An 11-20 dealer Southwest cohort spent between $200k-$300k in bucketed reporting terms — $152,000 in tracked media spend — across a single 30-day window, June 7 to July 7, 2026. It produced 4,537 conversions from 6,086,000 impressions and 160,400 clicks, landing at a cost-per-lead between $30 and $40 and a conversion rate in the 2-4% range. Average CPC held in the $1-$1 range — call it a dollar a click, cohort-wide, across nine sub-channels running simultaneously.
None of those numbers is the interesting one. The interesting number is nine. Nine sub-channels, one 30-day window, one dealer cohort, and a single budget engine deciding how much of that $152,000 went where — every day, without a media buyer re-running the math.
What Does a Nine-Channel Budget Split Actually Look Like at a Dealer Group?
Here's the allocation: Google Search took 40% of spend, Google PMax took 10%, Microsoft Search took 10%, Google Demand Gen took 10%, and Streaming CTV took 10%. The remaining 20% split four ways across Meta — Meta Awareness, Meta Traffic, Meta Leads, and Meta AIA each carrying 5%.
That's not a media plan a human built in a spreadsheet and left alone for a month. Nobody hand-allocates 5% slices to four different Meta objectives and holds that split steady while Search, PMax, Microsoft, Demand Gen, and CTV move in parallel. The allocation is a function of what's converting, updated continuously — not a quarterly plan document.
Most dealer media plans don't look like this. They look like Search plus whatever the agency's default second channel is this year, with everything else treated as a test budget that never graduates past 5% because nobody's watching it closely enough to justify moving it up. This cohort ran four Meta objectives at once, each earning its slice on results.
Why Does Google Search Still Take 40% of a Modern Dealer Budget?
Search isn't legacy spend here — it's the highest-certainty channel in the stack, and the allocation reflects that. A shopper typing a model name and a trim into Google is closer to a decision than a shopper scrolling a CTV pre-roll.
Google Search's share of the nine-sub-channel budget isn't fixed by convention — it moves with the numbers. AEGIS reallocates weekly based on VIN-level conversion data, inventory velocity, and market density, so a channel's budget share reflects what it's actually converting, not what it was allocated last quarter.
isn't inertia. It's the channel earning its share against eight competitors for the same dollar, every day.
What's changed is what's happening with the other 60%. A decade ago that remainder would have gone almost entirely to Display remnant and maybe a Facebook boost button. Here it's split across Performance Max, Microsoft, Demand Gen, CTV, and four separate Meta campaign objectives — each held accountable to the same cost-per-lead bar Search has to clear.
Is Performance Max Actually Earning Its 10%, or Just Sitting There?
PMax has a reputation problem — it's not a campaign type, it's a budget hostage situation when nobody's watching where Google routes the spend inside it. In this cohort, PMax carried 10% of total budget, on par with Microsoft Search and Demand Gen — not the runaway allocation Google's own recommendations would push it toward if left on autopilot.
That parity is the tell. When PMax, Microsoft Search, Demand Gen, and CTV all land at the same 10% share, that's not coincidence — that's four channels being measured against the same yardstick and none of them winning enough to justify taking budget from the others this month.
Why Does Microsoft Search Deserve the Same Budget Line as Google Search?
Microsoft Search matching Google PMax and Demand Gen at 10% — not some rounding-error 2% test — is worth pausing on. Most agencies still underfund Microsoft because it doesn't carry the same reporting weight internally, not because the traffic is worse. A cohort running Microsoft at parity with three Google product lines is a cohort measuring cost-per-lead by channel, not by platform reputation.
What Is Streaming CTV Doing in a Direct-Response Media Mix?
CTV at 10% — equal to PMax, equal to Microsoft, equal to Demand Gen — says this cohort isn't treating Streaming as a brand-awareness afterthought funded with whatever's left over. It's funded like every other channel: enough to be measured, and no more than its results justify. The channels that catch a shopper before they start actively searching only earn sustained budget when someone's actually attributing the downstream lead back to them — otherwise they get cut in month two, not held steady at 10%.
Why Split Meta Into Four Objectives Instead of Running One Campaign?
The four-way Meta split — Awareness, Traffic, Leads, and AIA, each at 5% — is the clearest signal in the whole allocation. A dealer running one generic Meta campaign is optimizing for one outcome and hoping it covers the funnel. This cohort ran four objectives simultaneously, each a distinct 5% bet: top-of-funnel reach, click-driving traffic, direct lead capture, and inventory-matched automotive ad units, evaluated separately.
None of the four dominated. None got starved to zero. That's what a working multi-objective Meta strategy looks like from the outside — not one winner take-all campaign, but four live experiments held at equal weight until one earns more.
How AUTONOMi Drives These Results
AEGIS ran this allocation as a single decision made daily across nine sub-channels, not nine separate media plans reconciled once a month. The platform composes and deploys campaign structures across Google Search, PMax, and Demand Gen, across Microsoft Search and Audience, and across the four Meta objectives this cohort ran — Awareness, Traffic, Leads, and the catalog-driven Automotive Inventory-style product set — through the same governed toolset, under the same cost-per-lead bar.
That's the mechanism behind a 10%-10%-10%-10% split across PMax, Microsoft, Demand Gen, and CTV that isn't a coincidence of four separate people setting round numbers — it's four channels being rebalanced against each other continuously, the way a multi-channel budget problem actually gets solved instead of managed one channel at a time by whoever owns that platform's login.
AXIOM governs every campaign action in that allocation before it fires — spend ceilings, platform allowlists, and a universal geo gate that refuses to enable any ad set on any of the nine sub-channels without a valid location constraint. None of the nine channels this cohort ran got to spend a dollar outside the geography the dealer group actually serves. And every allocation shift, every dollar moved from one objective to another, is hash-chained into an audit trail the dealer group can read — not a black box the agency reports on in arrears.
The daily inventory-diff rebuild is what keeps the Search, PMax, Demand Gen, and Microsoft copy live and current inside that budget split — as vehicles sell, arrive, or reprice, the affected ad groups rebuild in place rather than going stale until someone notices.
What Happens When the Next 30 Days Run the Same Way?
The number that should worry an agency reading this isn't the $30-40 CPL. It's the nine. A media plan that rebalances nine sub-channels daily against a shared performance bar doesn't need a monthly strategy call to decide whether Microsoft deserves more budget than CTV this quarter — the answer is already in the data, and the budget already moved. If you're running a dealer group and can't say which of your nine channels is earning its share this week, model what your spend looks like split this way before your next planning cycle instead of after it.
