For dealer principals and general managers

You don’t have a
lead problem.
You have a
vendor problem.

One vendor runs Google. Another runs Meta. A third runs SEO. Every one of them sends a report full of clicks, impressions and traffic. Not one of them can tell you how many were real conversations.

What Digital Tap does

01

One Vendor

Paid search, social, SEO, video and creative, run by one team against one objective.

02

Spend To Conversation

One reporting line from ad spend to the lead, and whether that lead was a phone call or a form.

03

One Dealer Per Market

We work with one franchise brand per market. When yours is claimed, it closes.

DT / Failure Mode

It isn’t your sales team.

The showroom gets blamed for a problem that started three vendors upstream. Leads arrive with a source nobody trusts and no read on intent, so a shopper who is three days from buying gets worked the same as someone who filled out a form on a Sunday afternoon.

When the month closes soft, nobody can say which dollar bought which customer. So nothing changes. And next month looks the same.

DT / Root Cause

The problem isn’t
lead volume.
It’s that nobody owns
the whole path.

DT / The Reframe

Changing vendors is not the same as changing the structure.

The Usual Setup

  • Three or four vendors, each optimizing their own channel
  • Three or four reports, none of which reconcile
  • Leads land in the CRM with a source nobody defends
  • The store gets blamed for close rate

The Digital Tap Setup

  • One team runs paid search, social, SEO, video and creative
  • One reporting line, from spend to the lead to what kind of lead it was
  • Every lead carries a source you can actually stand behind
  • Budget moves every month based on what produced real conversations

Same store. Same inventory. Same people. Different accountability.

DT / The Method

Spend-to-Conversation

Three stages. One objective.

01

Signal

What your market is actually doing, before a dollar is spent. Search demand in your DMA, the vehicle mix that moves there, the seasonal calendar, how many rooftops you are really competing with, and what message that market rewards. You see this before you sign anything.

02

Execution

Paid search, Meta, SEO, OTT and OLV, and creative, run by one team against that signal. Not four vendors and a coordinator trying to keep them aligned.

03

Proof

One line from spend to the lead, with phone calls counted separately from form submissions and connected calls separately from missed. What worked, what didn’t, and what moves next month.

DT / Your Numbers

What your current setup is actually costing you.

Six numbers you already know. Every figure it returns is arithmetic on your own answers. No benchmarks, no industry averages, and nothing that predicts a vehicle sale.

How many locations do you run?
$
All channels combined.
Unique leads, all sources. Not phone ups, not walk-ins.
What percent of those leads get a real human response within 15 minutes?
$
Front and back combined.
Can you say which channel produced your last 10 appointments?

Your Numbers

Answer the six on the left and press Calculate. The arithmetic runs in your browser.

DT / Scope

What we actually run.

Not a dashboard. Not a reporting subscription. The advertising itself.

Paid Search

Campaign structure, inventory feeds, budget allocation by model line and market condition.

Meta and Instagram

Creative, audiences, inventory advertising, lead forms wired to your CRM.

SEO and Local Visibility

Model line pages, market pages, the listings that decide whether you appear in your own town.

OTT and OLV

Video where the cord is already cut.

Creative and Production

Offer graphics, video and merchandising built for your store, not recolored from another dealer’s template.

Lead Follow-Up Strategy

What happens after the form submits, because that is where most of the spend is actually lost.

Performance Reporting

The Channel Truth report. Spend, leads, and the split between phone calls and form submissions.

DT / The Report

The report answers the question you actually ask.

Not impressions. Not clicks. Not “conversions” that were never a person. Spend, leads, and what kind of lead each one was, on one line, by channel, by month.

Channel Truth

Structure Spend to lead type Call source Tracked numbers, not platform estimates
Channel Media Spend Phone Calls Form Submissions Cost Per Lead
Paid Search
Meta and Instagram
SEO and Local
OTT and OLV

Five columns, by channel, by month. Phone calls break out again into connected and missed. Your figures fill them.

