CarGurus, AutoTrader, Cars.com and the rest each send you leads and a dashboard to prove it. Neither tells you the one thing that matters: which one actually sold cars. Here's how to find out.
The short answer: you can't judge a lead source by the number of leads it sends or what it charges per lead. You judge it by tracing its leads all the way to delivered gross, then dividing that by what you paid. Every listing site can be worth it or worthless for a given store — the only way to know yours is to measure it on your own numbers. This guide is deliberately neutral: no provider is the villain, and the good ones welcome being measured.
Cost-per-lead is the metric everyone quotes because it's the one everyone can see. It also hides the three things that decide profit:
Stop comparing cost-per-lead. Compare cost-per-sale and return on gross per source:
| Metric | How to read it |
|---|---|
| Leads | Volume only — the start of the question, never the answer |
| Cost per lead (CPL) | What the vendor charges — useful only next to close rate |
| Close rate by source | What share of that source's leads become delivered deals |
| Cost per sale | Total spend ÷ delivered deals from that source — the real cost |
| Return on gross | Total delivered gross from that source ÷ total spend — the real verdict |
The abstraction is what makes this easy to nod at and never do, so here it is with numbers. Two sources, each costing the same $3,000 a month:
| Source A | Source B | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly spend | $3,000 | $3,000 |
| Leads | 100 | 40 |
| Cost per lead | $30 | $75 |
| Close rate | 4% | 15% |
| Delivered units | 4 | 6 |
| Cost per sale | $750 | $500 |
| Return on gross (at $3,000 avg) | 4.0× | 6.0× |
On cost per lead, Source A looks twice as good and is the one that survives the budget meeting. On cost per sale and return on gross — the two numbers that actually describe what you got for the money — Source B wins decisively, on 60% fewer leads. That gap is the entire argument for measuring past CPL, and it's the same trap covered in cost per sale by channel: the cheapest lead is regularly the most expensive car.
The reason most stores never do this is that the answer lives in two systems that don't talk: the lead is in your CRM, the sale is in your DMS, and nothing automatically connects them. The work is joining them:
Do that and the ranking often surprises people: the source with the loudest dashboard isn't always the one paying the bills, and a quiet source can turn out to be the most profitable in the store.
"CarGurus vs AutoTrader" is the search everyone runs, and the honest answer is that there isn't a general one. Which marketplace performs better depends on your market, your franchise or independent mix, your price positioning and the inventory you actually stock. Two rooftops in the same group, forty minutes apart, routinely rank them in opposite orders. Any article that declares a winner is describing someone else's store.
North of the border the two names change — for most Canadian dealers the comparison is AutoTrader.ca versus Kijiji Autos, with CarGurus Canada in the mix — but the method below is identical. That Canadian marketplace landscape is its own guide: dealership software built for Canadian dealers.
What travels is the method, not the verdict. To make a comparison mean anything, hold five things constant across both:
How do you calculate ROI on CarGurus or AutoTrader leads? Two divisions, per source, over the same window. Cost per sale = total spend with that source ÷ the delivered units it produced. Return on gross = total delivered gross from those units ÷ the same spend. Work in units and delivered gross, never leads — the worked example above shows a source with 2.5× the cost per lead winning on both numbers.
Is CarGurus better than AutoTrader for dealers? There's no universal answer, and any comparison that gives you one is describing someone else's store. It turns on your market, your inventory mix and your price positioning — the same two platforms swap places between rooftops in one group. Run the comparison in your own store for a quarter, holding window, close definition, gross basis, de-duplication and response time constant across both.
So is CarGurus or AutoTrader worth it? For some stores, absolutely; for others, not at current spend. There is no universal answer — only your cost-per-sale and return on gross, measured on your own delivered deals.
Why not trust the provider's report? Because it can only see its own activity. It can't see which of its leads bought, at what gross, or which were duplicates. That view only exists inside your CRM and DMS, joined together.
Isn't this too much work to do every month? By hand, yes — which is why most stores don't. The matching from lead to delivered gross is exactly the kind of thing that should run automatically, so the answer is a live number, not a quarterly fire drill.
Each lead stamped with its true origin, duplicates collapsed, and every sale matched back to the source that created it — so you see real cost-per-sale and return on gross per channel, live.