Let’s say a dealership is spending $20,000/month on advertising. If Ford reimburses $8K–$10K/month through co-op, the dealer’s out-of-pocket is around $10K–$12K. Sounds great… until you look at the performance of the websites dealerships are being forced to use.Yes. It's a little unconventional, but considering OEMs have both a approved website vendor list AND an approved advertising partner list, unapproved website vendors could take a rip of ad spend (ex: 20-25%) and skirt the approved vendor rules, while still being able to use part of your co-op to fund the website. That's what I'd do if I was trying to sell websites to dealers but I wasn't an approved vendor...
Many OEM-approved sites:
- Load in 20–40+ seconds on mobile (especially on 4G)
- Are not ADA compliant
- Are full of coding errors and layout shifts
- And worst of all they suck at conversion rates
Koons Automotive took their mobile site load time from 26s → 2.6s and saw a 1,400% increase in conversion.
Other studies back this up:
- Amazon: every 100ms of improvement = 1% more revenue
- Google: 0.1s speed improvement = 7% boost in conversions
- Walmart: 2% more conversions per second shaved off
- Mobify: 1.11% more sales per 100ms improvement
That means:
- OEM-approved slow site → maybe 1% conversion
- Fast, optimized site → potentially 20%+ conversion
- Same ad spend, but 20x the ROI
…but you could gain 20x the leads and sales, especially if your website is loading lightning fast, ADA-compliant, and built for performance.
If we’re talking about running a real business, I’d rather pay $20K and make $500K than get a $10K subsidy and waste the other $10K on a broken funnel.
Just a thought!
And if you do what your saying you can still get the money back from the OEM by calling it advertising.