Clutch
G2
Every dealer principal I talk to asks me the same thing about connected TV for car dealers: “Does it actually do anything, or am I just buying brand awareness I can’t measure?” It’s a fair question. Nobody clicks a TV ad. So this year we went to the data to find out.
We looked at 18 of our dealerships running CTV with us in 2026 and compared them with 12 dealerships that didn’t run CTV at all. The short version: both groups lost about 18% of their total website traffic this year, but the CTV dealers grew their direct visits 17% while the non-CTV dealers lost 10%. Over the last six months, that gap got even wider.
Why connected TV is hard for car dealers to measure
With search or social, someone clicks, lands on your site and GA4 tells you where they came from. CTV doesn’t work that way. A shopper sees your spot on a streaming app on their living room TV, then picks up their phone and types in your URL, or goes straight to your site later that week.
In GA4, that visit shows up as direct traffic: no referrer, no click to trace. So if CTV is working, the place you’d expect to see it is a rise in direct visits, and in the share of your traffic that comes in direct. That’s what we measured.
How we set it up
We pulled GA4 data for every dealership in our automotive program and compared 2026 with the same dates in 2025.
- CTV group: 18 dealerships running SmartSites CTV in 2026. That’s mostly premium streaming placements, geo-targeted to each store’s market, at budgets ranging from about $1,500 to $9,000 a month.
- Comparison group: 12 dealerships that didn’t run CTV with anyone in 2026. Several of our other dealers run CTV through their own vendors, so we left them out. They aren’t a clean “no CTV” baseline.
- What we compared: direct visits, total site traffic, direct traffic as a share of all visits, and website form submissions.
We also dropped any store whose GA4 tracking broke or changed between years, because a tracking change can swing the numbers far more than any campaign.
What we found
The CTV dealers came out ahead on every traffic measure we compared, even though both groups faced the same traffic decline.
| Jan 1 – Oct 15, 2026 vs. 2025 | CTV dealers | No CTV |
|---|---|---|
| Direct visits | +17% | −10% |
| Direct visits, last 6 months (Apr–Sep) | +28% | −7% |
| Total site traffic | −18% | −18% |
| Direct share of all visits | 12.9% → 18.4% | 20.6% → 22.4% |
| Dealers that grew their direct share | 17 of 18 | 10 of 12 |
| Form submissions, typical dealer, last 6 months | +22% | −4% |
| Direct visits vs. same month 2025 | Jan | Mar | May | Jul | Aug | Sep |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CTV dealers | −12% | −22% | +20% | +25% | +50% | +64% |
| No CTV | −17% | −23% | −11% | −1% | +2% | +25% |
The split started in the spring. In the first quarter, both groups were down about the same. From April on, the CTV dealers turned positive and kept climbing, ending September up 64% on direct visits. The comparison group only got back to positive in late summer.
The number I keep coming back to is direct share. At the CTV stores, direct went from about 13% of all visits to roughly 24% by September. More of each store’s traffic is coming from people who already know the dealership’s name, and those are the shoppers you want.
One dealer’s launch: a luxury SUV store in New York City
The cleanest before-and-after we have is a luxury SUV dealership in New York City that started CTV in July 2026.
| Year over year | Jan–Jun (before CTV) | Jul–Sep (with CTV) |
|---|---|---|
| Direct visits | −3% | +101% |
| Website form submissions | −14% | +34% |
In the first half of the year, this store was flat on direct traffic and down on forms. Direct visits had already started rising in June. Once CTV was live, July through September came in at double the prior year on direct visits, and form submissions turned positive. One store isn’t a study, but it’s the pattern you’d hope to see.
What connected TV means for car dealers
CTV isn’t a replacement for search, VLAs or your OEM co-op programs. It does something those channels can’t: it puts your store in front of in-market shoppers on the biggest screen in the house, before they’ve started searching. When it works, it shows up as more people coming to your site directly, and that’s what we saw.
How we approach it across our 18 stores:
- Use real creative. We run dealer and OEM spots with a clear reason to visit and refresh them as offers change.
- Keep the geo tight. Target the market your store actually sells into, not the whole DMA.
- Give it a few months. Our dealers’ gains built over the spring and summer, not in the first month.
- Measure the right things. Watch direct visits, direct share and forms, not clicks. Tag your CTV landing URLs so you can see the visits that do come through directly.
If you want to see what CTV could look like in your market, reach out to your SmartSites strategist or contact us. We’ll build a plan around your inventory, your market and your budget.
About the data
- Source: Google Analytics 4. 2026 figures (Jan 1 – Oct 15, or Apr–Sep where noted) are compared with the same dates in 2025. All dealerships are anonymized.
- CTV group: 18 SmartSites CTV automotive clients with comparable GA4 history in both years.
- Comparison group: 12 SmartSites automotive clients that didn’t run CTV with any provider in 2026. Dealers running CTV through other vendors, and dealers without comparable GA4 history, were left out.
- Forms: standard dealer-website lead events across all traffic sources. Dealers whose form tracking was missing or changed between years are excluded (10 CTV and 12 comparison dealers included). “Typical” means the median dealer.
- Caveat: direct traffic can move for reasons besides CTV, including other brand advertising, seasonality and changes in how browsers and apps pass referral data. This is what happened at our dealers, not a controlled experiment.
“We've seen substantial growth in organic traffic, non-branded search visibility, and overall digital engagement since working with them.”
Danielle ColucciToyota of Stamford