Illustrative structure only. Figures shown are a format example and do not describe past program performance.

Producing that split takes a tracked number on every placement and a form that reports its own source. Most vendors hand you one blended “conversions” figure instead, because a click-to-call, a brochure download and a real inquiry look bigger stacked in the same column.

What this report does not claim

It does not tell you which advertisement sold a vehicle. Nobody’s can. Dealer CRM and DMS platforms do not open a direct line to an advertising vendor, so any company printing a cost-per-sold-unit next to your media spend is either reading a number you exported by hand or modeling one and calling it measurement. We report what is actually countable: the lead, where it came from, whether it was a call or a form, and what it cost.

DT / Market Fit

What sells in Wichita doesn’t sell in Fort Lauderdale.

Five regions. Five different buyers, media mixes, seasonal calendars and vehicle mixes. A vendor running one national playbook is guessing in at least four of them. Choose a region.

Midwest and Plains Texas and Southwest Southeast and Gulf Northeast and Mid-Atlantic West and Mountain

Scope is 48 states and the District of Columbia. Figures carry different periods and are not strictly comparable across regions; each panel prints its own sources and each figure its own period. Ratios described as calculated are arithmetic on two cited figures and are not published statistics. Registration and powertrain data is refreshed quarterly.

Region 01 · 12 states

Midwest and Plains

ND · SD · NE · KS · IA · MN · WI · MI · OH · IN · IL · MO

39.34% of new registrations in North Dakota are pickups. The national rate is 19.3%.

What moves
All twelve states clear the 83.5% US light-truck share. Pickup share is the differentiator, not SUV share: North Dakota 39.34%, South Dakota 34.68%, Iowa 29.53%, Missouri 28.65%. Two states run under the national pickup average, Illinois at 13.93% and Ohio at 17.80%.
Powertrain
Every state in the region falls below the 7.9% US battery-electric share, and hybrid outruns battery-electric three to seven times over in all twelve. North Dakota: 10.03% hybrid against 1.40% electric.
Competitive density
Roughly 15,979 people per franchised rooftop against about 20,117 nationally. The region holds 25.7% of US franchised rooftops on 20.4% of the population.
Calendar overlay
The national shape plus harvest cash. Iowa corn was 97% harvested and soybeans 99% by the week ending 16 November 2025, and grain sales convert to household cash in the weeks immediately after.
Media
Only 49% of rural Americans say local television coverage of their area is available, against 64% suburban and 70% urban. The rooftop’s own name and town has to do work that a DMA buy will not do for it.

What fails here. Electric-led brand campaigns against a 1.4% to 3.7% addressable segment. Flat always-on budgets that spend January like March. Treating Chicago and Fargo as one market.

S&P Global Mobility via Alliance for Automotive Innovation, full year 2025. NADA 2025 Annual Financial Profile with Census Vintage 2025 population, ratio calculated. USDA NASS, week ending 16 November 2025. Pew Research Center, May 2024.

DT / Evidence

We publish our numbers. Ask your current vendor to do the same.

Real accounts, real reporting periods, client identities removed. Every figure carries its source and its date range. Nothing on this page is a sample, a projection or a screenshot from a sales deck.

Reporting window

Source And Period, Every Figure

No number appears on this site without the account it came from and the date range it covers.

A Conversion Is Not A Lead

A platform “conversion” can be a coupon click. We count leads at the source: tracked calls and form submissions, reported separately, never blended.

Selection, Never Alteration

We choose which accounts to show. We do not change what they say, and we do not frame a number to mean something it does not.

DT / Territory

One dealer per brand, per market.

If we run your store, we do not run a competing store of the same brand in your market. That is a condition, not a courtesy.

The part that actually matters

What we learn from your store, your pricing, your close rates, which offers move metal in your market, does not get used to help the dealer down the road beat you. Ask any vendor running three of your competitors how they handle that.

