Your ads are pointed at the wrong part of the funnel

Most dealer advertising is focused on shoppers closest to a transaction. But those shoppers represent only a fraction of the total in-market audience.

The much larger opportunity exists during the consideration window, when buyers are still comparing vehicles, evaluating dealerships, and forming preferences about where they’ll ultimately purchase.

Drawing on Cars.com first-party shopper data, campaign performance analysis, and third-party research, the Advertiser Intelligence Report examines where influence happens during that process, how audience quality affects performance, and why creative relevance matters more than many advertisers realize.

The result is a practical framework for allocating media budgets, evaluating partners, and improving campaign performance in a changing shopper landscape.

What’s inside the free white paper:

Understand where undecided shoppers go during the 60-day consideration window, and why that’s where dealer selection decisions are actually made.

Learn why the audience your ads are reaching may have already bought a car, and what genuinely in-market targeting looks like instead.

Discover why consistent marketplace presence pays off downstream in ways last-click attribution will never show you.

See exactly what changes when your creative matches what a shopper is already researching, and why most dealer ads are solving the wrong problem.

Walk away with a vendor vetting framework, dealer insights, and the brief your agency should already be writing.