Your Cost Per Sale Is Lying to You

By Zach Billings, Wikmotive Co-Founder & CEO

Originally published in the September 2026 issue of AutoSuccess Magazine

Your 20 Group is doing a composite, measuring marketing cost per session, cost per lead and cost per sale. The goal is $300. The average is $420. You’re at $550. Now what?

You’re higher than the average, so it’s time to fire a vendor or cut some spend. Did you fire the right vendor? Did you cut the right spend? If your cost per sale and sales stats were all you used to inform your decision, I’m sorry to say you have no clue whether you made the right choice.

I’m going to explain three key challenges you need to understand — and that you ought to pose to yourself or your team — before you level that shotgun at your least favorite (or least understood) vendor and blow them out.

Cost Per Session

Sessions (website visits) are not all equal. 500 sessions from paid social ads likely turn into one lead. 1,000 sessions from display ads probably turn into zero leads. 100 sessions from organic search might produce 10 leads if they came from low-funnel keywords. Conversely, 1,000 organic search sessions might produce zero leads if they came from blog articles about towing capacity or model comparisons, both of which are high-funnel research topics.

Your website traffic is a meaningless number until you establish quality. Engagement time or page views are metrics that can indicate quality, but the real test is whether your traffic is converting to leads. That answer exists in your Google Analytics, and if you don’t know how to find it, you need a trusted advisor who does. (More on that later.)

Sessions are a meaningful indicator, but they should not be something you assign any weight to unless you understand channel/vendor-specific quality.

Cost Per Lead

The primary job of your marketing is to produce opportunities:

• Your SEO should drive more leads from organic search visibility.
• Your SEM should drive leads from paid search.
• Your paid social should drive from Facebook, etc.
• Your third parties should generally drive them straight to your CRM.
• Your email should produce leads via your website.
• Even direct mail can use tracking phone numbers and QR codes with tracking codes (UTM parameters) so you can isolate their traffic and lead activity.

Cost per sale is the efficiency metric we ultimately want to dial in on, but the way to understand which marketing efforts are working is to start with cost per lead and break it down by marketing channel. The data to quantify this is available, and your marketing should be directly responsible for that outcome.

As with traffic, you need to be comfortable with Google Analytics or have an expert in your corner who can help. Assuming you have that, your first action item following your 20 Group meeting should be to analyze what’s producing leads and what’s not. Understand that your CRM does NOT contain this information; you absolutely MUST use Analytics to determine this.

Cost Per Sale

Sales are the goal — at least when the variable is the marketing focus. If your marketing is doing its job, your sales should be going up. That said, we never think our own sh*t smells as much as it does, and there are process holes in every organization. The question is how big a limiter these holes are.

Were good leads marked bad because we were too slow or didn’t like the credit score? Did we fail to communicate with a customer using their preferred method? Did we fail to identify and respond to their specific needs and sensitivities? Were our phones ringing for 30 seconds before anyone answered? That last one happens way more than anyone wants to admit…

The point is that marketing does need to drive opportunities, but leads — even good ones — do not directly correlate with sales.

There is a healthy dollar range for cost per sale. Too low, and you’re likely leaving opportunities on the table. Too high, and you have something inefficient in the mix. Either way, cost per sale doesn’t tell you which marketing vendor to fire.

And don’t forget…seasonality exists. Wars delay purchases. Gas prices make people nervous. Elections make people nervous. So measure your store’s performance against the market, too!

The Smoking Gun

Cost per ________ tells you nothing on its own. You won’t know what’s working and what’s not until you measure specific channels and identify the variables.

None of this is rocket science. Between your CRM and Google Analytics, the information you need is available; what you need now is someone to help you unpack it. That someone might be a marketing role in your store/group. They might be a knowledgeable vendor you trust. They might be an outside consultant.

We don’t offer for-hire consulting — we specialize in custom marketing — but we do offer a helping hand to dealers who are stuck, at no cost. If you don’t have anyone to turn to, feel free to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn, and I’ll point you in the right direction.