Portal leads vs owner-base leads: a cost-per-sale comparison
Portal and enquiry leads cost real money on every contact. Owner-base leads come from data you already own. Here is the comparison laid out the way a CFO would want to see it.
If you put your lead sources on a spreadsheet and sorted them by cost, the gap would be hard to ignore. The leads you pay a portal for and the leads sitting in your own database are not in the same league, yet most dealers spend far more attention on the expensive ones.
What portal leads actually cost
Third-party enquiry leads carry a price on every contact, whether or not it ever becomes a sale. On carsales, a dealer on a pay-per-enquiry plan pays around $72 per enquiry for a demonstrator priced up to $69,999, and around $66 per enquiry for a new car in the same price band (carsales Help Centre). Other platforms sit in a broadly similar range. Those are per-enquiry numbers. Once you factor in that only a fraction of enquiries convert, the real cost per sale is a multiple of the headline price.
~$72
The carsales pay-per-enquiry cost for a single demonstrator enquiry, before any of them convert to a sale.
What owner-base leads cost
Now look at the other side of the ledger. A lead generated from your existing customer database costs an estimated $12 to $18 to qualify, according to BDC provider Strolid, against $150 to $300 for a third-party automotive lead. That is roughly a tenth of the cost, sometimes less. And the headline figure understates it, because the underlying data is something you already paid for once, when you sold the customer their car and serviced it.
The CFO framing
Portal spend is a recurring external cost that scales with volume: every extra enquiry is another invoice. Owner-base activity is the opposite. The data is a sunk asset already on your books, so the marginal cost of working it is close to the cost of reaching out. With AADA's 2026 Dealernomics benchmark putting dealer net profit at around 3.5 per cent of turnover, the difference between a $15 contact and a $200 lead is not a rounding error. It is the kind of swing that shows up in the annual result.
Portal leads are an expense you pay again and again. The owner base is an asset you already own.
None of this means abandoning portals, which still bring you genuinely new buyers. The point is balance. Most dealers are heavily invested in the expensive channel and barely working the cheap one. For which triggers to watch and how to work the owner base consistently, see the owner base guide.
Sources: carsales Help Centre: ad costs, Strolid: Equity Data Mining, AADA Dealernomics 2026. Figures are industry findings, not Dealerloop results.
See what closing the loop is worth on your own numbers.