How Sale-Level Attribution Turned Ad Spend Into $4.47M in Sold Cars

A full-funnel program across Google, Meta, connected TV and a Spanish-first social content engine, all tied back to real, sold vehicles.

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About the Project

Coast to Coast Motors is a multi-location used-vehicle dealer group serving the Houston and Oklahoma City markets, moving hundreds of cars a month across its lots with a credit-friendly, Buy-Here-Pay-Here model built on trust and approvals.

Like most dealers, they invested real money in Meta and Google every month and got steady lead volume back. What they could not see was what happened after the click. They had no way to know how many of those leads actually became a signed deal on the lot, because the reporting stopped at the form fill.

Anderson Collaborative was brought in to run the full marketing program and, more importantly, to answer the question every dealer principal actually asks. For every dollar we spend on marketing, how many cars does it sell?

We answered it by building the measurement infrastructure the dealership never had, then scaling a full-funnel program on top of it, from search all the way up to a Spanish-first social content engine that arms the sales floor with video.

Client:

Coast to Coast Motors

Product:

Used Vehicle Retail

Services:

Paid Media, CTV, Social Content & Marketing Attribution

THE PROBLEM:

Marketing that could not prove a single sold car

Auto retail has a measurement gap most agencies ignore. The sale happens days or weeks after the click, inside the dealership CRM, on a different system than the ad platforms, so the industry optimizes toward the thing it can see, the lead form, and hopes it tracks the thing that pays the bills, the sold vehicle. Coast to Coast Motors had no line of sight from an ad click to a car on the lot. Cost per lead looked fine, but nobody could say what the spend returned in actual sales, and the automated spend sync was even pulling from the wrong Google account, quietly inflating the numbers.

THE SOLUTION:

A full-funnel program, tied back to sold cars

We run the whole funnel and made every layer of it measurable. Google Ads captures in-market buyers at the bottom, selling cars at about $350 each. Meta prospecting and retargeting drives the most paid volume. Connected TV and YouTube build demand upstream, where car shoppers research long before they ever fill out a form. And a short-form, Spanish-first social content engine feeds the top of the funnel and arms the sales team with video, walkarounds, approvals, and real customer stories that do the convincing a static ad cannot. Underneath all of it, a live attribution warehouse joins MagiLoop CRM and IDMS sales against daily ad spend, matching each sale back to the click that produced it and refreshing every 30 minutes. We surfaced the whole program in a custom reporting dashboard we built for the dealership, so leadership sees cost per sold vehicle and return in sales revenue in real time, rather than a cost-per-lead figure buried in a month-old report. And with RankPrompt, our answer-engine visibility platform, we track how Coast to Coast shows up when car shoppers ask an AI, keeping the brand discoverable as search shifts to answer engines.

Results Summarized:

Since attribution went live, we have matched 2,603 vehicle sales worth $59.7M back to the marketing that produced them. In the funded media window of March through June, $175,079 of paid spend is tied to $4.47M in sold vehicles, a blended return of about 25x, or roughly $850 in marketing cost per car sold. Google Ads sells cars at about $350 each and Meta drives the most paid volume, so the program now optimizes toward sold vehicles, not form fills.

That performance sits on real top-of-funnel scale. Across the program, Meta and Google Ads have delivered more than 29 million impressions, over 865,000 clicks to the dealership, and 40,000-plus leads, with paid social alone driving nearly 4 million video views. That reach is what keeps the lot full and feeds the sold-car results above. Revenue figures are sale price, and March is auto retail's tax-season peak, both stated plainly in the reporting.