasted money is written down in plain English.