Independence

We are not an OEM-approved vendor, and we are not trying to be one. An approved vendor answers to the program first and to you second. We answer to you. We will still prepare and submit your co-op claims and pre-approvals where your program allows it.

01

Market Open

Your brand in your market is unclaimed and available.

02

You Claim It

A hold goes on your market while we talk. Nobody else in your market gets that conversation while it stands.

03

It Closes

If we partner, your market comes off the board for every competing dealer of that brand.

DT / The Call

Fifteen minutes. Here is exactly what happens.

01

We confirm the territory result you already have in writing.

02

We walk your current vendor setup and what each one is actually accountable for.

03

We go straight to the one finding in your Market Signal Profile that should change where your budget goes.

04

You decide whether a second conversation is worth your time.

Your Market Signal Profile and your territory result both arrive before the call, so the fifteen minutes start where your reading stopped. No deck. No proposal you didn’t ask for.

Month To Month

Thirty days’ notice. No annual term, no early-termination clause.

Your Accounts Stay Yours

In your name, with your billing. You keep the history if we part ways.

One Dealer Per Brand, Per Market

Yours closes when you claim it.

DT / Questions

The ones that actually get asked.

01What happens to our current vendors?

Usually one of two things. Either we take over the channels they run, or we take over some and coordinate the rest. We will tell you on the call which one your setup actually calls for. We do not require you to fire anyone to have the conversation.

02Do we keep ownership of our ad accounts?

Yes. Your Google Ads, Meta, Analytics and Search Console accounts stay yours, in your name, with your billing. We work inside them. If we ever part ways, you keep the account, the history and the data.

A vendor who runs your advertising inside their own account is holding your history hostage, and you should ask any vendor that question before you ask ours.

03What does “one dealer per brand, per market” actually mean?

It means one franchised store of a given brand per DMA. If we run a CDJR store in your market, we will not run another CDJR store in that market. We may work with a store of a different brand in the same market, because those stores are not competing for the same customer on the same vehicle.

You will see exactly what your territory covers before anything is signed.

04Can you tell me which advertisement sold a car?

No. And be careful with anyone who says they can.

Dealer CRM and DMS platforms do not open a direct line to an advertising vendor. Without that line, a cost-per-sold-unit sitting next to a media spend is either a number somebody exported by hand and pasted in, or a model dressed up as a measurement. We are not going to build your budget on either one.

What we can tell you, every month, from tracked numbers and form source data: how many leads each channel produced, whether each one was a phone call or a form submission, whether the calls connected or went unanswered, and what each one cost. That is the part that is actually countable, and it is the part that changes where the money goes next month.

05How long before we see anything?

We ask for two weeks to onboard. Most stores are live inside one. You see the Market Signal Profile for your market before you sign anything, so the first useful thing lands before the clock starts.

06Do you work with OEM co-op?

Yes, we prepare and submit co-op claims and pre-approvals where your program allows it. One thing we will say plainly: we are not an OEM-approved vendor. Some programs restrict reimbursement on certain spend categories to approved vendors, so before a dollar is committed we confirm what your specific program will and will not reimburse.

We would rather tell you a category is not claimable than let you find out at reconciliation. Being independent is a deliberate choice. An approved vendor answers to the program first. We answer to you.

07Do you require a long contract?

No. Month to month, with thirty days’ notice. There is no annual term and no early-termination clause. If the work stops producing, you should be able to leave, and the fact that most vendors make that difficult tells you something about how confident they are.

08What size store does this work for?

We recommend media budget per rooftop, with a minimum of $1,500 per source. A store running paid search, Meta and OTT would be at $4,500 a month in media. Below that, a channel has too little budget to produce a readable result, and we would rather turn the work down than take money that cannot perform.

Replace the noise.

Fifteen minutes to find out whether your brand in your market is still open, and what your current vendors are actually accountable for.