Auto dealers continue to shift budgets from traditional advertising to internet marketing programs, with dealers on average spending about 9 percent of their advertising budget in 2005 on paid search, third-party lead-generation sites and other web marketing programs, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association, writes Internet Retailer.

That's compared with 6.7 percent of car dealers' advertising budgets spent on online advertising and internet marketing in 2004 - and zero dollars 10 years earlier, in 1995, according to NADA. In 2005, the average car dealer spent about $36,000 on internet advertising; larger dealerships that sell more than 750 new vehicles each year averaged about $69,000.