I wrote a book on car dealers and Google, and I still oversee a lot of dealer accounts myself. Lately one question comes up more than any other: “Alex, is Connected TV actually worth it?”
I get why they ask. A dealer can see every click from a search ad or a VLA. With CTV, a shopper watches your spot on a streaming app in their living room, and there’s nothing to click. Most dealers I talk to have either been sold CTV as “awareness” with no way to measure it, or they’ve passed on it because they couldn’t see the return.
So I stopped answering with opinions and pulled the numbers from our own dealers.
What the data showed
We compared 18 SmartSites dealerships running CTV in 2026 with 12 that didn’t run CTV with anyone, using GA4 and the same dates last year. CTV shows up as direct traffic, so that’s where we looked.
- Same headwind: both groups lost about 18% of total website traffic this year.
- Different outcome: direct visits were up 17% at the CTV dealers and down 10% at the others. Over the last six months it was +28% vs. −7%.
- Direct share nearly doubled: at the CTV stores, direct went from about 13% of all visits to roughly 24% by September. It grew at 17 of 18 stores.
- Forms followed: the typical CTV dealer was up 22% on website form submissions over the last six months, vs. down 4% for the comparison group.
My favorite example is a luxury SUV store in New York City that launched CTV in July. Its direct visits were flat for the first half of the year, then doubled year over year from July through September. Form submissions went from down 14% to up 34%.
The full write-up, with charts and methodology, is on the SmartSites blog.
What I tell dealers now
CTV isn’t magic, and it doesn’t replace search, VLAs or co-op. What it does is get your store’s name in front of in-market shoppers before they start searching. When that works, you see it in more people coming straight to your site. That’s what showed up in our numbers.
I also want to be straight about the limits. Direct traffic can move for other reasons too: other brand advertising, seasonality, and changes in how browsers pass referral data. This is what happened at our dealers, not a lab experiment. But when two groups of dealers face the same traffic decline and only the CTV group grows direct visits, that’s a signal worth paying attention to.
If you’re a dealer on the fence, my advice is simple:
- Run it long enough to judge it. Our dealers’ gains built over the spring and summer.
- Judge it on direct visits and form submissions, not clicks.
- Look at your own GA4 before and after. The data will tell you.
If you want to talk through what CTV could look like for your store, reach out. I’m always happy to look at the numbers with you.
— Alex