11:09 am, April 15, 2026
Car Dealer has tested used car marketplace providers for the past year – and today we can announce the winners.
At our Clever Car Collection used car dealership in Gosport, we’ve been tracking which leads converted to sales in the last financial year, which ended on March 31.
In our 2025/26 financial year, we sold 187 cars – a drop in the ocean compared to many car dealers out there – but enough for us to get a good handle on lead volumes from the advertising platforms.
Each time a customer purchased a car we’d ask where they saw the car first – and we always gave them the choice of the range of marketing options we currently use. This has not been a simple tick box exercise but an important part of every sales conversation to ensure attribution was accurate.
We backed these conversations up with lead tracking via our DMS provider, DealerKit, to check the initial lead source matched the customer’s claim.
Here’s how each provider fared and the winner of this year’s Car Dealer Recommends award for used car marketing.
We’ve ranked the businesses on the percentage of sales they achieved for this year’s used car marketing Car Dealer Recommends award, not the number of leads they sent us.
We’ll caveat these results by saying different stock performs differently on certain channels, but this is our first hand experience, tested in a live environment.
Car Dealer Recommends: Autotrader | Percentage of CCC sales: 55.7% | Number of leads: 227
Autotrader charges the most for its marketing packages and has faced a controversial year with the implementation of its Deal Builder product. However, it still accounts for by far and away the most sales for the Clever Car Collection.
We turn our seven-car package at least twice per month, selling around 14 cars or more from the platform, which effectively halves the cost of advertising. We find leads via Autotrader are more likely to convert into a sale and use the data the firm provides across the business when making car buying decisions.
Leads did drop off when the Deal Builder product was launched and the necessity for buyers to sign in to the site before enquiring, but the tweaks the firm has made since have improved this. The account management is very useful and the tips we have been given to improve adverts, videos and pictures has improved our performance.
We’d like to see more emphasis put on videos in listings as they are often hard to discover and most customers miss them. They’re currently a separate tab on the picture elements of listings, but we’d like to see them displayed as the first thing customers are shown or embedded as part of the photo gallery.
While expensive, we think the cost of the package is outweighed by the sales it achieves and it is by far and away the biggest source of deals for our business. It wins Car Dealer Recommends for the first year.
=2. Highly Commended: Cargurus | Percentage of CCC sales: 13.6% | Number of leads: 184
Cargurus sales differ in quality depending on your stock profile and price. When we list a cheap car under £2,500 we are usually awash with leads from Cargurus and they often convert into a sale.
Frustratingly, our detailed descriptions of cars are buried on the vehicle pages and it means a number of customers miss key details when enquiring about a car. The layout of the text is also clunky and hard to read, so I can see why customers miss a lot of the information we put into them.
Cargurus also doesn’t showcase our videos, despite them being sent across in the feed – something we’d like to see improved.
But that said, lead volumes are consistent and this has led to more conversions than others here. We notice a large number of our cars appear in Google Vehicle Ads via Cargurus and this clearly drives traffic.
We’ve noticed more and more customers are mentioning Cargurus when they come into the showroom and we find the price flags it uses to assess whether our cars are too high or too low are always far more positive than Autotrader’s.
The account management side of the business is good and we’ve had some helpful calls with the team. It’s also excellent value for money. A solid Highly Commended placing.
=2. Highly Commended: 67 Degrees | Percentage of CCC sales: 13.6% | Number of leads: 161
They say even a small business can look big online and that’s certainly the case thanks to our website. We partnered with the brilliant 67 Degrees from the start of the Clever Car Collection and they’ve offered a stand-out website that not only looks good, but converts into sales, hence their inclusion as an advertising channel here.
Firstly, our website searches brilliantly in Google thanks to strong SEO tagging and structure. We upgraded to a new template last year and this has showcased our cars in a beautiful way and, importantly, made our videos a stand-out element. Cleverly, the videos autoplay silently as you scroll down the page and catch customers’ eyes.
The layout of the pages work well with key details of the car at the top, our descriptions are laid out in an easy-to-read style and a bold finance section has converted many sales.
While a number of these sales could be attributed to Google Vehicle Ads, where the customer may have first originated, we have worked hard with customers to assess where they really saw us first.
If they said they ‘googled a local car dealer’ and found us, we asked about the search terms they used and asked specifically whether it was a standard Google listing or a vehicle ad they saw. We are confident the sales attributed to our website are from customers who purely found us because of organic searches and our website’s performance.
