2025 NADA DATA: Digital Spend Hits $36.5K/Month"

The full-year 2025 NADA DATA report is live, and the numbers are worth a closer look.

U.S. new car dealer advertising spend is rebounding from pandemic lows, with digital spending continuing to climb.

We spent this past weekend digging into the full-year 2025 NADA DATA report from the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), and the chart below tells a compelling recovery story.

If you haven't grabbed your free copy of the 2025 report yet, it's well worth downloading directly from NADA.

The screenshot above shows total dealership advertising expenditure from 2018 through 2025, and the trend line tells its own story.

The pandemic dip and rebound:

• 2018: $9.42 billion in total dealer ad spend

• 2020: Dropped to $7.48 billion during the pandemic pullback

• 2025: Rebounded to $9.96 billion, nearly matching pre-pandemic levels

Digital spend per dealership continues to accelerate:

• Average monthly digital marketing spend per dealership hit $36,500 in 2025

• That's up from around $30,000 just a few years prior

• A 21.7% increase in digital spend per rooftop

If your store is still spending $30K a month or less on digital, while the industry average pushes closer to $37K, you may be losing ground on search visibility, social reach, and third-party listing prominence.

But here's the more important question: what kind of ROI are you actually getting on that $36,500 a month?

In our audits, most dealers are losing 30-40% of their digital budget to waste, whether through over-investment in Google paid search, poor campaign structure, weak targeting, or overlapping efforts across multiple vendors.

The industry as a whole is spending more. The real question is whether you're spending smarter.

Smarter spending for dealers is our mission at Generations Digital. Reach out if we can help.