The WhatsApp button is a useful feature on the site and 67 Degrees has implemented the Impel AI chatbot code well too. I struggle to think of a way we’d improve the site at present and can see why 67 Degrees are a stand-out performer in our annual Car Dealer Power Awards. Another strong Highly Commended placing for 2025 and joint second place.
4. Google Vehicle Ads | Percentage of CCC sales: 5.7% | Number of leads: Unknown
Google Vehicle Ads (GVA) needs a partner to set it up unless you’re incredibly technically minded, so we used the Localise agency. The team there were brilliant and helped us through every step of the process and come highly recommended.
GVA display at the top of searches as a shopping carousel, showing one picture of your car, the price and your contact details. If users click the advert they land on your website so attribution of the lead source was important.
We had the help of Mediahawk, a clever marketing monitoring service, to help work out whether leads were from GVA, so carefully analysed the leads to ensure they were attributed correctly.
Over the year GVA helped us sell some high value models (for us) including several new Suzuki Jimnys. Unfortunately the number of leads sent to us via GVA were untracked in our DMS, but we paid close attention to any conversions.
We’re told GVA works best when you have inventory of 10 or more cars and due to our sales rates we often struggled to get more than seven cars live at a time so this might be why sales volumes were down for us.
Having as much presence on Google can only be a good thing, but just as important as paid for adverts is a high performing website. We’ve stopped GVA currently for 2026.
5. Carwow | Percentage of CCC sales: 5.0% | Number of leads: 154
We’ve been impressed with Carwow’s used car sales platform and it seems to generate a steady stream of leads. Unfortunately, the conversions have been mixed. Often customers do not know where we are based and we lose a lot of deals due to this.
Carwow doesn’t display the description we write for our cars and cannot currently pull our videos across to the site. We spend most of our time replying to Carwow leads telling customers where we are based and to watch our videos.
On the car listing pages there are few details about us as a business and displaying our location would be a useful start to weeding out leads that are put off by our location.
However, the volumes of leads are good and the customers are engaged. Those that have converted into sales have often resulted in deliveries and some additional revenue.
Carwow is in the very early stages with its used car platform, but it certainly generates lead volumes even with our low number of cars on display. There are few people who would bet against it succeeding and we believe there are some simple fixes to the platform that would elevate Carwow’s offering considerably.
6. Motors/Cazoo | Percentage of CCC sales: 4.3% | Number of leads: 47
For a period last year there was a real boost in lead volumes from the Cazoo element of the Motors group, but sadly for us, few of them converted into sales.
Clearly, the acquisition of the online used car dealer’s brand helped boost the overall group’s advertising effectiveness and it now boasts an impressive network with plenty of eyeballs across it. Inventory numbers on the site are also impressive with more than 300,000 cars advertised for sale.
Unfortunately, for the Clever Car Collection, the volumes of leads were lower overall than others here and frequently we would not receive a reply from a customer who enquired. Cheaper cars always performed better on Motors/Cazoo, though, especially if priced sub-£2,500.
As with others, our advert descriptions are not very clearly laid out – the line breaks we add in text in our DMS are not copied across so they read as one huge block of copy. Our videos are also not displayed so we spend a lot of time replying to any lead with the link to our videos instead.
It is a real surprise that none of the other advertising platforms have worked out how to showcase car dealers’ walk around videos on their adverts, especially at a time when video is so important to buyers.
Motors does provide dealers with data on their listings and customers, but up until now we have never been able to get access to the portal where this is provided. With some closer account management and help we’re confident we could make more out of the Motors/Cazoo proposition, though. Early signs in 2026 are already positive so it will be interesting to see where the firm finishes next year.
7. Dealerway | Percentage of CCC sales: 2.1% | Number of leads: Untracked
It accounts for a very small amount of our car sales every year, but when we need to trade a car on that is out of stock our profile or overage we turn to Dealerway.
The site was set up by two car dealers and connects trusted dealers with each other to sell their trade cars on. It’s easy to list, has an engaged number of buyers and always manages to get us a decent price for our cars. In fact, we usually make a small trade profits on these cars which helps get the cash back in the bank for cars we’ve held on to for too long. We’ve sold a few cars via auction, but always get more for cars on Dealerway.
There are clearly other trade disposal routes available but I like the fact Dealerway users rates each other so you can trust who you’re buying from or selling to. It’s a cheap disposal route as well with sellers not charged a fee and buyers paying just £99 – all of this results in dealers having more money to bid for your cars as they don’t have to worry about high fees.
The team behind it offers excellent support too and the associated app is slick. Highly recommended despite only accounting for a small number of our sales in the last year.
To be included in our annual test of used car advertising partners, please get in touch with the Car Dealer team.
